Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  At first there was only the smoothness of glass and the coolness of metal. Now, he thought, now! But just as he touched the curved shape of a handle the train lunged forward, and as he banged against solid steel the handle slipped from his hand and sent him reeling. And saving himself by leaping backwards against the door, he rocked and swayed to the train’s pounding motion with the rhythmical clicking of wheels on rails sounding like the challenge of a disdainful drummer daring him to abandon the written score of a piece of new music and take off on a flight of syncopated riffing and swing the band to his personal rhythm. The sound was reassuring. And now, as he countered the train’s rattling advance with a side-to-side swaying, he looked back to see the landscape wheeling past to become a succession of tranquil scenes which flickered and faded in the blue-cast haze behind him. And with the train bearing him relentlessly backward he thought with a sense of wonder, These scenes I see are not the scenes into which I’m plunging, nor can they ever be again the “where” out of which I’m being carried, or the “when” that lies ahead…. Then, bracing himself at a backward slant he reached over his head, clutching the top of the door frame with one sweaty hand, found the handle again with the other, gripped it, and gave it a tentative turn.

  But this time, squirting from his fingers like a wet cake of soap, the handle flipped free. And, annoyed at his failure, he wiped his hand on the seat of his trousers. Then, finding the handle again, he gripped it firmly, and with a grunt applied all of his strength in giving it a teeth-gritting tug. Come on, Come ON! he gasped, but though firmly clutched in his hand the handle resisted. Then, gasping for breath, he tightened his grip and tried once again, but still no movement. Then, giving a final tug of futility, he accepted the now obvious fact that the door had been locked from the inside.

  And now, confounded by the sudden sound of dim laughter, he was furious and raising his right leg kicked backwards against the door three thundering times but heard no answer from inside the car. Then, in an effort to see if there were actually passengers inside, he gave a violent twist to his body—whereupon the train’s headlong advance was suspended. Then the distant engine seemed to reverse its motion, causing the cars to contract like the retracted pleats of an accordion’s bellows—until with an earthshaking roar the train leaped down the track and he was forced to save himself by hanging again on to the handle.

  First he was flying along at a slant with his feet banging the platform, then squatting in the position of a Cossack dancer with arms stretched over his head. And as he held on he found himself looking back with a sense of dread as twin lines of track-side telegraph poles accented the landscape like an ominous parade of wire-supporting crosses.

  This is awful, he thought, but since it seems to be the only way to wherever I’m headed then I’ll have to hold on ‘til I reach it …

  Then, with a sigh, he began consoling himself by counting the crosses. But hardly had he begun than a tall, leafless tree loomed into view above the landscape, and at such a precarious slant that it threatened to topple onto the tracks. And there, sticking through a hole high at the top, he saw a small furry head which at first he took for that of a puppy and then the head of a child’s teddy bear. But no, it was the head of a fox! A fox with its red tongue dangling as it peered below as though on the lookout for hunters and hounds. And as he looked down to see what threat of man or of beast could have chased a fox into so desperately high a hiding place, he saw a small child emerging from a tumbling clump of tumbleweeds and crawling rapidly toward the tree. Yes, it was a child dressed in a diaper! A child who now paused and, looking over its shoulder, disappeared into a hole in the base of the tree. Then from far in the distance came the lonesome wail of a whistle followed from high above by the eagle-winged swoosh of an airplane descending—which, approaching at an angle, swept over his head with an eerie, high-pitched whine—but how, he thought, can a child that small tree a fox? And the scene vanished.

  And now as he stared up at vague shadows cast by an early-evening glow of street signs and traffic he asked himself the puzzling, blues-echoing question: Since you heard a WHISTLE blow, why were you buzzed by a PLANE? And as echoes of whistle and whine combined in a tremulous chord there came the clanking and sliding of elevator doors and with voices moving past in the hall raging in heated argument images of wild-eyed white men, black men, and Indians recalled from his visit with Love reeled through his mind—whereupon he rolled over and stared sleepily at the blue glow of the clock on the dresser and thought, Thank God it was only a dream, but what terrible people for a man to have around when he needs them!

  Yes, Hickman, a taunting voice from the past said with a chuckle, but remember that you were the one who was doing the dreaming and you never got a look inside that car. So while it was un-Christian for its passengers to ignore your situation, maybe the dream was your way of punishing yourself in the eyes of your enemies. That way you could punish anyone who might or might not have harmed you…. And if you really want the truth,

  that’s it!

  But you know, he answered, that I’ve always been willing to pay for my falls from grace—so at a time like this why would I dream such a dream?

