Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  And at last they were letting me down, down, down; and I could feel the jar as someone went too fast, as now a woman’s shout came to me, seeming to strike the side near my right ear like a flash of lightning streaking jaggedly across a dark night sky.

  Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-sus! Have mercy, Jeeeeeee-sus! and the cold quivering flashed up my legs.

  Everybody’s got to die, sisters and brothers, Daddy Hickman was saying, his voice remote through the dark. That is why each and every one must be redeemed. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE REDEEMED! Yes, even He who was the Son of God and the voice of God to man—even He had to die. And what I mean is die as a man. So what do you, the lowest of the low, what do you expect you’re going to have to do? He had to die in all of man’s loneliness and pain because that’s the price He had to pay for coming down here and putting on the pitiful, unstable form of man. Have mercy! Even with his godly splendor which could transform the built-in wickedness of man’s animal form into an organism that could stretch and strain toward sublime righteousness—Amen! That could show man the highway to progress and toward a more noble way of living—even with all that, even He had to die! Listen to me tell it to you: Even He who said, Suffer the little ones to come unto Me had to die as a man. And like a man crying from His cross in all of man’s pitiful puzzlement at the will of Almighty God! …

  It was not yet time. I could hear the waves of Daddy Hickman’s voice rolling against the sides, then down and back, now to boom suddenly in my ears as I felt the weight of darkness leave my eyes, my face bursting with sweat as I felt the rush of bright air bringing the odor of flowers. I lay there, blinking up at the lights, the satin corrugations of the slanting lid and the vague outlines of Deacon Wilhite, who now was moving aside, so that it seemed as though he had himself been the darkness. I lay there breathing through my nose, deeply inhaling the flowers as I released Teddy’s paw and grasped my white Bible with both hands, feeling the chattering and the real terror beginning and an ache in my bladder. For always it was as though it waited for the moment when I was prepared to answer Daddy Hickman’s signal to rise up that it seemed to slide like heavy mud from my face to my thighs and there to hold me like quicksand. Always at the sound of Daddy Hickman’s voice I came floating up like a corpse shaken loose from the bottom of a river and the terror rising with me.

  We are the children of Him who said, “Suffer …” I heard, and in my mind I could see Deacon Wilhite, moving up to stand beside Daddy Hickman at one of the two lecterns, holding on to the big Bible and looking intently at the page as he repeated, “Suffer …”

  And the two men standing side by side, the one large and dark, the other slim and light brown; the other reverends rowed behind them, their faces staring grim with engrossed attention to the reading of the Word; like judges in their carved, high-backed chairs. And the two voices beginning their call and countercall as Daddy Hickman began spelling out the text which Deacon Wilhite read, playing variations on the verses just as he did with his trombone when he really felt like signifying on a tune the choir was singing:

  Suffer, meaning in this workaday instance to surrender, Daddy Hickman said.

  Amen, Deacon Wilhite said, repeating Surrender.

  Yes, meaning to surrender with tears and to feel the anguished sense of human loss. Ho, our hearts bowed down!

  Suffer the little ones, Deacon Wilhite said.

  The little ones—ah yes! Our little ones. He was talking to us too, Daddy Hickman said. Our little loved ones. Flesh of our flesh, soul of our soul. Our hope for heaven and our charges in this world. Yes! The little lambs. The promise of our fulfillment, the guarantee of our mortal continuance. The little wases-to-bes-Ha!—Amen! The little used-to-bes that we all were to our mammys and pappys, and with whom we are but one with God….

  Oh my Lord, just look how the bright word leaps! Daddy Hickman said. First the babe, then the preacher. The babe father to the man, the man father to us all. A kind father calling for the babes in the morning of their earthly day—yes. Then in the twinkling of an eye, Time slams down and He calls us to come on home!

  He said to Come, Brother Alonzo.

  Ah yes, to Come, meaning to approach. To come up and be counted; to go along with Him, Lord Jesus. To move through the narrow gate bristling with spears, up the hill of Calvary, to climb onto the unyielding cross on which even lil’ babies are turned into men. Yes, to come upon the proving ground of the human condition. Vanity dropped like soiled underwear. Pride stripped off like a pair of duckings that’ve been working all week in the mud. Feet dragging with the gravity of the trial ahead. Legs limp as a pair of worn-out galluses. With eyes dim as a flickering lamp-wick! Read to me, Deacon; line me out some more!

