Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

two black pigeons rising above a skull-white barn to tumble and rise through still, blue air.

"Let me tell it as it truly was! His name was Tod Clifton and he was full of illusions. He thought he was a man when he was only Tod Clifton.

And as I took one last look I saw not a crowd but the set faces of individual men and women.

Speech failed , alienated instead of uniting

I crept along, walking a southern walk in southern weather, closing my eyes from time to time against the dazzling reds, yellows and greens of cheap sport shirts and summer dresses.

What would the committee say about that? What did their theory tell them of such a world? I recalled a report of a shoeshine boy who had encountered the best treatment in the South simply by wearing a white turban instead of his usual Dobbs or Stetson, and I fell into a fit of laughing. Jack would be outraged at the very suggestion of such a state of things. And yet there was truth in it; this was the real chaos which he thought he was describing -- so long ago it seemed now . . . Outside the Brotherhood we were outside history; but inside of it they didn't see us. It was a hell of a state of affairs, we were nowhere. I wanted to back away from it, but still I wanted to discuss it, to consult someone who'd tell me it was only a brief, emotional illusion. I wanted the props put back beneath the world. So now I had a real need to see Hambro.

I tucked the hat under my arm and put the glasses in my pocket along with Brother Tarp's leg chain and Clifton's doll. My pocket was getting overloaded.

Suddenly I couldn't stand it. "Look at me! Look at me!" I said. "Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my good -- only they were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop? Is this the new true definition, is Brotherhood a matter of sacrificing the weak? If so, at what point do we stop?"

And now I looked around a corner of my mind and saw Jack and Norton and Emerson merge into one single white figure. They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me. I was simply a material, a natural resource to be used. I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came out the same -- except I now recognized my invisibility.

That was all anyone wanted of us, that we should be heard and not seen, and then heard only in one big optimistic chorus of yassuh, yassuh, yassuh!

I stood wiping my hands against the brief case,

water of a flooded river

Lot of flood symbolism , wonder if biblical

I hit the first with Tarp's leg chain

"Now you're free of illusions," Jack said, pointing to my seed wasting upon the air. "How does it feel to be free of one's illusions?"

Thus I have come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from the point in society toward which I originally aspired.

the principle

Belief in american values and constitution?

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he's going.

I sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man -- but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.

principle

Grandfather's principle?