Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

"Please him? And here you are a junior in college! Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!

Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it. Let the Negroes snicker and the crackers laugh! Those are the facts, son.

"You're nobody, son. You don't exist—can't you see that? The white folk tell everybody what to think—except men like me. I tell them; that's my life, telling white folk how to think about the things I know about. Shocks you, doesn't it? Well, that's the way it is. It's a nasty deal and I don't always like it myself. But you listen to me: I didn't make it, and I know that I can't change it. But I've made my place in it and I'll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am."

"Son, if you don't become bitter, nothing can stop you from success. Remember that."

"Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don't have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. 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. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate—I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment. We're an ass-backward people, though. You might even beat the game. It's really a very crude affair. Really

I put into words things which most men feel, if only slightly. Sure,

Perhaps that's the advice to give you: Be your own father, young man. And remember, the world is possibility if only you'll discover it.

"Okay, I'm slowing down. I'll verse you but I won't curse you—My name is Peter Wheatstraw, I'm the Devil's only son-in-law, so roll 'em! You a southern boy, ain't you?" he said, his head to one side like a bear's.

"My dear Mr. Emerson," I said aloud. "The Robin bearing this letter is a former student. Please hope him to death, and keep him running. Your most humble and obedient servant, A. H. Bledsoe

"I didn't want to be trouble to anyone," I said. "Everybody has to be trouble to somebody.

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.

"It's just hard times you going through," she'd say. "Everybody worth his salt has his hard times, and when you git to be somebody you'll see these here very same hard times helped you a heap."

She's let her religion go to her head, but we all know that religion is for the heart, not for the head.

sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action,"

No, I thought, shifting my body, they're the same legs on which I've come so far from home. And yet they were somehow new. The new suit imparted a newness to me. It was the clothes and the new name and the circumstances. It was a newness too subtle to put into thought, but there it was. I was becoming someone else.

"We with you, Brother. You pitch 'em we catch 'em!" That was all I needed, I'd made a contact, and it was as though his voice was that of them all.

"You don't pitch no balls, Brother! Not a single one!"

I can understand that it should make you timid—you're afraid of carrying through to the next step—because it's up to you to organize that energy. Well, it's going to be organized and not by a bunch of timid sideline theoreticians arguing in a vacuum, but by getting out and leading the people!"

"I think Brother Jack is correct," a short, bald man said. "And I don't think that we, of all people, should be afraid of the people's enthusiasm. What we've got to do is to guide it into channels where it will do the most good."

"Come," Brother Jack said. "Let's get out of here. If we keep our eyes on the real goal our chances are better than ever before. And let's remember that science isn't a game of chess, although chess may be played scientifically. The other thing to remember is that if we are to organize the masses we must first organize ourselves.

Words, phrases skipped through my mind; I saw the blue haze again. What had I meant by saying that I had become "more human"?

The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record . . . We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture.

"I've worked pretty hard trying to master the ideology." "Master it," Brother Jack said, "but don't overdo it. Don't let it master you. There is nothing to put the people to sleep like dry ideology. The ideal is to strike a medium between ideology and inspiration. Say what the people want to hear, but say it in such a way that they'll do what we wish." He laughed. "Remember too, that theory always comes after practice. Act first, theorize later; that's also a formula, a devastatingly effective one!"

You all know the events of the recent period, and the role our new brother has played in them. Briefly, you are here to see that it isn't wasted. We must achieve two things: We must plan methods of increasing the effectiveness of our agitation, and we must organize the energy that has already been released. This calls for a rapid increase of membership. The people are fully aroused; if we fail to lead them into action, they will become passive, or they will become cynical. Thus it is necessary that we strike immediately and strike hard!

"They will. You haven't been around the movement as I have, for three years now, and I can feel the change. They're ready to move." "I hope your feelings are right," I said. "They're right, all right," he said. "All we have to do is gather them in."

"Mahn," Ras blurted, "I ought to kill you. Godahm, I ought to kill you and the world be better off. But you black, mahn. Why you be black, mahn? I swear I ought to kill you. No mahn strike the Exhorter, godahmit, no mahn!" I saw him raise the knife again and now as he lowered it unused he pushed Clifton into the street and stood over him, sobbing. "Why you with these white folks? Why? I been watching you a long time. I say to myself, 'Soon he get smart and get tired. He get out of that t'ing.' Why a good boy like you still with them?"

What you trying to deny by betraying the black people? Why you fight against us? You young fellows. You young black men with plenty education; I been hearing your rabble rousing. Why you go over to the enslaver? What kind of education is that? What kind of black mahn is that who betray his own mama?"

