Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  “Yao! Then they’ll slap on a tax and label the bottles with the picture of a white man propped on a horse. And next thing you know everywhere you turn there’ll be billboards telling the world that the best beer in the world is George Washington Beer. Done blanked out the fact that it was the Choctaws’ gift from the spirits. So I say let the State folks stay ignorant! And don’t even mention it to Janey, because she’ll phone her pastor and next thing we know he’ll be up in the pulpit ranting and raving about Choc being brewed by the Devil. That woman wants to ruin my life just because my ways are different from hers. Where’d I leave off?”

  “You were saying that the boy came back the next day, but before you get into it, I’d like to ask you a question….”

  Suddenly motionless, Love looked out into the sky above the backyard then back with a stony expression.

  “Okay, Hickman, shoot,” Love said, “but be warned that I’m a fast-moving target—which a man like me has to be in this country. What’s your question?”

  “I’m curious as to why you call folks like me ‘State Negroes’?”

  “Hell, Hickman, it’s because you people let our being about the same color blind you to all the differences between us.”

  “What differences?”

  “Hell, man, the difference between our backgrounds and experience.”

  “But that is true of everybody—at least in detail—so what do you mean?”

  “That you State folks tend to see color before you see individuals. That you reduce a man to his color and overlook his uniqueness, his culture. That you State folks tend to see in the way of the shotgun, which scatters its shot in loose patterns. Which is fine for bringing down birds, but not worth a damn for stopping a man or a grizzly.

  “For such the way of the rifle is needed, and even better, a telescoped rifle. One which can isolate details of camouflaged shapes, detect the slightest degree of uncontrolled tension, and allow a hunter to see through the shadows surrounding his target. Because when he’s dealing with those who enter the field of his vision such attention to detail is imperative. Aye! And when they speak with forked tongues it helps to have ears tuned to detect what’s being said and what’s not being said. Which is my way with men of all shapes, forms, and colors. A way which makes a hell of a difference between me and you State folks—you with me?”

  “Oh, yes, and I’m learning.”

  “You keep at it, because between us there are also the many differences in experience which go back to the time when the Yankees and the Rebs got tired of their killing and your folks came under the command of the United States government….”

  “All right, but what about your folks, your father and mother?”

  “In the beginning they were like the parents of your parents, human beings who’d been sold into slavery—Yao! But sometime before that Reb-Yank ruckus erupted my parents escaped and came West. Came to what was then known as the Old Territory, and here the tribes of the People made them welcome. So with that they were no longer slaves. And that began the branching of what in the beginning had been the common stream of life which was shared by your people and mine.

  “Then time passed and the Rebs and the Yanks went to war, and when slavery was supposed to have ended my folks had a choice which yours didn’t. Because yours were still rooted in the ways of the slave states, and though no longer slaves they were left without options. But mine remembered what their lives had been under the feuding government in Washington and chose to remain with the People. Which means that they were never of the State people and had no need for the mockery of freedom which the North threw at the State Negroes, who by then were called freedmen….”

  “Why not?”

  “Because by then they were already free! And Hickman, they were self-freed—which is as different from being freed by the whites who enslaved them as darkness from daylight. Living among the People my folks had tribal rights and a voice in the councils. They had the same freedoms and responsibilities that were shared by all of the People—Yao! They were governed and ruled by the same laws and customs, and having put aside the white man’s religion they were also free in spirit, free to worship the gods of the People. Which they did.”

  “But even so, and forgive me for smiling, they were still colored…. Still mixed bloods living in the U.S. of A….”

  “Yao! And had to keep well out of the way of the white man. But living on the reservation they were able to avoid most of the crazy color confusion in which the State folks—black, white, and mixed—are tangled. And remember this, Hickman: They were here in this country long before the State folks rushed in and ruined it….”

  “Are you saying that before those you call the State folks arrived this part of the country was another Garden of Eden?”

  “Oh, no! That’s just some more State folks’ foolishness. This was no Eden, and neither was it a ‘New Jerusalem’—which was another childish misnaming. It was simply a country where mankind, the earth, and the animals could live together in some kind of peace. But then the State folks came crapping and destroying and ruined it…. They ruined it!”

  Hearing a note of anger, Hickman looked up to see the old man shaking his head. And now as the ancient eyes focused on his face, Love’s voice returned higher in pitch and more nasal, sounding with a mixture of Negro-Indian idiom that was edged with a bitterness long held in memory….

  So now, he thought, he’ll get back to the moviemaking and to Janey’s little man whose questions got him started. Yes, and come to think of it, where’s the boy now, and what is he up to?

  “Like I told the boy,” Love said, “the State folks had invaded this country all of a sudden, gusting through the land like flames through the prairies. Came fast and from many far places, and most of them wild as sage hens drunk to the gills on fermenting berries. On they came making waves. Came in the nighttime, and came in the daytime, with few knowing what to expect but all leaping along with heads filled with some raggle-tag notion of unlimited freedom.

