Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  “You know,” Murphy exclaimed as he stood sniffing the air, “there has to be a still hidden somewhere in this joint.”

  “Yes, Murphy,” the Sergeant replied, “there may very well be, but if so it’s evidence and you’re not to touch it. Meanwhile, forget it and let’s have a look at our stiff.”

  “If you say so,” Murphy said, “but stills are a hell of a lot livelier than stiffs.”

  “Don’t worry,” the Sergeant shot back, “because in our line of work all stiffs are still.”

  And with a self-satisfied grin at his banter he pointed to a door behind us and said, “And now to prove it, let’s have a look-see.”

  But when he twisted the knob of the triple-locked door we were startled by the faint sound of moaning.

  “Hell, Sergeant,” a policeman in uniform said, “whoever’s in there is alive!”

  “Cool it,” the Sergeant said sotto voce. “Do you think I’ve gone deaf?”

  Then, with a twist of the doorknob he shouted, “You in there, open this door!”

  And receiving no answer he repeated his order.

  “Hey, Sarge,” Murphy said with a grin, “it would seem that you’ve turned up a stiff who doubts your authority.”

  “Dammit, Murph,” the Sergeant said with a glare, “that’ll be enough out of you!”

  And rattling the doorknob he bellowed, “Mr. Rockmore, we’re the police, so unlock the door!”

  And with the moaning his only reply he turned to a detective and said, “All right, Levine, get it open!”

  “Shall I give it my shoulder?” Levine said as he inspected the door frame.

  “And scair him to death? Hell no, use your tools.”

  It was then I annoyed the Sergeant by asking him to explain why a man reported to have been murdered was moaning.

  “Not now, McIntyre,” he said with a frown, “not now….”

  “But do you know the perpetrator’s identity?”

  “Later, McIntyre, can’t you see I’m busy?”

  “So am I,” I said. “You have your duties and I have mine. So what information do you have? And who reported this case as a murder?”

  “Please, McIntyre, step aside and let us get on with our work!” And ignoring my question he turned angrily away.

  “And you, Lawson,” he barked to one of his men, “go around to the back of this joint and see if there’s a door or a window that’s open.”

  Inside the room the moaning continued, and with his companions looking on Levine went to work on the locks, the third of which soon proved so resistant that I moved away and tried making sense of the chaos around me. It was then I saw that a section of the lamp-blazing wall was covered with old lithographs, the subjects of which were deeply interred in my memory. And suddenly I was taken with a disquieting feeling of having been lured to an unnoticed area of Washington by a malicious trickster of historical bent whose motive was to force me to confront certain vague detail from the historical past and make sense of their ties to the present.

  And immediately I was drawn to a lithograph in which soldiers in parade uniforms and civilians in black were accompanying a flag-draped coffin which rested on the bed of a horse-drawn camion. The civilians appeared to be men of authority, and with the flag displayed on the coffin I decided that the deceased had been a figure of national importance. Then from the dated dress of the crowd looking on and the long jackets and high domed helmets of the policemen in control of the gathering I realized that the time of the scene was the mid-nineteenth century. Then as I groped for the name of the deceased and the role he had played in the drama of history his funeral cortege seemed to surge and begin moving. Then from somewhere close by gunfire erupted, and with people screaming and scattering the horses took off down the street with a banging of wheels and jangling of harness, the flag was flapping, and the coffin banging the bed of the camion with such thundering force that I had a vision of it landing in the street and sending the deceased sailing through the air like a shot from a cannon. And reeling with vertigo, I was relieved that it was only a vision.

  But now the image of Abraham Lincoln loomed in my mind, and with my memory aflap like a book in a whirlwind I thought with relief, Oh, no—thank God—such a thing didn’t happen!

  But at the thought the next lithograph came instantly alive, and I was watching a battlefield scene in which soldiers in blue and in gray were firing rifles and cannons while General Robert E. Lee with saber in hand was galloping northward on his handsome steed Traveller. Whereupon wondering if the scene was of Antietam, Bull Run, or Chancellorsville, I recalled the Battle of Gettysburg and moved to the next lithograph expecting a scene in which General Ulysses S. Grant was finally triumphant.

