Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  What?

  You know lying is a sin, dont you? You surely ought to by now, because I’ve told you often enough.

  He looked at me then cut his eyes away, scowling. Listen, Bliss, a little while ago you wouldn’t tell me whether that boy who led Samson got killed or not, so now dont come preaching me no sermon. Cause you know I can kick your butt. I dont have to take no stuff off you. This here aint no Sunday, no how. Cant nobody make me go to church on no Friday, cause on a Friday I’m liable to boot a preacher’s behind until his nose bleeds.

  I rebuked him with my face but now he was out to tease me.

  That’s the truth, Rev, and you know the truth is what the Lord loves. I’ll give a doggone preacher hell on a Friday. Let him catch me on Sunday if he wants to, that’s all right providing he aint too long-winded. And even on Wednesday aint so bad, but please, please, dont let him fool with me on no Friday.

  I flipped a goober at his boasting head. He didn’t dodge and tried to stare me down. Then we dueled with our faces, our eyes, but I won when his lips quivered and he laughed.

  Rev, he said, shaking his head, I swear you’re my ace buddy, preacher or no—but why do preachers always have to be so serious? Look at that face! Let’s see how you look when you see one of those outrageous sinners. One of those midnight rambling, whiskey drinking gamblers….

  I rebuked him with my eyes, but he kept on laughing. Come on, Rev, let’s see you…

  I’ve told you now, Body…

  Man, you too serious. But I’m not lying about that box though, honest. It’s suppose to be about this size, but when they come out on the wall they git as big as grown folks—Hecks, bigger. It’s magic, man.

  It must be, I said. What kind of folks has he got in that box? You might as well tell a really big lie.

  White folks, man. What you think—Well, he has got a few Indians in there. That is if any of them are left after they’re supposed to have been killed.

  No colored?

  Naw, just white. You know they gon’ keep all the new things for theyselves. They put us in there about the time it’s fixing to wear out.

  We giggled, holding one hand across our mouths and slapping our thighs with the other as grown men did when a joke was outrageously simpleminded and yet somehow true.

  Then that’s got to be magic, I said. Because that’s the only way they can get rid of the colored. But really, Body, dont you ever tell the truth?

  Sure I do, all the time. I know you think I’m lying, Rev, but I’m telling you the Lord’s truth. Sammy got them folks in that machine like lightning bugs in a jug.

  And about how many you think he’s got in there?

  He held his head to one side and squinted,

  About two hundred, man; maybe more.

  And you think I’m going to believe that too?

  It’s true, man. He got them jugged in there and for four cents me and you can go see him let ‘em come out and move. You can see for yourself. You got four cents?

  Sure, but I’m saving ‘em. You have to tell a better lie than that to get my money; a preacher’s money comes hard.

  Shucks, that’s what you say. All y’all do is hoop and holler a while, then you pass the plate. But that’s all right, you can keep your old money if you want to be so stingy, because I seen it a coupla times all ready.

  You saw it? So why’re you just now telling me?

  I felt betrayed, Body was of my right hand. I saw him skeet through the liar’s gap in his front teeth and roll his eyes.

  Shoots, you dont believe nothing I say no how. I get tired of you ‘sputing my word. But just the same I’m telling the truth; they come out and move and they move fast. Not like ordinary folks. And last time I was down there Sammy made them folks come out big, man. They was twice as big as grown folks, and they had a whole train with them …

  A whole train?

  Sho, a real train running over a trestle just like the Southern does. And some cowboys was chasing it on they hosses.

  Body, I’m going to pray for you, hear? Fact is, I’m going to have Daddy Hickman have the whole church pray for you.

  Dont you think you’re so good, Bliss. You better ask him to pray for yourself while you doing it, cause you believe nothing anybody says. Shucks, I’m going home.

  Now dont get mad—hey, wait a minute, Body. Come back here, where you going? Come on back. Please. Body. Caint you hear me say “please.” But now the dust was spurting behind his running feet. I was sad, he was of my right hand.