Their money bleed black blood, mahn. It's unclean! Taking their money is shit, mahn. Money without dignity—That's bahd shit!"

They fell in line like prisoners: preachers, politicians, various professionals, proving Clifton correct. The eviction fight was such a dramatic issue that most of the leaders feared that their followers would have rallied to us without them.

The Brotherhood was a world within a world and I was determined to discover all its secrets and to advance as far as I could. I saw no limits, it was the one organization in the whole country in which I could reach the very top and I meant to get there. Even if it meant climbing a mountain of words. For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words.

Life was all pattern and discipline; and the beauty of discipline is when it works. And it was working very well.

This is advice from a friend who has been watching you closely. Do not go too fast. Keep working for the people but remember that you are one of us and do not forget if you get too big they will cut you down. You are from the South and you know that this is a white man's world. So take a friendly advice and go easy so that you can keep on helping the colored people. They do not want you to go too fast and will cut you down if you do. Be smart

There had been only a few minutes from the time that I'd called in Brother Tarp about the letter and his leaving, but it seemed as though I'd plunged down a well of years. I looked calmly now at the writing which, for a moment, had shaken my total structure of certainty, and was glad that Brother Tarp had been there to be called rather than Clifton or some of the others before whom I would have been ashamed of my panic. Instead he'd left me soberly confident. Perhaps from the shock of seeming to see my grandfather looking through Tarp's eyes, perhaps through the calmness of his voice alone, or perhaps through his story and his link of chain, he had restored my perspective.

"Yes, I think I do," I said, remembering that there was always that sense in me of being apart when the flag went by. It had been a reminder, until I'd found the Brotherhood, that my star was not yet there

Going out, he turned with his hand on the door frame, frowning. "And, Brother, don't forget what I said about that thing you got on your desk. Things like that don't do nothin' but cause confusion. They ought to be kept out of sight."

"Just a plot," Wrestrum said. "He aims to control the movement uptown. He wants to be a dictator!"

I felt suddenly empty; there was a logic in what he said which I felt compelled to accept. They were wrong, but they had the obligation to discover their mistake.

the cop would be Clifton's historian, his judge, his witness, and his executioner, and I was the only brother in the watching crowd. And I, the only witness for the defense, knew neither the extent of his guilt nor the nature of his crime. Where were the historians today? And how would they put it down?

We who write no novels, histories or other books. What about us, I thought, seeing Clifton again in my mind and going to sit upon a bench as a cool gust of air rolled up the tunnel.

Everyone must have seen them, or heard their muted laughter, or smelled the heavy pomade on their hair—or perhaps failed to see them at all. For they were men outside of historical time, they were untouched, they didn't believe in Brotherhood, no doubt had never heard of it; or perhaps like Clifton would mysteriously have rejected its mysteries; men of transition whose faces were immobile.

The political equivalent of such entertainment is death. But that's too broad a definition. Its economic meaning? That the lite of a man is worth the sale of a two-bit paper doll . . . But that didn't kill the idea that my anger helped speed him on to death. And still my mind fought against it. For what had I to do with the crisis that had broken his integrity?

What we want is not tears but anger. We must remember now that we are fighters, and in such incidents we must see the meaning of our struggle. We must strike back.

He sang with his whole body, phrasing each verse as naturally as he walked, his voice rising above all the others, blending with that of the lucid horn. I watched him now, wet-eyed, the sun hot upon my head, and I felt a wonder at the singing mass. It was as though the song had been there all the time and he knew it and aroused it; and I knew that I had known it too and had failed to release it out of a vague, nameless shame or fear. But he had known and aroused it.

It was not the words, for they were all the same old slave-borne words; it was as though he'd changed the emotion beneath the words while yet the old longing, resigned, transcendent emotion still sounded above, now deepened by that something for which the theory of Brotherhood had given me no name.

"What are you waiting for me to tell you?" I shouted suddenly, my voice strangely crisp on the windless air. "What good will it do?

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,' and when Clifton fell he had found it.

I don't know if Tod Clifton had a soul. I only know the ache that I feel in my heart, my sense of loss. I don't know if you have a soul. I only know you are men of flesh and blood; and that blood will spill and flesh grow cold. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

You were not hired to think."

"Don't twist my meaning. For all of us, the committee does the thinking. For all of us. And you were hired to talk."

"So you've heard it," he said. "Very well, so now hear this: We do not shape our policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them!"