Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

I come to a stop at the chapel. And then it is suddenly winter, with the moon high above and the chimes in the steeple ringing and a sonorous choir of trombones rendering a Christmas carol; and over all is a quietness and an ache as though all the world were loneliness.

Oh, moon that kissed the steeple and flooded the perfumed nights,

the car leaping leisurely beneath the pressure of my foot,

!

I didn't understand in those pre-invisible days that their hate, and mine too, was charged with fear. How all of us at the college hated the black-belt people, the "peasants," during those days! We were trying to lift them up and they, like Trueblood, did everything it seemed to pull us down. "It appears quite old," Mr. Norton said, looking across the bare, hard stretch of yard where two women dressed in new blue-and-white checked ginghams were washing clothes in an iron pot. The pot was soot-black and the feeble flames that licked its sides showed pale pink and bordered with black, like flames in mourning. Both women moved with the weary, full-fronted motions of far-gone pregnancy.

How can he tell this to white men, I thought, when he knows they'll say that all Negroes do such things? I looked at the floor, a red mist of anguish before my eyes.

'You low-down dog,' she says, 'it's better to spill than to foul!'

!

She's swingin' her arms like a man swingin' a ten-pound sledge and I sees the knuckles of her hand is bruised and bleedin', and I sees it catch in her gown and I sees her gown go up so I can see her thighs and I sees how rusty and gray the cold done made her skin, and I sees her bend and straightenin' up and I hears her grunt and I sees her swing and I smells her sweat and I knows by the shape of the shinin' wood what she's got to put on me. Lawd, yes! I sees it catch on a quilt this time and raise that quilt up and drop it on the floor. Then I sees that ax come free! It's shinin', shinin' from the sharpenin' I'd give it a few days before, and man, way back in myself, behind that windbreak, I says, " 'NAAW! KATE -- Lawd, Kate, NAW!!!' " Suddenly his voice was so strident that I looked up startled. Trueblood seemed to look straight through Mr. Norton, his eyes glassy. The children paused guiltily at their play, looking toward their father. "I might as well been pleadin' with a switch engine," he went on. "I sees it comin' down. I sees the light catchin' on it,

I'm layin' there on the floor, but inside me I'm runnin' round in circles like a dog with his back broke, and back into that numbness with my tail tucked between my legs.

The blood was runnin' all over my clothes and the flies was after me, and I went back inside to try and stop it.

I leaves tryin' to pray, but I caint. I thinks and thinks, until I thinks my brain go'n bust, 'bout how I'm guilty and how I ain't guilty.

! John Wayne gacy

I didn't have a cryin' dime!

I saw Halley tilt the bottle and the oily amber of brandy sloshing into the glass. Then tilting Mr. Norton's head back, I put the glass to his lips and poured. A fine brown stream ran from the corner of his mouth, down his delicate chin. The room was suddenly quiet. I felt a slight movement against my hand, like a child's breast when it whimpers at the end of a spell of crying. The fine-veined eyelids flickered. He coughed. I saw a slow red flush creep, then spurt, up his neck, spreading over his face. "Hold it under his nose, school-boy. Let 'im smell it."

!

"Now, let's have a drink!" Halley was slow in getting behind the bar and they cursed him. "Get back there and serve us, you big sack of fat!" "Gimme a rye!" "Up here, funk-buster!" "Shake them sloppy hips!" "Okay, okay, take it easy," Halley said, rushing to pour them drinks. "Just put y'all's money where your mouth is."

!

put his shoes under my bed any night." "Shucks, me I'd kill an old man like that." "Kill him nothing," Edna said. "Girl, don't you know that all these rich ole white men got monkey glands and billy goat balls? These ole bastards don't never git enough. They want to have the whole world." The doctor looked at me and smiled. "See, now you're learning all about endocrinology," he said.

Shucks, you don't know nothing. That ole white man right there might have him a coupla jackass balls!" The fat man raised up with a quick grin. "As a scientist and a physician I'm forced to discount that," he said. "That is one operation that has yet to be performed." Then he managed to get the girls out of the room. "If he should come around and hear that conversation," the vet said, "it would be enough to send him off again. Besides, their scientific curiosity might lead them to investigate whether he really does have a monkey gland. And that, I'm afraid, would be a bit obscene." "I've got to get him back to the school," I said.

"The clocks are all set back and the forces of destruction are rampant down below. They might suddenly realize that you are what you are, and then your life wouldn't be worth a piece of bankrupt stock. You would be canceled, perforated, voided, become the recognized magnet attracting loose screws. Then what would you do? Such men are beyond money, and with Supercargo down, out like a felled ox, they know nothing of value. To some, you are the great white father, to others the lyncher of souls, but for all, you are confusion come even into the Golden Day."