  But instead, surrounded by soldiers with a crowd looking on, John “Osawatomie” Brown was being marched down an old Charlestown street on his way to the gallows. And while most of the crowd are acclaiming his capture, a short distance behind them a slave mother wearing a blue bandana headcloth stands weeping and cuddling her tiny black baby. And seeing the soldiers and prisoner approaching the spot where she’s standing she thrust her tiny black child above the crowd’s straining heads and beseeches John Brown to give it his blessing.

  To which Brown reacts by thrusting out his chin and looking up at the child with an expression in which pride, surprise, and regret are enigmatically mingled. And while the crowd gawks and remains serenely unaware of what’s happening above and behind them it’s as though Brown were baring his neck for the noose which was ready and waiting at the end of his march.

  Then, struck by a blow from the past, I reacted to the slave mother’s gesture of hope and respect in the context of the chaos created by the clash between our democratic ideals and our regional self-interests. And with the devastation wrought by the war which erupted soon after sweeping through my mind, I recalled having read that during Brown’s raid on the armory at old Harper’s Ferry two of his sons had been slain.

  And suddenly as I stared at Brown, the crowd, and the weeping slave mother, her symbolic gesture took on a power that wrenched me. For in it tragedy, hope, and sheer hopelessness were so intricately entwined that I moved away in a state of confusion. Then time took a leap, and with a sense of relief my attention was drawn to a thundering contention of fine thoroughbreds.

  Mounted by jockeys in eye-dazzling silks, they were rounding the curve past a spectator-filled grandstand, and as I thrilled with excitement any questions raised by Brown and the slave mother’s gesture were quickly forgotten. For now time swept me backwards into a mixture of relief and further confusion.

  For, while the cheering spectators were white men and women, most of the jockeys—whether black, brown, or high-yellow—were racially black men. And in struggling to make sense of that incongruity I noted the unusual postures in which they were riding. For instead of straddling their mounts in the high-perched, short-stirruped, monkey-on-a-stick style of today, they were brandishing their whips in upright positions with their legs extended and feet thrust earthward. And as I watched a black rider maneuvering his mount to the lead of the track-pounding pack a quick glance at the lithograph’s legend revealed that his name was Pike Barnes, his horse Proctor Knott, the year 1888, and that the race they were winning the first Futurity. And with the fashionably dressed spectators cheering them on they went galloping past in dream-like bounds as they headed for the finish of a race from which in the very near future jockeys of Barnes’ racial identity would be barred from competing. And as though my invisible tormentor was using mute juxtaposition as a means for making me aware of the historical irony, the next lithograph presented a Kentucky scene of Churchill Downs which bore the image of black Isaac Murphy, the celebrated winner of three of its Derbys.

  But now time leaped forward and wavered, and down the middle of a Manhattan street a group of smiling black women and men accompanied by a blaring brass band were dancing a high-stepping cakewalk. And while the women were prancing and smiling in a shimmering flurr
y of pink feather boas, the dashing black beaus, dressed in white ties and tails, were flourishing silk opera hats above their partners’ plumed heads. To which, smiling coquettishly, the women were responding by aiming high kicks toward the beaus’ gleaming hat brims. And as they swayed and swayed and kicked higher and higher they revealed teasing pink flashes of their ruffled silk lingerie, and their feminine garters were adorned with tiny blue bows. And as I watched them prance to the beat of the blaring brass tune I recalled a snatch of its once popular lyrics, which were echoed years later in a mosaic-like poem by Thomas Stearns Eliot:

  If you like-a me

  Like I

  Like-a you …

  Under the bamboo tree …

  Then with a swoop and a flourish the dancers were gone—and I was watching a race between the riverboats Natchez and the Robert E. Lee. And as they went plowing along with their sidewheels awhirl and their smokestacks billowing a crowd of blacks who were lined on the levee were urging them on with cheers and with laughter.

