Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

an assurance and arrogance that I had never seen in any except white men and a few bad, razor-scarred Negroes.

"Oh, I'll do that. All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit and mother-wit. And man, I was bawn with all three. In fact, I'maseventhsonofaseventhsonbawnwithacauloverbotheyesandraisedonblackcat-boneshighjohntheconquerorandgreasygreens --" he spieled with twinkling eyes, his lips working rapidly. "You dig me, daddy?"

! Maya Angelou

I'm a piano player and a rounder, a whiskey drinker and a pavement pounder. I'll teach you some good bad habits.

Whether we liked him or not, he was never out of our minds. That was a secret of leadership.

some kind of sadistic catharsis.

White saviors !

the clapboards shone with a satiny, silvery, silver-fish sheen.

the small surrounding towns, wore chauffeur caps and pretended that their cars belonged to white men.

it seems to me that anybody that would work under that sonofabitching, double-crossing Brockway for more than fifteen minutes is just as apt as not to be naturally fink-minded!

!

Finkism is born into some guys.

You were trained to accept the foolishness of such old men as this, even when you thought them clowns and fools; you were trained to pretend that you respected them and acknowledged in them the same quality of authority and power in your world as the whites before whom they bowed and scraped and feared and loved and imitated, and you were even trained to accept it when, angered or spiteful, or drunk with power, they came at you with a stick or strap or cane and you made no effort to strike back, but only to escape unmarked. But this was too much . . . he was not grandfather or uncle or father, nor preacher or teacher. Something uncoiled in my stomach and I was moving toward him, shouting, more at a black blur that irritated my eyes than at a clearly denned human face, "YOU'LL KILL WHO?" "YOU, THAT'S WHO!"

"Why, you old-fashioned, slavery-time, mammy-made, handkerchief-headed bastard, you should know better! What made you think you could threaten my life? You meant nothing to me, I came down here because I was sent. I didn't know anything about you or the union either. Why'd you start riding me the minute I came in? Are you people crazy? Does this paint go to your head? Are you drinking it?" He glared, panting tiredly. Great tucks showed in his overalls where the folds were stuck together by the goo with which he was covered, and I thought, Tar Baby, and wanted to blot him out of my sight. But now my anger was flowing fast from action to words.

!

I saw a uniformed military band arrayed decorously in concert, each musician with well-oiled hair, heard a sweet-voiced trumpet rendering "The Holy City" as from an echoing distance, buoyed by a choir of muted horns; and above, the mocking obbligato of a mocking bird. I felt giddy. The air seemed to grow thick with fine white gnats, filling my eyes, boiling so thickly that the dark trumpeter breathed them in and expelled them through the bell of his golden horn, a live white cloud mixing with the tones upon the torpid air. I came back. The voices still droned above me and I disliked them. Why didn't they go away? Smug ones. Oh, doctor, I thought drowsily, did you ever wade in a brook before breakfast? Ever chew on sugar cane? You know, doc, the same fall day I first saw the hounds chasing black men in stripes and chains my grandmother sat with me and sang with twinkling eyes: "Godamighty made a monkey Godamighty made a whale And Godamighty made a 'gator With hickeys all over his tail . . ."

!

snug in the bushes called out so loud that you daren't hear:

Man, and you can't see her pot for the steam

I recoiled inwardly as though the cord were part of me. Then they had it free and the nurse clipped through the belly band and removed the heavy node. I opened my mouth to speak but one of the physicians shook his head. They worked swiftly.

Fire !

You just aren't prepared for work under our industrial conditions.

Across the aisle a young platinum blonde nibbled at a red Delicious apple as station lights rippled past behind her. The train plunged. I dropped through the roar, giddy and vacuum-minded, sucked under and out into late afternoon Harlem.

the soft cool splash of sleep.

I SAW her across the room when I awoke, reading a newspaper, her glasses low across the bridge of her nose as she stared at the page intently. Then I realized that though the glasses still slanted down, the eyes were no longer focused on the page, but on my face and lighting with a slow smile. "How you feel now?" she said. "Much better."

Aw !

You got to lead and you got to fight and move us all on up a little higher. And I tell you something else, it's the one's from the South that's got to do it, them what knows the fire and ain't forgot how it burns. Up here too many forgits. They finds a place for theyselves and forgits the ones on the bottom. Oh, heap of them talks about doing things, but they done really forgot.

Warmth of other sons !

preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood;

the pathetic ones who possessed nothing beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard;

the younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream

I had no doubt that I could do something, but what, and how? I had no contacts and I believed in nothing.

A remote explosion had occurred somewhere, perhaps back at Emerson's or that night in Bledsoe's office, and it had caused the ice cap to melt and shift the slightest bit.

that frozen virtue, that freezing vice.

The streets were covered with ice and soot-flecked snow and from above a feeble sun filtered through the haze.

!

The whole of Harlem seemed to fall apart in the swirl of snow.

a thin spiral of smoke that drifted the odor of baking yams slowly to me, bringing a stab of swift nostalgia.