  So now I wanted to say, No, Daddy Hickman; if that’s the way it has to be, let’s not go. Because it was one more thing I’d have to deny myself because of being a preacher, and I didn’t want the added yearning. Better to listen to the others telling the stories, as I had for some time now, since Body had brought the news and the movies had come to town. Better to listen while sitting on the curb stones in the evening, or watching them acting out the parts during recess and lunchtime on the school grounds. Any noontime I could watch them reliving the stories and the magic gestures and see the flickery scenes unreeling inside my eye just as Daddy Hickman could make people relive the action of the Word. And seeing them, I could feel myself drawn into the world they shared so intensely that I felt that I had actually taken part not only in the seeing, but in the actions unfolding in the depths of the wall I’d never seen; experiencing with the excruciating intensity a camel would feel if drawn through the eye of a needle a whole world uncoiling through an eye of glass.

  So Daddy Hickman was too late, already the landscape of my mind had been trampled by the great droves of galloping horses and charging redskins and the yelling charges of cowboys and cavalrymen, and I had reeled before exploding faces that imprinted themselves upon one’s eyeball with the impact of a water-soaked snowball bursting against the tender membrane to leave a felt-image of blue-white pain throbbing with every pulse of blood propelled toward vision. And I had sat dizzy with the vastness of the action and the scale of the characters and the dimensions of the emotions and responses; had seen laughs so large and villainous with such rotting, tombstone teeth in mouths so cavernous that they seemed to yawn wall-wide and threaten to gulp the whole audience into their traps of hilarious maliciousness. And meanness transcendent, yawning in one overwhelming face; and heroic goodness expressed in actions as cleanly violent as a cyclone seen from a distance, rising ever above the devilish tricks of the badguys, and the women’s eyes looking ever wider with horror or welling ever limpid with love, shocked with surprise over some bashful movement of the hero’s lips, his ocean waves of hair, his heaving chest and anguished eyes. Or determined with womanly virtue to escape the badguy and escaping in the panting end with the goodguy’s shy help; escaping even the Indian chief’s dark clutches even as I cowered in my seat beneath his pony’s flying hooves, surviving to see her looking with wall-wide head and yard-wide smiling mouth melting with the hero’s to fade into the darkness sibilant with women’s and young girls’ sighs.

  Or the trains running wild and threatening to jump the track and crash into the white sections below, with smoke and steam threatening to scald the air and bring hell fire to those trapped there in their favored seats—screaming as fireman and engineer battled to the death with the Devil now become a Dalton boy or a James or a Younger, and whose horses of devil flesh outran again and again the iron horses of the trains, upgrade and down, and with their bullets flying to burst ever against the sacred sanctuary of Uncle Sam’s mail cars, where the gold was stored and the hero waited; killing multitudes of clerks and passengers, armed and unarmed alike, in joy and in anger, in fear and in fun. And bushwhacking the Sheriff and his deputies again and again, dropping them over cliffs and into cascading waterfalls, until like the sun the Hero loomed and doomed the arch-villain to join his victims, tossed too from a cliff, shot in the belly with the blood flowing dark; or hung blackhooded with his men, three in a row, to drop from a common scaffold to swing like sawdust filled dolls in lonely winds.

&
nbsp; All whirled through my mind as filtered through Body’s and the other’s eyes and made concrete in their shouting pantomime of conflict, their accurately aimed pistol and rifle blasts, their dying falls with faces fixed in death’s most dramatic agony as their imaginary sixshooters blazed one last poetic bullet of banging justice to bring their murderers down down down to hell, now heaving heaven high in wonder beneath our feet….

  So I wanted to leave the place unentered, even if it had a steeple higher than any church in the world, leave it, pass it ever by, rather than see it once, then never to enter it again—with all the countless unseen episodes to remain a mystery and like my mother flown forever.