  Which left me wondering at the complex role played in our fractured democracy by the sports and the arts, and struck by the irony of irreverent laughter serving as a balm for the wounds that both bind and divide us …

  But now, my musing interrupted by the Sergeant’s command to one of his men, I turned to see on a table nearby an Edison phonograph, a telegraph key, a Leyden jar, a tintype camera, a collection of antique movie projectors, and a scattered collection of stereoscopic views of early America: Niagara Falls, a spouting Old Faithful, Jamestown, Boston, and Virginia’s old Williamsburg. And then I took note of a towering stack of phonographic discs, on the top of which I looked down to see a cracked recording of “The Bear Mash Blues.” …

  Then from behind me the lock expert complained, “Look, Sarge, I could save time by giving this thing a bang with my shoulder.”

  “And you’d wake up the dead,” the Sergeant said, “so stick to that lock ‘til you’ve solved it. That’s what you’re paid for.”

  “Okay, but by then whosever’s in there could climb out the window.”

  “Don’t worry, the joint’s surrounded,” the Sergeant said, “so snap to it!”

  And with that I continued making notes on the room and its clutter, which was becoming a mind-teasing mixture of weird treasure-house and pack rat’s burrow. And in inching my way I grew dizzier and dizzier.

  Here was an old Franklin stove supporting a fading framed portrait of Teddy Roosevelt wearing his Rough Rider’s uniform. A full-length portrait of Senator Stephen A. Douglas looked down from a wall surrounded by framed collages made of fading handbills that offered rewards in cash for the safe return of runaway slaves. A playbill dated April 14, 1865, announced the final performance of Our American Cousin, a drama in which Laura Keene had starred on the stage of Ford’s Theater, that site of a deed so fatal that it still finds uneasy echoes in our hesitant memory. And next to that haunting reminder that our country’s history possesses elements of tragedy (and no doubt to the delight of my invisible tor-menter), I saw a playbill of the same fatal date that proudly announced the presentation of Boucicault’s “Great Sensation Drama” The Octoroon, and beside it a portrait of young Thomas Jefferson.

  And now I moved past a tall weathered totem pole carved with animals, birds, and tribal ancestors—and was brought to a halt by the cast-iron figure of a young blackamoor.

  A relic from the days when few cars were available, the figure had once served as a convenient device for tethering horses. But now it stood high on a table with a small palm stretched toward me and a mischievous smile on its shiny black face. And as it stared back with eyes that seemed to look through me, I realized that the object on its head at a debonair angle was the inverted bowl of an old chamber pot, and as I frowned in revulsion it appeared to respond with a gaze of derision—from which unnerving spell I sought to escape by grabbing the offensive utensil and snatching it away.

  Whereupon I saw printed on its side in Italian:

  Mange Bene,

  Cacca Forte,

  Vida Longo!

  Under which the following comment was written in English:

  “But now, alas and alack, Her lovely soft

  Thighs shall be bathed

  By bright Pearly Tears.”

  And fearing that the grinning black figure would take off and start dancing a buck dance, I returned the bawdy utensil to its nappy iron head.

  But where, I thought as I moved quickly away, are the fumes coming from? Could it be from the fireplace? And could the building actually be, as Murphy suggested, a site for illegal activities? And all the clutter a shield for crimes that had long gone unnoticed? Could the mass of images and objects from the past have been amassed as a façade behind which some violation of law had only now run its course and ended in murder? How did one even begin to think about a place in which the weird collection of incongruous objects were evoking a whirl of long surpressed memories? And why were the detectives taking so much time in picking that lock!

  Then, inspired by the fumes in the air, I thought, Perhaps there really is a still in this building, with its copper coil winding between the walls and the floors and down to the basement, where even now its illegal distillant is being collected.

