Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.

I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” They thought the old man had gone out of his mind.

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.

These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth;

Play the game, but don’t believe in it—that much you owe yourself.

When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? What a waste, what a senseless waste!

Still it was nothing new, 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.

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,’ and when Clifton fell he had found it. The Police Special spoke its lines and the rhyme was completed. Just look around you. Look at what he made, look inside you and feel his awful power. It was perfectly natural. The blood ran like blood in a comic-book killing, on a comic-book street in a comic-book town on a comic-book day in a comic-book world.

This whole speech gave me CHILLS

Tell them to get out of the box and go teach the cops to forget that rhyme. Tell them to teach them that when they call you nigger to make a rhyme with trigger it makes the gun backfire.’

I had let it get away from me, had been unable to bring in the political issues.

The IRONY of him thinking the euology wasnt political because for once spoke on the issue of race from a black perspective and not "politics" as his white "Brothers" have trained him to do

“I’ll have you know that I’m married to a fine, intelligent Negro girl,” he said. So that’s what makes you so cocky, I thought, seeing now how the light struck him at an angle and made a wedge-shaped shadow beneath his nose. So that’s it … and how did I guess there was a woman in it? “Brother, I apologize,” I said. “I misjudged you. You have our number. In fact, you must be practically a Negro yourself. Was it by immersion or injection?”

If he’d been white, he’d be alive. Or if he’d accepted being pushed around …” “Black and white, white and black,” Tobitt said. “Must we listen to this racist nonsense?”

Hambro smiled remotely. “We don’t have to worry about the aggressiveness of the Negroes. Not during the new period or any other. In fact, we now have to slow them down for their own good. It’s a scientific necessity.”

Here I had thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn’t see either color or men … For all they were concerned, we were so many names scribbled on fake ballots, to be used at their convenience and when not needed to be filed away.

And that I, a little black man with an assumed name should die because a big black man in his hatred and confusion over the nature of a reality that seemed controlled solely by white men whom I knew to be as blind as he, was just too much, too outrageously absurd. And I knew that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others,

I had been used as a tool. My grandfather had been wrong about yessing them to death and destruction or else things had changed too much since his day.

So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.

America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It’s “winner take nothing” that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many— This is not prophecy, but description. Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he’s going.