Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.

We take these white folks where we want them to go, we show them what we want them to see.

My God, boy! You're black and living in the South -- did you forget how to lie?"

"New York!" he said. "That's not a place, it's a dream.

Play the game, but don't believe in it -- that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way -- part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy.

Maybe he was dissimulating, like some of the teachers at the college, who, to avoid trouble when driving through the small surrounding towns, wore chauffeur caps and pretended that their cars belonged to white men.

They were outside the groove of history, and it was my job to get them

The cop? What about him? He was a cop. A good citizen. But this cop had an itching finger and an eager ear for a word that rhymed with 'trigger,'

"Don't stretch me on a rack of dialectic. I'm a brother."

I was simply a material, a natural resource to be used.