  But I could not say it, nor could I refuse; for no language existed between child and man. So I, Bliss the preacher, ascended, climbed, holding reluctantly Daddy Hickman’s huge hand, climbed up the steep, narrow stairs crackling with peanut hulls and discarded candy wrappers—up into the hot, breathing darkness, up, until the roof seemed to rest upon the crowns of old heads…. And as we come into the pink-tinted light with its tiered, hierarchical order of seats, I pull back upon his hand, frightened by what I do not know. And he says, Come along, Bliss boy—deep and comforting in the dark. It’s all right, he says, I’m going with you. You just hold my hand.

  And I ascended, holding on.

  IT ALWAYS BREAKS OUT

  PARTISAN REVIEW 30 (SPRING 1963): 13–28

  What a country, what a world! I don’t know which was the more outrageous, the more scandalous—the burning of the Cadillac on the senator’s beautiful lawn, the wild speech made by the arsonist while the beautiful machine smoked and glowed in flames, or the crowd’s hysterical reaction to the weird, flamboyant sacrifice.

  I know only that I have neither the power nor the will to convey the incident to Monsieur Vannec. How can I, when I’ve been unable to frame it for myself? To hell with the inquisitive Frenchman, there is simply too much unexpected chaos involved, too many unsettling contradictions have appeared. Besides, I refuse to reveal to him that I’m so much without presence before a phenomenon of my own country. It is a matter of pride: personal, intellectual, national. And especially is this true when I consider Vannec’s passionate need to define all phenomena—whether social, political or cultural—and codify them and reduce them to formulae—intricate ones—that can be displayed in the hard sparkling center of a crystal paperweight.

  And speaking of paper, how should I explain the manner in which the car burning was handled by the press? How the newspapers reduced the event to a small item which stated simply that a deranged jazz musician had set fire to his flashy automobile on the senator’s lawn—with all references to his wild speech and the crowd’s reaction omitted? And here is the shameful part requiring an unwilling confession: I would have to tell Vannec that we, the newspapermen, members of the working press, champions of the reported fact who insist upon the absolute accessibility of the news, that we ourselves suppressed it, reduced it to insignificance by reflex and with no editorial urging whatsoever!

  Or at least we tried; but despite what we did the event has had, is having, its effect. It spreads by word of mouth, it imposes itself like a bad smell carried by the wind into private homes and into private conversations. Yes, and into our private thoughts. It balloons, it changes its shape, it grows. Worse, it seeps back into consciousness despite all we do to forget it. And we, remember, are tough-minded newspapermen.

  Get this: a group of us met that evening to eat and drink and chat—just as we’ve done once a week for quite some time. Sometimes we exchange information and discuss that part of the news which, for one reason or another, is considered untimely or unfit to print. Often, as on this occasion, we enjoy our private jokes at the expense of some public figure or incident which, in reporting, we find expedient to treat with formal propriety. But tonight our mood was light, almost gay. Or at least it seemed so at the beginning. We were delighted that at last one of the senator’s butts had succeeded in answering him, if only briefly and at outrageous expense. But beneath our banter we were somewhat uneasy. The wildman Negro jazzman had made us so. Certainly there was no other reason for it—unless it was the intimate knowledge which each of us possessed of our filed accounts. Otherwise why the uneasy undertone as we relaxed there in the brightly lighted dining room with its sparkle of silver and crystal, its sheen of rich woods, its tinkle of iced glasses and buzz of friendly talk? The very paintings on the wall, scenes of early life on the then remote frontier, moody, misty scenes of peaceful life in great forest clearings, formal portraits of the nineteenth-century founders of the club—all made for a sense of security. Even Sam, our inscrutable but familiar Negro waiter, was part of a ritual. And while I don’t mean to imply that the club is a great place, it is a good place indeed, and its food and drink are excellent; its atmosphere, resonant with historical associations and warmly civilized values, most relaxing.

  But tonight, as I say, something was working within each of us and it was just after Sam’s dark hands had served the second round of after-dinner drinks, placed clean ashtrays before us and withdrawn, that Wiggins, the economics expert, released it.

  “What,” he said, “do you think of the new style in conspicuous consumption?”