  “They came riding and came walking, on horseback, on foot, and in wagons. Yao! And some of them hoofing it all the way from Tennessee and Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, the Carolinas, and Georgia. These were the ex-slaves, the so-called freedmen, the State Negroes.

  “So to bring things closer to the times the boy knew when he was living with Janey I asked him, ‘Do you remember the Watsons, the Hunicutts, and the Rogans?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I played with some of their kids. They were relatives, weren’t they?’

  “I said, ‘Not unless it was through hoofing it all the way from Tennessee. Anyway, folks like them were different from the others because in remembering what they’d left behind them they came in hope but were prepared for the worst. But I was speaking of those who rushed here seeking “free land”—how the hell could this land be free when it belonged to the People? But that’s what most of those who came walking or riding behind mule teams and oxen were seeking. So like a party of braves who had run many days and nights with a war party of hostiles dogging their trail, most arrived rest-broken and weary. I watched them come, and I tell you, the sight they made was alarming.

  “‘Even sitting still on their exhausted behinds they seemed nervous and restless, still on the move. And as they increased in number most seemed on the lookout for something which kept to the shadows behind them. Something hostile and biding its time before springing to attack them. Something which moved only at night, or during that time of day when the sun pounds a man’s eyes like a club on a war drum. But the State folks kept coming and coming.

  “‘They streamed here from the old country seeking what they told themselves was a new land, but which was by no means a reality. No, it was only un-fouled. It was just not in disorder. And that’s because the People respected the earth and replaced what they used of it. Sure, being men they did what men do, both to the earth, the game, and each other. But when this land was the People’s it was untouched by the treacherous sickness which the newcomers broug
ht to it. It was unspoiled by the hate and the greed and color confusion that those of the desperate blue eyes brought here from the old land. Those who were sick with a self-disgust which made them think in ways other than those of the People. And besides, for the proud invaders our ways didn’t count, because in considering us heathens they denied our humanity!

  “‘They who came here bringing their messy ideas and stinking up the land, step by step, as they made their way westward!

  “‘They who came like packs of wild dogs that piss-marked and shit-kicked every stone, bush, and tree on the landscape—Yao!’

  “I said, I told the boy, ‘They claimed that they were here seeking freedom, but I think that they were really on the run from themselves! Why? Because behind them they’d left that big bloody war and all the killing and stealing that followed. Yao! And all the lying and cheating and betrayal of that much too short a spell when Yankee armies guarded the human bones of contention that had led to all the bloodshed and lying. Then they declared peace, a peace which turned out to be tall like a pine, squawked like a crow, and talked more crap than the radio!

  “‘Even so, it was a peace enforced by rifle and cannon, and for a while there appeared to be a possibility of making a life in which men on both sides, black men and white, could walk tall with their heads erect on their shoulders. But then the white man’s belief in what he calls “freedom” and “justice” went limp as a flag in a skin-soaking weather. Then he turned his chicken-shit weakness westward and his back on that which he should have done in justifying all the bloodshed, the killing, and arson. Yao!

  “‘But just at the time when he should have been strong and determined, he collapsed like a brave debauched by syphilis and whiskey. Then he demonstrated his strength to be mainly of numbers, guns, and bloodthirsty ruthlessness. But because no group of men can live out their seasons perpetually at war—not even these, the proud ones called Americans—they became uneasy. Aye, for a greater strength, a strength of the spirit, was needed. And this the white man did not have—and still doesn’t!’

  “Well, when I said that I could see the boy’s face turn red as an ember.

  “He didn’t like it, but I continued. I told him, ‘For even in so powerful a country as this, peacetime is harder, much harder, than wartime. And even harder for men like these who had turned what they called peace into a nastiness that’s in many ways much worse than armed warfare. They corrupted the spirit of the words they claimed to hold sacred until they were like words scribbled on scraps torn from catalogs and newspapers, which in the days before bathrooms they used on trips to the outhouse—Yao!

  “‘So, as I say, when they could no longer stand the stink they’d made in the East they rushed here and invaded this country. The humiliated ones, the greedy, and the mean, dog-assed, bloodthirsty ones—yes, and even a few, though only a few, of those who were truly brave and well-meaning. And I name only the best of a crew that was sorry.

  “‘Because all that can be said even of the best, both the black, the white, and the stewpot mixture of Africa, Europe, and Asia, is that when the jagged blade of their bloody transgressions was pressed to their throats, when the consequences of their misdeeds could no longer be disregarded, they tried to leave the past and all their misdeeds behind them. They took off. They ran—Yao! And they had a heap to run from!

  “‘Like the death and destruction left by that cowardly scum dressed in hoods rigged out of bedsheets who rode through the night killing and raping. That mangy scum mounted on horseback who prowled the countryside by the light of tar-burning torches carrying ropes noosed for hanging—yes, and lynching and burning you black Christian State folks on tree limbs and crosses …’ ”

  “But …”

  “No, Hickman, don’t say it! Don’t tell me that they were only a few! All the bastards were guilty! All of them, North and South, who benefited from slavery, which was a violation of their own ideals, which turned life into something that stank like the body of a dead horse being worked from asshole to eyeball by buzzards—and the land was the horse and they were the buzzards!

