Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

I laughed, getting my breath now, and discovering that the silent tension of the others was ebbing into a ripple of laughter that sounded throughout the room, growing swiftly to a roar, a laugh of all dimensions, intensities and intonations. Everyone was joining in.

white folks seemed always to expect you to know those things which they'd done everything they could think of to prevent you from knowing.

! epistemological justice

As Brother Jack had said, History makes harsh demands of us all. But they were demands that had to be met if men were to be the masters and not the victims of their times. Did I believe that? Perhaps I had already begun to pay.

Lecarre

words that were at best all snarled up and undifferentiated

Then I was awake and not awake, sitting bolt upright in bed and trying to peer through the sick gray light as I sought the meaning of the brash, nerve-jangling sound. Pushing the blanket aside I clasped my hands to my ears. Someone was pounding the steam line, and I stared helplessly for what seemed minutes. My ears throbbed. My side began itching violently and I tore open my pajamas to scratch, and suddenly the pain seemed to leap from my ears to my side and I saw gray marks appearing where the old skin was flaking away beneath my digging nails. And as I watched I saw thin lines of blood well up in the scratches, bringing pain and joining time and place again, and I thought, The room has lost its heat on my last day at Mary's, and suddenly I was sick at heart.

Leave the world behind white noise !

"Why don't you act like responsible people living in the twentieth century?" I yelled, aiming a blow at the pipe. "Get rid of your cottonpatch ways! Act civilized!"

"But that's a hundred-dollar bill. I take that an' try to change it and the white folks'll want to know my whole life's history."

"Some folks just live in filth," she said disgustedly. "Just let a little knocking start and here it comes crawling out. All you have to do is shake things up a bit."

if that's a lie, I hope something big'll bite me!"

!

The night's snowfall was already being churned to muck by the passing cars, and it was warmer.

My voice had taken on a new shrill pitch. "I've done what you wanted me to do; another word and I'll do what I want to do --"

"I know what kind of garbage it is. You young New York Negroes is a blip!

Beneatha

On the subway people around me were reading their morning papers, pressing forward their unpleasant faces.

rum-flavored tobacco, causing it to glow on and off, a red disk in the dark.

he seemed to grin back at me like a fat good-natured man, the saliva roping silvery from his jowls.

He claims he needs the space -- he calls it his freedom. And he knows he's got us on our blind side and he's been popping away till he's got us silly -- uncommonly silly! In fact, In fact, his freedom has got us damn-nigh blind! Hush now, don't call no names!" I called, holding up my palm. "I say to hell with this guy! I say come on, cross over! Let's make an alliance! I'll look out for you, and you look out for me! I'm good at catching and I've got a damn good pitching arm!"

"Silence is consent,"

this Brother Tod Clifton, the youth leader, looked somehow like a hipster, a zoot suiter, a sharpie -- except his head of Persian lamb's wool had never known a straightener.

bigger than anything since Garvey."

"He must have had something to move all those people! Our people are hell to move. He must have had plenty!"

!

"All we have to do is gather them in."

the doubtful, the curious and the convinced in the crowd.

It was early and I threw my voice hard down against the traffic sounds, feeling the damp coldness of the air upon my cheeks and hands as my voice warmed with my emotion.

! fire

suddenly alive in the dark with the horror of the battle royal,

childish perfidity?

Never mind, take your corrupt ideology and eat out your own guts like a laughing hyena. You are nowhere,

!

sometimes a man has to plunge outside history

"I see," I said, becoming interested.

petty -- petty individualist!"

I've tried to do my work and if the brothers don't know that, then it's too late to tell them.

Nothing lay outside the scheme of our ideology, there was a policy on everything, and my main concern was to work my way ahead in the movement.

the others upon whom I depended for information concerning the lowest groups in the community.

"What a beautiful room you have here," I said, looking across the rich cherry glow of furniture to see a life-sized painting of a nude, a pink Renoir.

sat, seeing her go toward a door, the train of her gown trailing sensuously over the oriental carpet. Then she turned and smiled. "Perhaps you'd prefer wine or milk instead of coffee?" "Wine, thank you," I said, finding the idea of milk strangely repulsive.

One just has to respond, even when one isn't too clear as to your meaning. Only I do know what you're saying and that's even more inspiring."

it's time the woman had a champion in the movement. Until tonight I'd always heard you on minority problems."

freedom and necessity, woman's rights and all that. You know, the sickness of our class

I was lost, for the conflict between the ideological and the biological, duty and desire, had become too subtly confused.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quercus_muehlenbergii

Why did they have to mix their women into everything? Between us and everything we wanted to change in the world they placed a woman: socially, politically, economically. Why, goddamit, why did they insist upon confusing the class struggle with the ass struggle, debasing both us and them -- all human motives?

I was careful to keep the biological and ideological carefully apart -- which wasn't always easy, for it was as though many of the sisters were agreed among themselves (and assumed that I accepted it) that the ideological was merely a superfluous veil for the real concerns of life.

the streets to seem strange. The uptown rhythms were slower and yet were somehow faster;

"Good evening, Brothers," I said, finding myself beside two men whom I had seen around before; only to have them look at me oddly, the eyebrows of the tall one raising at a drunken angle as he looked at the other. "Shit," the tall man said. "You said it, man; he a relative of yourn?" "Shit, he goddam sho ain't no kin of mine!" I turned and looked at them, the room suddenly cloudy. "He must be drunk," the second man said. "Maybe he thinks he's kin to you." "Then his whiskey's telling him a damn lie. I wouldn't be his kin even if I was -- Hey, Barrelhouse!"

the old boyhood pleasure of discarding winter shoes for sneakers and the neighborhood foot races that always followed, that light-footed, speedy, floating sensation.

At first I thought it was a cop and a shoeshine boy; then there was a break in the traffic and across the sun-glaring bands of trolley rails I recognized Clifton. His partner had disappeared now and Clifton had the box slung to his left shoulder with the cop moving slowly behind and to one side of him. They were coming my way, passing a newsstand, and I saw the rails in the asphalt and a fire plug at the curb and the flying birds, and thought, You'll have to follow and pay his fine

Yes, I thought, what about those of us who shoot up from the South into the busy city like wild jacks-in-the-box broken loose from our springs -- so sudden that our gait becomes like that of deep-sea divers suffering from the bends?

Warmth of other sons !

What about those fellows waiting still and silent there on the platform, so still and silent that they clash with the crowd in their very immobility; standing noisy in their very silence; harsh as a cry of terror in their quietness?

! Fire

What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile and these boys his agents, his big surprise!

Bread and Wine, Bread and Wine, Your cross ain't nearly so Heavy as mine . . .

For what had I to do with the crisis that had broken his integrity?