  And there it was, right out in the open, wearing a comic disguise. We laughed explosively, not so much at his remark but at ourselves, at the quick summoning up of what lay beneath our calm.

  “It was a lulu,” Thompson said, “a real lulu.”

  “Where on earth did that fellow come from?” Wilson said.

  “From Chattanooga. He rose up like a wave of heat from the Jeff Davis highway,” Wilkins said. “Didn’t you hear him say it?”

  “I wasn’t there,” Wiggins said, “but when I heard of it I thought, Thorstein Veblen, your theory has been carried to the tenth power!”

  “And in horse power,” I said. “Wiggins, you always said that Veblen was the comedian of economics. Now I’m beginning to understand.”

  “That’s right, he was an ironist, a humorist of economic theory,” Wiggins said, “and all he needed to make that clear was to have had that black boy illustrate his books.”

  “The learned doctor would have flipped,” Larkin said.

  “Did you ever see anything like it, a man burning his own car before an audience?”

  “He’s as wild as those rich Oklahoma Indians who preferred to travel in hook-and-ladder fire trucks or brand new hearses instead of limousines,” Wiggins said.

  “Yes,” I said, “but that was a cultural preference. The Indians were really living in a different world, but this fellow today must have been mad. Off his rocker.”

  “Just leave it to the senator,” Wilson said. “If there’s something outrageous to be brought out in people he’s the man to do it.”

  “It’ll be interesting to see what this will bring out of the insurance people,” Larkin said.

  “They’ll be wild.”

  “Man, they’re already rewriting their policies!”

  “Well, I’ll bet no one is as wild as the senator,” Thompson said. “He’s probably searching for laws to rewrite.”

  “Can you blame him, that boy tried to tie a knot in his tail.”

  “Yeah,” McGowan said, “ole senator was up there cooking up a barbecue for his v.i.p. guests and here comes a Nigra straight out of nowhere to prepare the hot sauce!”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about how the senator is taking it,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t sitting in his study right this minute laughing his head off.”

  “He’s baited those people so often that he shouldn’t mind when one answers back.”

  “The senator is an actor,” I said, “nothing seems to touch him.”

  “He’s a thick-skinned scoundrel,” said Larkin, “a thick-skinned, brilliant scoundrel and a joker.”

  “Well, that colored fellow really tried to cap his joke. What is this country coming to? A United States senator stands on the f
loor of the senate and allows himself the license of saying that so many Negro citizens are driving Cadillac cars that he suggests that the name, the trade mark, be changed to the Coon Cage Eight—imagine! And as though that weren’t scandalous enough, hardly before the news is on the air, a Negro drives an expensive Cadillac onto the senator’s grounds and in rebuttal sets it afire! What on earth are we coming to?”

  “The senator’s a joker, the Negro is a joker, this is a nation of jokers. We aren’t coming, we’ve arrived. Welcome to the United States of Jokeocracy.”

  “Hell, that was no joke, not the car. That fellow was dead serious.”

  “The point that interests me,” Wilson said, “is that a fellow like that was willing to pay for it. He probably decided that he’d do anything to get back at the senator and this was the damndest way he could find. If I were the senator I’d reflect on that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that it’s possible that someone else might decide to call him, and in a more personal way. In fact, I’m surprised that he hasn’t provoked someone long before today …”

  Wilson’s voice faded into his thinking and then just as the swift, barely-formed idea flashed into my own mind, Wilson looked around the table, frowning.

  “Say,” he said, “have we ever had a Negro assassin?”

  I looked at him, open-mouthed. It was as though the words had been transferred from my mind to his. I held my breath. Past Wilson’s shoulder and far across the room I could see Sam, standing with folded arms. Several pitchers of iced water and a large white crock piled high with iced squares of butter rested on the stand beside him while he glanced casually down the long sweep of the room to where a girl moved gracefully through the door. Her red hair flowed in waves to the shoulders of her white suit and she carried a large blue bag and I thought, Hail Columbia, long may she wave…. Then I heard Thompson saying,

  “You mean in the United States?”

  “That’s right,” Wilson said, “have we?”