  He said volumes in just those words. Brother Alonzo, he said, COME UNTO ME, Deacon Wilhite cried.

  Yes! Meaning to take up His burden. At first the little baby-sized load that with the first steps we take weighs less than a butter ball; no more than the sugar tit made up for a year-and-a-half-old child. Then, Lord help us, it grows heavier with each step we take along life’s way. Until in that moment it weighs upon us like the headstone of the world. Meaning to come bringing it! Come hauling it! Come dragging it! Come even if you have to crawl! Come limping, come lame; come crying in your Jesus’ name—but Come! Come with your abuses but come with no excuses. Amen! Let me have it again, Rev. Wilhite….

  Come unto me, the Master said.

  Meaning to help the weak and the downhearted. To stand up to the oppressors. To suffer and hang from the cross for standing up for what you believe. Meaning to undergo His initiation into the life-everlasting. Oh yes, and to Cry, Cry, Cry … Eyeeeee.

  I could hear the word rise and spread to become the great soaring trombone note of Daddy Hickman’s singing voice now and it seemed somehow to arise there in the box with me, shaking me fiercely as it rose to float with throbbing pain up to him again, who now seemed to stand high above the tent. And trembling I tensed myself and rose slowly from the waist in the controlled manner Daddy Hickman had taught me, feeling the terror gripping my chest like quicksand, feeling the opening of my mouth and the spastic flexing of my diaphragm as the words rushed to my throat to join his resounding cry:

  Lord … Lord …

  … Why…

  … Hast Thou…

  Forsaken me … I cried, but now Daddy Hickman was opening up and bearing down:

  … More Man than men and yet in that world-destroying-world-creating moment just a little child calling to His Father…. HEAR THE LAMB A-CRYING ON THE TREE!

  LORD, LORD, I cried, WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME?

  Amen, Daddy Hickman said, Amen!

  Then his voice came faster, explosive with gut-toned preacher authority:

  The father of no man who yet was Father to all men—the human-son-side of God—Great God A-mighty! Calling out from the agony of the cross! Ho, open up your downcast eyes and see the beauty of the living Word…. All babe, and yet in the mysterious moment, ALL MAN. Him who had taken up the burden of all the little children crying, LORD….

  Lord, I cried.

  Crying plaintive as a baby sheep …

  … Baaaaaaaaa! …

  Yes, the little Lamb crying with the tongue of man …

  … LORD …

  … Crying to the Father…

  … Lord, LORD…

  … Calling to his pappy…

  … Lord, Lord, why hast…

  Amen! LORD, WHY…

  … Hast Thou…

  Forsaken … me …

  Aaaaaaaaaaah!

  WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME, LORD?

  I screamed the words in answer and now I wanted to cry, to be finished, but the sound of Daddy Hickman’s voice told me that this was not the time, that the words were taking him where they wanted him to go. I could hear him beginning to walk up and down the platform behind me, pacing in his great black shoes, his voice rising above his heavy tread, his great chest heaving.

  Crying—Amen! Crying, Lord, Lord—A
men! On a cross on a hill, His arms spread out like my mammy told me it was the custom to stretch a runaway slave when they gave him the water cure. When they forced water into his mouth until water filled up his bowels and he lay swollen and drowning on the dry land. Drinking water, breathing water, water overflowing his earthbound lungs like a fish drowning of air on the parched dry land.

  And nailed NAILED to the cross-arm like a coonskin fixed to the side of a barn, yes, but with the live coon still inside the furry garment! Still in possession, with all nine points of the Roman law a fiery pain to consume the house. Yes, every point of law a spearhead of painful injustice. Ah, yes!

  Look! His head is lollying! Green gall is drooling from His lips. Drooling as it had in those long sweet, baby days long gone. AH, BUT NOT TIT SO TOUGH NOR PAP SO BITTER AS TOUCHED THE LIPS OF THE DYING LAMB!