"What are you talking about?" I said, thinking: Lyncher? He was getting wilder than the men downstairs. I didn't dare look at Mr. Norton, who made a sound of protest.

bring me dignity -- not wealth, only dignity -- and other men health!"

"You see," he said turning to Mr. Norton, "he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. Understand? It's worse than that. He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn't digest it. Already he is -- well, bless my soul! Behold! a walking zombie! Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!"

!

Mr. Norton looked amazed. "Tell me," the vet said, suddenly calm. "Why have you been interested in the school, Mr. Norton?" "Out of a sense of my destined role," Mr. Norton said shakily. "I felt, and I still feel, that your people are in some important manner tied to my destiny."

!

"A little child shall lead them," the vet said with a smile. "But seriously, because you both fail to understand what is happening to you. You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see -- and you, looking for destiny! It's classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and he sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the score-card of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less -- a black amorphous thing.

Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other !

And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force

Whiteness “White people know everything.” Stewart Middle !

to assure him that far from being like any of the people we had seen, I hated them, that I believed in the principles of the Founder with all my heart and soul, and that I believed in his own goodness and kindness in extending the hand of his benevolence to helping us poor, ignorant people out of the mire and darkness. I would do his bidding and teach others to rise up as he wished them to, teach them to be thrifty, decent, upright citizens, contributing to the welfare of all, shunning all but the straight and narrow path that he and the Founder had stretched before us. If only he were not angry with me! If only he would give me another chance! Tears filled my eyes, and the walks and buildings flowed and froze for a moment in mist, glittering as in winter when rain froze on the grass and foliage and turned the campus into a world of whiteness, weighting and bending both trees and bushes with fruit of crystal. Then in the twinkling of my eyes, it was gone, and the here and now of heat and greenness returned.

Black nihilism + Deweyian sentimentality then realist novel summer-sensual heat !

A co-ed sat at a graceful table stacked with magazines. Before a great window stood a large aquarium containing colored stones and a small replica of a feudal castle surrounded by goldfish that seemed to remain motionless despite the fluttering of their lacy fins, a momentary motionful suspension of time.

! Fire

"What the hell, roomy," he said. "Let's go to chow." I looked at his confident mug; he was going to be a farmer. "I don't have an appetite," I said with a sigh. "Okay now," he said, "you can try to kid me but don't say I didn't wake you." "No," I said. "Who're you expecting, a broad-butt gal with ballbearing hips?" "No," I said. "You'd better stop that, roomy," he grinned. "It'll ruin your health, make you a moron. You ought to take you a gal and show her how the moon rises over all that green grass on the Founder's grave, man . . ." "Go to hell," I said. He left laughing,

!

At the sound of vespers I moved across the campus with groups of students, walking slowly, their voices soft in the mellow dusk. I remember the yellowed globes of frosted glass making lacy silhouettes on the gravel and the walk of the leaves and branches above us as we moved slow through the dusk so restless with scents of lilac, honeysuckle and verbena, and the feel of spring greenness; and I recall the sudden arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass -- gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells. Dong! Dong! Dong! Above the decorous walking around me, sounds of footsteps leaving the verandas of far-flung buildings and moving toward the walks and over the walks to the asphalt drives lined with whitewashed stones, those cryptic messages for men and women, boys and girls heading quietly toward where the visitors waited, and we moving not in the mood of worship but of judgment; as though even here in the filtering dusk, here beneath the deep indigo sky, here, alive with looping swifts and darting moths, here in the hereness of the night not yet lighted by the moon that looms blood-red behind the chapel like a fallen sun, its radiance shedding not upon the here-dusk of twittering bats, nor on the there-night of cricket and whippoorwill, but focused short-rayed upon our place o...

!

And I remember too, how we confronted those others, those who had set me here in this Eden, whom we knew though we didn't know, who were unfamiliar in their familiarity, who trailed their words to us through blood and violence and ridicule and condescension with drawling smiles, and who exhorted and threatened, intimidated with innocent words as they described to us the limitations of our lives and the vast boldness of our aspirations, the staggering folly of our impatience to rise even higher; who, as they talked, aroused furtive visions within me of blood-froth sparkling their chins like their familiar tobacco juice, and upon their lips the curdled milk of a million black slave mammies' withered dugs, a treacherous and fluid knowledge of our being, imbibed at our source and now regurgitated foul upon us. This was our world, they said as they described it to us, this our horizon and its earth, its seasons and its climate, its spring and its summer, and its fall and harvest some unknown millennium ahead; and these its floods and cyclones and they themselves our thunder and lightning; and this we must accept and love and accept even if we did not love. We must accept -- even when those were absent, and the men who made the railroads and ships and towers of stone, were before our eyes, in the flesh, their voices different, unweighted with recognizable danger and their delight in our songs more sincere seeming, their regard for our welfare marked by an almost benign and imper...

