The Intuitionist

by Colson Whitehead

Lila Mae (who, by the way, is still not making much headway in the evening traffic) may be an Intuitionist, but she is a colored woman, which is more to the point. Chancre’s assistant left a note on her desk: Your good service won’t be forgotten after the election. As if she needed to be bribed with a vague promise of promotion (and probably a lie anyway). It’s her job. She’s taken an oath and such things are to be taken seriously.

Lila Mae doesn’t frequent O’Connor’s very often, usually just on the Department’s bowling nights, when it’s just her and Chuck and the resident alcoholics, this latter party posing no threat except to clean floors. Because her father taught her that white folks can turn on you at any moment.

They can turn rabid at any second; this is the true result of gathering integration: the replacement of sure violence with deferred sure violence.

“Is it true that the inspector was an Intuitionist?” a reporter asks. “Yes, the inspector of the Fanny Briggs building, a Miss Lila Mae Watson, is an Intuitionist. I’m real reluctant to turn this terrible affair into a political matter, but I’m sure most of you are well aware that my opponent in the election for Guild Chair is also an Intuitionist.”

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect. Nothing we create works the way it should.

Lila Mae lived in the janitor’s closet because the Institute for Vertical Transport did not have living space for colored students.

Lila Mae did not mix much with the other students, who were in turn thankful that she had spared them the burden of false conciliation. As she had when she was in elementary school, she sat in the final row of her classes and did not speak unless there was no other option. She retired early in the evening, shuttering her eyes to the urgent grumblings of the gym’s boiler room, whose howls filled the empty building at night like the protestations of wraiths. She rose early in the morning, when the first sunlight crept over the statues of Grecian nymphs before it advanced to the metropolis a few miles to the west. The admission of colored students to the Institute for Vertical Transport was staggered to prevent overlap and any possible fulminations or insurrections that might arise from that overlap.

Natchez shakes his head again and grins. “Okay, then,” he says. “You one of those visiting professors they always have staying here? You giving a speech?” “No, I’m an elevator inspector.” Lila Mae’s voice automatically rises at those last two words, up to the tone she uses when she’s on a case. “I didn’t know they let us do that,” Natchez tells her. “Even up here.” “They don’t but I’m doing it anyway.” “Is that good work—working on elevators? That’s a city job, right?”

Lila Mae does not expect human beings to conduct themselves in any other way but how they truly are. Which is weak.

They sent Pompey to sabotage the elevator stack in the Fanny Briggs building, Lila Mae is sure of that. It would have appeased their skewed sense of harmony to pit their two coloreds against each other.

No passion—but then, Lila Mae thinks, Intuitionism isn’t about passion. True faith is too serious to have room for the distraction of passion.

Blood is destiny in this land, and she did not choose Intuitionism, as she formerly believed. It chose her.

White people’s reality is built on what things appear to be—that’s the business of Empiricism.

There was no hope for him as a colored man because the white world will not let a colored man rise, and there was no hope for him as a white man because it was a lie. He secretes his venom into the pages of a book. He knows the other world he describes does not exist. There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.