  And making my way to the room’s marble fireplace, I examined its opening but found no sign of a still’s hidden coil. Instead, in the space usually occupied by andirons, firewood, and ashes, I found an ancient iron safe, on the black door of which I read quotations that were a mix of the Bible and Benjamin Franklin. Painted in red, gold-bordered letters, they offered the following advice to the reader:

  REMEMBER THY FATHER IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH FOR A PENNY SAVED IS A PENNY EARNED (!)

  Then, hearing the detectives thudding the door to little effect, I moved from the safe to a wall on which I saw a series of photographed portraits of once-famous Indians. Among them Black Hawk and Tecumseh, Sitting Bull and Chief Joseph, Osceola, Crazy Horse, and Stumickosucks—a name as imposing as its owner’s grim image. Here was a ceremonial scene in which white men and Indians were making a treaty, a group of Plains Indians in full regalia posing with impassive dignity for an early daguerreotypist—perhaps no less than the great Mathew Brady.

  Then came photographs of President Warren G. Harding. In the first of which, surrounded by cronies, Harding might well have been indulging in the hyper-alliterative oratorical style for which he was famous. Such as his letter “P” accented “… palaver on progress without pretense or prejudice or accent upon personal pronouns, and without regard to the perennial pronouncements and unperturbed by people passion-wrought over the loss of promises proposed.”

  Which phrase I recalled as among the guests who were listening I identified Albert Fall and Harry Daugherty and surmised that the scene might have been snapped about the time Teapot Dome, that nation-shaking scandal of the twenties, was on the point of exploding. And then came photographs of scenes that fairly exulted, “HARDING, HARDING, WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING!”

  Harding attired in a suit of white flannel, silk shirt, bow tie, and panama hat while playing croquet on the handsome South Lawn of the White House.

  Harding standing on a balcony with a party of ladies with high generous bosoms who displayed fancy wide hats while waving to a mob of small kids who were rolling Easter eggs on the lawn below them.

  Harding with hand upraised while taking the oath of his office, his swarthy face somber beneath his white, neatly parted hair.

  And Harding in top hat and fur-collared coat smiling suavely as he waved from a limousine to a Fifth Avenue crowd.

  And then, just when I was taken with sadness by such poignant reminders of those desperately optimistic days, when this war-weary nation’s most popular slogan was “A return to normalcy,” I was face-to-face with Jack Johnson, the most notorious of all heavyweight champions, and a man whom certain sports reporters and Sam, my favorite black waiter, regard as an underground hero. Which I confess was an opinion in whose rega
rd I remained strictly neutral. Nevertheless I recognized that Johnson was a figure of national prominence who had indeed been most imposing, skillful, and troublesome. But now, erupting like a ghost from the past, he came jogging toward me like a black Hercules. Broad-shouldered and tall, he’s wearing a black-and-white suit of giant hounds -tooth check, a white turtleneck sweater, and a circular fur cap of Russian design. And gripping a club of a walking cane midway its length he comes jogging toward me with a haughty expression. Then, in Havana, stretched on the canvas, he’s shading his eyes from the sun with a nonchalant gesture while Jess Willard, the triumphant “White Hope,” waits in a corner while the referee with hand in the air renders his verdict. But was Johnson really defeated—or, as Sam the waiter insisted, simply bowing to the force of white racial prejudice? And thinking, Damn this room and the questions it raises, I returned to the present when one of the detectives bumped into a table and a huge music box came alive with a reedy, twangy rendition of “Oh Didn’t He Ramble.”

  Then the Sergeant was cursing and as the tune expired I turned back to see Johnson dressed in a bullfighter’s costume while posing with his arms around the shoulders of the Joselito and Belmonte, who like himself were both outstanding athletes. Yes, but unlike our boxing theirs was a sport which was life-risking and tragic.

  And now here was Johnson looking sinisterly graceful in his black fighting togs, with his domed, shaven head bobbing and weaving as he taunts and has fun with Jim Jeffries.

  Which called to mind an incident from my boyhood in which a little black kid hurled a taunt from the top of a fence in an alley. Sticking out his tongue and thumbing his nose he had yelled,