  “So they swept out here in a leg-pissing panic. Because after a brief time of hope they had seen the face of freedom turn into a mirage, a mask hiding evil. Then a pestilence arose and polluted the old land, a pollution that ballooned, farted, and drifted until it was impossible to look anywhere, but they saw its effects and felt it and breathed it. Yao! This was the new life that had been bought, back there in the North and the South, with so much bullshit and bloodshed. This, Hickman, was the life your folks, your grandparents, the emancipated freedmen, came into after that war. And it was very different from what mine knew with the People.

  “This was the new peace, the new morality and justice. And though they were running there was no escaping. Because those who came West, even the good ones, brought along their sickness like pox in the bloodstream.

  “So you see, after the State Negroes endured slavery and survived the war they were betrayed by those in the North who made a deal to undermine the so-called Reconstruction—which was no more than a new form of slavery. So now they were little better off than when they were slaves. And as though all of that hadn’t been enough testing, enough of an initiation into the white man’s freedom, the State Negroes learned that they now had to deal with tar, lynch ropes, and fire as other men dealt with the cost of their food and their shelter.

  “And like I told the boy, some came here even before statehood was established. They came in hope, but now hoping was even harder than when they were slaves. Because the hope which had once been a life-sustaining vision had shrunk like a spring gone dry in a drought. And the same with their belief in their strength to endure—oh, yes, they had survived, but they had been seared, maimed, and their vision distorted. So they came here. Came walking, came riding, came running—Yao! And like the old slave song has it, some came crying in the name of your Jesus—ha!

  “Yes, but now they were folks of cloudy, color-warped vision. No longer did they possess the clear eyes and high hope mixed with caution which guided those like my pappy and mammy after they killed and escaped bloodhounds in making their way to the People. Theirs was an old, old, hope, a hope as old as the giant sequoias. Secret, yes; but undulled and unblemished by what would come after the end of the Reb-Yankee war. And Hickman, it was probably a hope which your grandparents shared. Not a hope for what you Christians call Eden, no. But simply a yearning for a place where they could be themselves whatever their color.

  “My pappy used to sing about going to the Nation, going to the Territory, and after he made it here and found his place with the People he kept singing that song until he died and went back to the earth to join his ancestors. For him it was a song of promise, a song of fulfillment—Yao!—an incantation to the gods on which he and my mother had staked their lives and found contentment. They had planned long and thought hard, and took the risk of stealing themselves—clothes, bundles, and hopes for freedom—then made their way here to become part of the People. For them that was the way it was, and they lived in peace and died in dignity, right here in what was then the Old Territory….

  “But with the State folks it was different. Something inside must have been killed off as they made their way West. And I mean most of them, and especially the white ones. Maybe they died in spirit as did many of the People on the long Trail of Tears. Because it was back in those times that we began to unravel. First in the old land—in Alabama, the Carolinas, Florida, Mississippi, and Georgia—and then along the trail that was watered with tears. And once in this land the dying continued, a cruel slow dying during all the long years.

  “So maybe the State people who came later were already dead, were zombies, who didn’t realize they were no longer human. Perhaps all that which had happened, all that they had done during the Reb-Yankee war and after, had been like something that scrambled their brains and shriveled their hearts. And perhaps because of their crimes they were made to go on as though they were
human. I do not know, although I have thought on it for a long, long time. But suddenly they were here, still moving and building and ruining. And with my own eyes I saw them. Hickman, I am old enough to have seen many generations rise up and go West, but I do not believe that most of them are human….”

  Pausing, Love shook his head. “Like I told the boy, I know what I say is not generous—Yao!—but I stand by it. Truly I don’t think they are human. They are something else, for them another name is needed. And to this the boy grinned and said, ‘How about “supermen”?’

  “And I looked into his eyes and I said, ‘No, that is now a name for the funnies—which are no longer funny—or for cartoons printed on the editorial pages of newspapers. Besides, if you were in the last war you would know not to laugh at the type of men who call themselves super.’

  “And the boy said, ‘Okay, so I made a bad joke.’ And I said, ‘By helping us deal with the truth joking helps keep us alive, but in this I am far from joking. No, because I think seriously that they’re something else, and therefore some other name is called for. For they are people who violate both their own gods and the rules of their gods. And though they are many and powerful, no tribe has been known to violate its gods and go unpunished. For sooner or later something revolting takes over. Something small which they overlook or dismiss with a sneer of pride will defeat them….’

  “And to this the boy shook his head, and I said, ‘Do you think I’m overstating my case?’

  “And he said, ‘I think you’re making it all black and white, or all white and red. If not, where do I stand in all of this?’

  “I said, ‘That is for you to say. It’s been many moons since you left this country and Janey, therefore you, yourself, must decide where you stand. What you are is hidden behind your eyes and under your skin; but you are young, and young men who look like you have the best of choices—though not for long. I can only tell you that you are not outside of it, no matter how you might feel.’ And the boy said, ‘Yes, that’s true.’ And I said, ‘I know that it’s true.’