  There He is, hanging on; hanging on in spite of knowing the way it would have to be. Yes! Because the body of man does not wish to die! It matters not who’s inside the ribs, the heart, the lungs. Because the body of man does not sanction death. That’s why suicide is but sulking in the face of hope! Ah, man is tough. Man is human! Yes, and by definition man is proud. Even when heaven and hell come slamming together like a twelve-pound sledge on a piece of heavy-gauged railroad steel, man is tough and mannish, and ish means like …

  So there He was, stretching from hell-pain to benediction; head in heaven and body in hell—tell me, who said He was weak? Who said He was frail? Because if He was, then we need a new word for strength, we need a new word for courage. We need a whole new dictionary to capture the truth of that moment.

  Ah, but there He is, with the others laughing up at Him, their mouths busted open like melons with rotten seeds—laughing! You know how it was, you’ve been up there. You’ve heard that contemptuous sound: IF YOU BE THE KING OF THE JEWS AND THE SON OF GOD, JUMP DOWN! JUMP DOWN, BLACK BASTARD, DIRTY JEW, JUMP DOWN! Scorn burning the wind. Enough halitosis alone to burn up old Moloch and melt him down.

  He’s bleeding from his side. Hounds baying the weary stag. And yet … And yet, His the power and the glory locked in the weakness of His human manifestation, bound by His acceptance of His human limitation, His sacrificial humanhood! Ah, yes, for He willed to save man by dying as man dies, and He was a heap of man in that moment, let me tell you. He was man raised to his most magnificent image, shining like a prism glass with all the shapes and colors of man, and dazzling all who had the vision to see. Man moved beyond mere pain to godly joy…. There He is, with the spikes in His tender flesh. Nailed to the cross. First with it lying flat on the ground, and then being raised in a slow, flesh-rending, bone-scraping arc, one-hundred-and-eighty degrees—Up, up, UP! Aaaaaaaaaaaah! Until He’s upright like the ridge-pole of the House of God. Lord, Lord, Why? See Him, Watch Him! Feel Him! His eyes rolling as white as our eyes, looking to His, our Father, the tendons of His neck roped out, straining like the steel cables of a heavenly curving bridge in a storm. His jaw muscles bursting out like kernels of corn on a hot lid. Yea! His mouth trying to refuse the miserable human questioning of His fated words …

  Lord, Lord….

  Oh, yes, Rev. Bliss. Crying above the laughing ones for whom He left His Father to come down here to save, crying—

  Lord, Lord, Why …?

  Amen! Crying as no man since—thank you, Jesus—has ever had to cry.

  Ah, man, ah, human flesh! This side we all know well. On this weaker, human side we were all up there on the cross, just swarming over Him like microbes. But look at him with me now, look at Him fresh, with the eyes of your most understanding human heart. There He is, hanging on in man-flesh, His face twitching and changing like a field of grain struck by a high wind—hanging puzzled. Bemused and confused. Mystified and teary-eyed, wracked by the realization dawning in the grey matter of His cramped human brain; knowing in the sinews, in the marrow of His human bone, in the living tissue of His most human veins—realizing totally that man was born to suffer and to die for other men! There He is, look at Him. Suspended between heaven and hell, hanging on already nineteen centuries of time in one split second of his torment and realizing, I say, realizing in that second of His anguished cry that life in this world is but a zoom between the warm womb and the lonely tomb. Proving for all time, casting the pattern of history forth for all to see in the undeniable concreteness of blood, bone, and human courage before that which has to be borne by every man. Proving, proving that in this lonely, lightning-bug flash of time we call our life on earth we all begin with a slap of a hand across our tender baby bottoms to start us crying the puzzled question with our first drawn breath:

  Why was I born?… Aaaaaaaah!

  And hardly before we can get it out of our mouths, hardly before we can exhale the first lungful of life’s anguished air—even before we can think to ask, Lord, What’s my true name? Who, Lord, am I?—here comes the bone-crunching slap of a cold iron spade across our cheeks and it’s time to cry, WHY, LORD, WHY WAS I BORN TO DIE?