  I knew you would say that! Why can’t you face the facts without bringing me into it? The truth is that Janey’s problems and all the changes you’re seeing out here on one of your old stamping grounds has you feeling old and discouraged. So now you’re punishing yourself for all those times you sinned against the dignity of your body at the expense of your spirit. Times when out of pride in your musical skills you’d cut comic dance steps while blowing your horn. Times when you amused the crowds by pretending to have so little body control that your trombone slide would become detached and go spinning into the air like a drum major’s baton. And while it whirled cartwheels through the air overhead you’d pretend dismay and blow hysterical riffs on that Rudy Muck mouthpiece which you prized as much as Stackalee prized his magical hat.

  And what did you blow in your clowning? I’ll tell you: It was that vulgar “I Know Something That I Can’t Gonna Tell You Blues”! Which wasn’t a true blues at all but a childish piece of doggerel about somebody’s backside smelling so loud that the gnats and flies were giving it hell!

  Now you can admit that something like that was a mean, low-down, dirty, ungentle-manly thing to do, even for the you of those freewheeling days. So even though those dumb, condescending white folks didn’t understand your signifying, it was still disgusting and unworthy, and you knew it! Still you kept spraying them with it, and then you went wriggling and twisting across the stage until you were under that tumbling gold-plated slide—which you were not about to drop—and caught it in what looked like a last-minute save from disaster. Then you snapped that bell and slide back together and ended your disgraceful act by sinking to the floor in a stiff-legged, britches-busting split! Yes, and with that trombone held high overhead and the poor, bamboozled crowd applauding your clowning!

  All right, all right! But in those days that kind of caper was a part of show business, and if performers like us didn’t come up with something that left them comfortable with memories of minstrel shows we didn’t work….

  Yes, Hickman, it’s true that the minstrel show was alive and well in a lot of things, including the movies, Uncle Ben’s rice, and Aunt Jemima’s pancakes. Just as it still paid off for white performers to pretend to be black, and for Negroes to pretend to be blackfaced white folks pretending to be black. All that’s true, but you were using it as a form of guerrilla warfare.

  Because you were playing with the crowd’s reluctance to reconcile your dancing skill with your size, or your gifts as an artist with the negative rating they placed on your race and your color. That you resented, and in retaliation you acted the clown and told yourself that it was a way of getting back at them. So now as you say from the pulpit: In sinning against them you sinned against yourself and against all your people. Because in hiding behind your skin, grin, and antics you thought you were
only manipulating their smug feelings of superiority. And like the hep cat you claimed to be you toyed with their mixed expectations like a black cat playing with a nest of mesmerized white mice like the ones that they use in scientific experiments. And when you took those “Thank-you-boss” bows in response to their applause you were anything in this world but humble. No, because behind your grin you were sneering with contempt and exulting with pride over compelling a bunch of misguided human beings to swallow a color and style they despised along with the slavery-based, mammy-made art they couldn’t help but admire and envy….

  Hey, he asked himself, where do you come off preaching me a sermon! And given what I was in those days, why should I have been more gracious than those who looked down upon me?

  Hickman, you’re the preacher, so ask yourself. Because I’m only the self you left behind. But since you’ve been dream-shocked into enough humility to ask, all right: Maybe it’s because your gifts and suffering should have taught you not mere forgiveness, but insight into the pathetic pretensions of humanity—and I mean your own as well as that of others. But instead of reacting out of the deeper wisdom of the experience you inherited, that tough experience which carries with it the obligation of Christian forbearance before provocation, and a tolerance of childish vanity, you were pulling a two-faced act in the name of revenge. So you ended up committing an act of self-abasement. Then you told yourself that you were doing the world a service by feeding your enemies their own fires of destruction. What do the radicals call it—“boring from within”? Or was it construction by debasement?

  Are you through?

  Yes, I’m through until the next time you disturb my rest with some crazy dream.

  Good! But before you go, what was the meaning of the baby, and that fox in the tree? Who was I punishing with that?

  Hickman, that wasn’t punishment, you were putting that fox and baby to the same use you put me—which is to avoid facing up to what’s staring you straight in the face. The rest is silence—go somewhere and relax, have some fun.

  Sitting up, he looked about the room with a feeling of disorientation, then Janey’s voice sounded in his head and he thought, How did she put what that mixed-up boy, her denied prodigal, had said? “If I find the one who gave me this color, I’ll kill him.” … Yes, and that was my cue—let me get out of here and find that Cliofus!

  And now, gazing abstractly into the bathroom mirror as he went through the ritual of shaving, his mind went back to the time when he had found Janey mothering Cliofus.