Okonkwo, invisible man, Kendrick

I stopped as though struck by a shot, deeply inhaling, remembering, my mind surging back, back. At home we'd bake them in the hot coals of the fireplace, had carried them cold to school for lunch, munched them secretly, squeezing the sweet pulp from the soft peel as we hid from the teacher behind the largest book, the World's Geography. Yes, and we'd loved them candied, or baked in a cobbler, deep-fat fried in a pocket of dough, or roasted with pork and glazed with the well-browned fat; had chewed them raw -- yams and years ago. More yams than years ago though the time seemed endlessly expanded, stretched thin as the spiraling smoke beyond all recall.

Cooking Gene !

What a group of people we were, I thought. Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked. Not all of us, but so many. Simply by walking up and shaking a set of chitterlings or a well-boiled hog maw at them during the clear light of day! What consternation it would cause! And I saw myself advancing upon Bledsoe, standing bare of his false humility in the crowded lobby of Men's House, and seeing him there and him seeing me and ignoring me and me enraged and suddenly whipping out a foot or two of chitterlings, raw, uncleaned and dripping sticky circles on the floor as I shake them in his face, shouting: "Bledsoe, you're a shameless chitterling eater! I accuse you of relishing how bowels! Ha!

! Cooking gene

I couldn't believe it. Something, a sense of foreboding, filled me, a quick sense of uncleanliness.

A flash of heat went over me and J turned. "Look, friends," I said, hearing a hot edge coming into my voice. "I asked a civil question. If you don't care to answer, don't, but don't try to make me look ridiculous."

!

don't beat up your gums at me," I said, throwing him a newly acquired phrase.

"Don't tell me," she said. "It's all the white folks, not just one. They all against us. Every stinking low-down one of them."

The old woman's sobbing was having a strange effect upon me-as when a child, seeing the tears of its parents, is moved by both fear and sympathy to cry. I turned away,

Dmitri baby dream karamazov! Dostoevsky

I stood in a kind of daze, looking at an old folded lace fan studded with jet and mother-of-pearl. The crowd surged as the white men came back, knocking over a drawer that spilled its contents in the snow at my feet. I stooped and starting replacing the articles: a bent Masonic emblem, a set of tarnished cuff links, three brass rings, a dime pierced with a nail hole so as to be worn about the ankle on a string for luck, an ornate greeting card with the message "Grandma, I love you" in childish scrawl; another card with a picture of what looked like a white man in black-face seated in the door of a cabin strumming a banjo beneath a bar of music and the lyric "Going back to my old cabin home"; a useless inhalant, a string of bright glass beads with a tarnished clasp, a rabbit foot, a celluloid baseball scoring card shaped like a catcher's mitt, registering a game won or lost years ago; an old breast pump with rubber bulb yellowed with age, a worn baby shoe and a dusty lock of infant hair tied with a faded and crumpled blue ribbon. I felt nauseated.

Parataxis = ? !

a bitter spurt of gall filled my mouth and splattered the old folk's possessions.

They don't want the world, but only Jesus. They only want Jesus, just fifteen minutes of Jesus on the rug-bare floor . . . How about it, Mr. Law? Do we get our fifteen minutes worth of Jesus? You got the world, can we have our Jesus?"

"Who doesn't count?" I said. "Those old ones," he said grimly. "It's sad, yes. But they're already dead, defunct. History has passed them by. Unfortunate, but there's nothing to do about them. They're like dead limbs that must be pruned away so that the tree may bear young fruit or the storms of history will blow them down anyway. Better the storm should hit them --"

Communist Mosimov in Dostoevsky !

"Sure, we were burned in the same oven," I said. The effect was electric. "Why do you fellows always talk in terms of race!" he snapped, his eyes blazing. "What other terms do you know?" I said, puzzled. "You think I would have been around there if they had been white?"

if the pay was anything at all it would be more than I had now.

an icy peal of clear chimes.

"Don't think, act," he said. "We're very thirsty men. This young man pushed history ahead twenty years today." "Oh," she said, her eyes becoming intent. "You must tell me about him."

It was not the harsh uninterested-in-you-as-a-human-being stare that I'd known in the South, the kind that swept over a black man as though he were a horse or an insect;

!

Brother Jack's wife, his girl friend? Maybe she wants to see me sweat coal tar, ink, shoe polish, graphite. What was I, a man or a natural resource?

I'll have to be careful. Always careful. With all people I'll have to be careful .

! LeCarre

whoever you are. Some day the rule shall be business with pleasure, for the joy of labor shall have been restored. Sit down."

I looked into my crystal glass of bourbon. It was unbelievable, yet strangely exciting and I had the sense of being present at the creation of important events, as though a curtain had been parted and I was being allowed to glimpse how the country operated. And yet none of these men was well known, or at least I'd never seen their faces in the newspapers. "During these times of indecision when all the old answers are proven false, the people look back to the dead to give them a clue,"

singing folk songs with more volume than melody.