  Why, Rev. Bliss? Because we’re men, that’s why! The initiation into the lodge is hard! The dues are outrageous and what’s more, nobody can refuse to join. Oh, we can wear the uniforms and the red-and-purple caps and capes a while, and we can enjoy the feasting and the marching and strutting and the laughing fellowship—then Dong, Dong! and we’re caught between two suspensions of our God-given breath. One to begin and the other to end it, a whoop of joy and a sigh of sadness, the pinch of pain and the tickle of gladness, learning charity if we’re lucky, faith if we endure, and hope in sheer downright desperation!

  That’s why, Reveren’ Bliss. But now, thank God, because He passed his test like any mannish man—not like a God, but like any pale, frail, weak man who dared to be his father’s son … Amen! Oh, we must dare to be, brothers and sisters…. We must dare, my little children…. We must dare in our own troubled times to be our father’s own. Yes, and now we have the comfort and the example to help us through from darkness to lightness, a beacon along the way. Ah, but in that flash of light in which we flower and wither and die, we must find Him so that He can find us, ourselves. For it is only a quivering moment—then the complicated tongs of life’s old good-bad comes clamping down, grabbing us in our tender places, feeling like a bear’s teeth beneath our short-hair. Lord, He taught us how to live, yes! And in the sun-drowning awfulness of that moment, He taught us how to die. There He was on the cross, leading His sheep, showing us how to achieve the heritage of our godliness which He in that most pitiful human moment—with spikes in His hands and through His feet, with the thorny crown of scorn studding His tender brow, with the cruel points of Roman steel piercing His side … Crying…

  Lord…

  … Lord …

  LORD! Amen. Crying from the castrated Roman tree unto his father like an unjustly punished child. And yet, Rev. Bliss, Glory to God, and yet He was guaranteeing with the final expiration of his human breath our everlasting life….

  Bliss’s throat ached with the building excitement of it all. He could feel the Word working in the crowd now, boiling in the heat of the Word and the weather. Women were shouting and up suddenly to collapse back into their chairs, and far back in the dark he could see someone dressed in white leaping into the air with outflung arms, going up then down—over backwards and up and down again, in a swooning motion which made her seem to float in the air stirred by the agitated movement of women’s palm leaf fans. It was long past the time for him to preach St. Mark, but each time he cried Lord, Lord, they shouted and screamed all the louder. Across the platform now he could see Deacon Wilhite lean against the lectern shaking his head, his lips pursed against his great emotion. While behind him, the great preachers in their high-backed chairs thundered out deep staccato Amens, he tried to see to the back of the tent, back where the seams in the ribbed white cloth curved down and were tied in a roll; past where the congregation strained forward or sat rigid in holy transfixation, seeing here and there the hard, bright disks of eyeglasses glitte
ring in the hot, yellow light of lanterns and flares. The faces were rapt and owllike, gleaming with heat and Daddy Hickman’s hot interpretation of the Word….

  Then suddenly, right down there in front of the coffin he could see an old white-headed man beginning to leap in holy exaltation, bounding high into the air, and sailing down; then up again, higher than his own head, moving like a jumping jack, with bits of sawdust dropping from his white tennis shoes. A brown old man, whose face was a blank mask, set and mysterious like a picture framed on a wall, his lips tight, his eyes starry, like those of a blue-eyed china doll—soaring without effort through the hot shadows of the tent. Sailing as you sailed in dreams just before you fell out of bed. A holy jumper, Brother Pegue….

  Bliss turned to look at Daddy Hickman, seeing the curved flash of his upper teeth and the swell of his great chest as with arms outspread he began to sing … when suddenly from the left of the tent he heard a scream.

  It was of a different timbre, and when he turned, he could see the swirling movement of a woman’s form; strangely, no one was reaching out to keep her from hurting herself, from jumping out of her underclothes and showing her womanness as some of the ladies sometimes did. Then he could see her coming on, a tall redheaded woman in a purple-red dress; coming screaming through the soprano section of the big choir where the members, wearing their square, flat-topped caps were standing and knocking over chairs to let her through as she dashed among them striking about with her arms.

  She’s a sinner coming to testify, he thought…. A white? Is she white? Hearing the woman scream,