White complicity in white supremacy !

I could not understand the words, but only the mood, sorrowful, vague and ethereal, of the singing. It throbbed with nostalgia, regret and repentance, and I sat with a lump in my throat as she sank slowly down; not a sitting but a controlled collapsing, as though she were balancing, sustaining the simmering bubble of her final tone by some delicate rhythm of her heart's blood, or by some mystic concentration of her being, focused upon the sound through the contained liquid of her large uplifted eyes.

Holy holy holy !

"Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or a moaning dove.

!

I remember how I looked out of the frosted pane and saw the looming great North Star and lost it, as though the sky had shut its eye. The train was curving the mountain, the engine loping like a great black hound, parallel with the last careening cars, panting forth its pale white vapor as it hurled us ever higher. And shortly the sky was black, without a moon . . ."

!

inescapably reminding them -- they felt the dark night of slavery settling once more upon them. They smelt that old obscene stink of darkness, that old slavery smell, worse than the rank halitosis of hoary death. Their sweet light enclosed in a black-draped coffin, their majestic sun snatched behind a cloud.

Black, black, black! Black people in blacker mourning, the funeral crape hung upon their naked hearts; singing unashamedly their black folk's songs of sorrow, moving painfully, overflowing the curving walks, weeping and wailing beneath the drooping trees and their low murmuring voices like the moans of winds in a wilderness.

From somewhere across the quiet of the campus the sound of an old guitar-blues plucked from an out-of-tune piano drifted toward me like a lazy, shimmering wave, like the echoed whistle of a lonely train, and my head went over again, against a tree this time, and I could hear it splattering the flowering vines.

"New York!" he said. "That's not a place, it's a dream. When I was your age it was Chicago. Now all the little black boys run away to New York.

"They? Why, the same they we always mean, the white folks, authority, the gods, fate, circumstances -- the force that pulls your strings until you refuse to be pulled any more. The big man who's never there, where you think he is."

White folks are bad luck ! Morrison

the sun caught its treetops, bathed its low-set buildings and ordered grounds. Then it was gone. In less than five minutes the spot of earth which I identified with the best of all possible worlds was gone, lost within the wild uncultivated countryside.

I saw a moccasin wiggle swiftly along the gray concrete, vanishing into a length of iron pipe that lay beside the road. I watched the flashing past of cotton fields and cabins, feeling that I was moving into the unknown.

Morrison !

my armpits well deodorized

"Sure, but how do you get to Harlem?" "That's easy," he said. "You just keep heading north." And while I got down my bags and my prize brief case, still as shiny as the night of the battle royal, he instructed me how to take the subway, then I struggled through the crowd.

into a train that was so crowded that everyone seemed to stand with his head back and his eyes bulging, like chickens frozen at the sound of danger.

Then the door banged behind me and I was crushed against a huge woman in black who shook her head and smiled while I stared with horror at a large mole that arose out of the oily whiteness of her skin like a black mountain sweeping out of a rainwet plain.

Dermatologist !

to plunge downhill now, only to lunge to a stop that shot me out upon a platform feeling like something regurgitated from the belly of a frantic whale.

Jonah ! For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

For a moment I stood before a shop window staring at my own reflection in the glass, trying to recover from the ride against the woman.

Goodbye Columbus !

I had never seen so many black people against a background of brick buildings, neon signs, plate glass and roaring traffic

moving along with so much tension and noise that I wasn't sure whether they were about to celebrate a holiday or join in a street fight.

!

his voice quavering and full of church-house rhetoric and verbal humility. But this made me homesick and I put the Bible aside.

charming. Like Ronald Colman. What a voice! Of course you couldn't speak that way in the South, the white folks wouldn't like it, and the Negroes would say that you were "putting on." But here in the North I would slough off my southern ways of speech. Indeed, I would have one way of speaking in the North and another in the South. Give them what they wanted down South, that was the way.

Pilate and police Song of Solomon !

It rose like a rocket, creating a sensation in my crotch as though an important part of myself had been left below in the lobby.

Elevator dick lol !

I looked back to a ferry passing the Statue of Liberty now, its backwash a curving line upon the bay and three gulls swooping down behind it.

be sent South again to head the college -- just as the mayor's cook had been made principal of the school after she'd become too lame to stand before her stove.

Mr chips