  And what a time that was, he thought. I hadn’t seen her for three or four years, and when I did it made me realize that not only had I failed to understand her, but that I didn’t know the first thing about the basic female nature of any of the other women I’d known. Because long after giving me my walking papers I discover that not only is she still unmarried, but she’s supporting five young children and they’re all boys. And when I saw the youngest I was so confounded and felt so guilty over what happened between us that I wondered whether she hadn’t taken him as a way of punishing me for not being acceptable as a husband. Not only was he the biggest baby I’d ever seen, but even for a baby he was so awkward and ugly that I asked myself if it were possible that adopting him was her way of signifying that he was the kind of child we would have had if we’d been married. Took it so personally that right then and there I decided not to see her again. Yes, but after seeing how well she treated the boys I changed my mind. Still, there was no way that I could ignore the fact that he was a strange baby, and while I had sense enough not to say it I doubted that she was prepared to fulfill the obligation she’d taken on. So I kept my mouth shut and hoped for the best. Then, three years later, I returned to find that he hadn’t learned to talk, and that Janey had made up her mind that he was deaf and dumb. By now he was a giant of a baby and giving her twice the usual trouble as well—but, being Janey, it only made her more determined to finish the job of raising him.

  What was it, Hickman, a case of frustrated mother love? Her spirit compensating for her denial of your wayward flesh?

  Who knows, it could have been—but by then, thank God, I had entered my ministry and was learning to wonder about such things, so I decided that whatever her reasons were for taking him on might have been she was managing to deal with him and her other boys—yes, and was keeping me informed about them….

  Inspecting his image as he wiped the foam from his ears and applied shaving lotion to his cheeks, he gave himself a slap that erupted into a spasm of body-shaking laughter as he thought, Then came that Thanksgiving Day dinner when she served the other boys a second helping of her fine sweet potato–yam cobbler and forgot to serve ole Cliofus—and what a mixed-up day of thanksgiving it turned out to be!

  She said it was then that the rascal spoke his very first words, and swore that when she heard him it almost gave her a heart attack! Yes, sir! And don’t forget that when she told you about it she wanted to kill you for laughing. But what did she expect from someone with my sense of humor? Reminded me of the lie about the iceman’s horse who could talk but wouldn’t let on because he was afraid that if he did he’d have to climb all those long tenement stairs delivering ice and have some woman refuse it because it wasn’t as cold as a white iceman’s ice—wow!

  Yes, sir! After three long years of playing possum, old Cliofus ups and starts talking—and it wasn’t baby talk but in the polite down-home idiom she’d been teaching the others. And when he said, “Miss Janey, ma’am, I think I’m ready for my second helping of pie,” poor Janey couldn’t believe her own ears. But he’d said it so clearly that while she sat there wondering whether she’d really heard him, her other boys had got the message and were cheering and asking Cliofus to talk some more. Yes, and that’s when ole Cliofus demonstrated without a doubt that he was neither a deaf dummy nor a mindless fool!

  Because while the others were going out of their heads with excitement the rascal just sat there, crammed into that high chair and looking around as though he hadn’t said a mumbling word—and it wasn’t until Janey finally listened to the others repeating what he’d said and came across with more pie that he spoke another word. And when he did she was so sure she’d witnessed a miracle that she called in all the neighbors to witness it. And that’s when ole Cliofus came into his own! Talked so much and so well that everybody who’d been saying that Janey had an idiot on her hands had to eat crow. And I mean with hot sauce!

  Now let’s see, he thought as he returned to the bedroom, switched on the closet light, and selected a shirt and underclothing from the dresser, she always mentioned him in her letters, but the next time I actually saw him he’d grown into a clumsy, oversized teenager who walked like an agitated robot, and his small child’s fascination with railroad trains was causing folks to treat him like some kind of harmless idiot. By then I knew that he was far from that and tried to get the idea across, but with our folks being no kinder to their own than other folks are to us he had to suffer for being different. Even worse, he had so little control over his mouth and movements that he became an easy target even for kids who were smaller than himself. Those were the days when every letter from Janey had a complaint about his being punched, teased, or forced to buck-dance for older boys. And that wasn’t the end of it, because a few years later his word trouble had reached the point that he was making grown folks uncomfortable because they were afraid that his uncontrollable mouth might reveal things which he might overhear them say or see them do. Treated the poor fellow like he was some kind of unblinking eye of community conscience—what a terrible trial it must have been to find himself speaking the truth in all innocence of evil intention and having to pay for it! It must have been like having a mouth like a running sore, with folks fascinated by what you might say but being too repelled by the smell to really want to listen. For a youngster with a mouth like that the heaviest cross he could ever think of being forced to bear must have been a cross of unruly words!

  Then as he
smiled at the confusion created when Cliofus decided to speak for the first time he shook his head, thinking, Yes, Hickman, but as you have now come to know all too well, the WORD itself is a cross. And since even sacred communion itself depends upon our communicating through word and gesture, why should the innocent offspring of the Word be free of agony? And least of all for those who were given an unusual gift for using them? When old mouthy Love talked about that denied little man of Janey’s going to Cliofus for information about his father he called him a “word-drunk oracle,” but that’s something like a copper kettle having the gall to low-rate a black iron pot for being smoky. So now just as I went to him I’m going to that same word-drunk Cliofus in search of a word or gesture that might save another man’s life.