Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

It’s as though every day were Leap Year—which is as it should be. Women should be absolutely as free as men.”

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 saw Barrelhouse rolling down from the other end of the bar, his white apron indented by the tension of its cord so that he looked like that kind of metal beer barrel which has a groove around its middle; and seeing me now, he began to smile.

seeing the doll throwing itself about with the fierce defiance of someone performing a degrading act in public, dancing as though it received a perverse pleasure from its motions.

It was as though I had waded out into a shallow pool only to have the bottom drop out and the water close over my head.

I looked at the doll and felt my throat constrict. The rage welled behind the phlegm as I rocked back on my heels and crouched forward. There was a flash of whiteness and a splatter like heavy rain striking a newspaper and I saw the doll go over backwards, wilting into a dripping rag of frilled tissue, the hateful head upturned on its outstretched neck still grinning toward the sky.

What would non-members who knew him say? It was as though he had chosen—how had he put it the night he fought with Ras?—to fall outside of history.

But he knew that only in the Brotherhood could we make ourselves known, could we avoid being empty Sambo dolls.

I saw a flight of pigeons whirl out of the trees and it all happened in the swift interval of their circling, very abruptly and in the noise of the traffic—yet seeming to unfold in my mind like a slow-motion movie run off with the sound track dead.

the two moving in a kind of march that I’d seen many times, but never with anyone like Clifton.

I heard rapid explosions and saw each pigeon diving wildly as though blackjacked by the sound, and the cop sitting up straight now, and rising to his knees looking steadily at Clifton, and the pigeons plummeting swiftly into the trees, and Clifton still facing the cop and suddenly crumpling.

The sun seemed to scream an inch above my head. Someone shouted.

Why should a man deliberately plunge outside of history and peddle an obscenity, my mind went on abstractedly. Why should he choose to disarm himself, give up his voice and leave the only organization offering him a chance to “define” himself?

Where were the historians today? And how would they put it down?

What did they ever think of us transitory ones? Ones such as I had been before I found Brotherhood—birds of passage who were too obscure for learned classification, too silent for the most sensitive recorders of sound; of natures too ambiguous for the most ambiguous words, and too distant from the centers of historical decision to sign or even to applaud the signers of historical documents? We who write no novels, histories or other books. What about us, I thought,

standing noisy in their very silence; harsh as a cry of terror in their quietness?

These fellows whose bodies seemed—what had one of my teachers said of me?—“You’re like one of these African sculptures, distorted in the interest of a design.” Well, what design and whose?

On one side I saw a white nun in black telling her beads, and standing before the door across the aisle there was another dressed completely in white, the exact duplicate of the other except that she was black and her black feet bare.

I looked into the design of their faces, hardly a one that was unlike someone I’d known down South. Forgotten names sang through my head like forgotten scenes in dreams.

Was this the only true history of the times, a mood blared by trumpets, trombones, saxophones and drums, a song with turgid, inadequate words?

I’d been so fascinated by the motion that I’d forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I’d been asleep, dreaming.

and I had failed. All I’d done was to make them laugh all the louder … I had aided and abetted social backwardness

Clifton had chosen to plunge out of history and, except for the picture it made in my mind’s eye, only the plunge was recorded, and that was the only important thing.

and it was necessary that we make it known that the meaning of his death was greater than the incident or the object that caused it. Both as a means of avenging him and of preventing other such deaths

a crude platform of planks and ranked saw horses had been erected beneath the black iron bell, and when the procession started into the park we were standing high above, waiting. At our signal he struck the bell, and I could feel my eardrums throbbing with the old, hollow, gut-vibrant Doom-Dong-Doom.

their white uniforms glowing in the now unveiled sun like lilies.

an old, plaintive, masculine voice arose in a song, wavering, stumbling in the silence at first alone, until in the band a euphonium horn fumbled for the key and took up the air, one catching and rising above the other and the other pursuing, two black pigeons rising above a skull-white barn to tumble and rise through still, blue air.

a knife welt around his upturned neck as his throat threw out the song. 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 looked at the coffin and the marchers, listening to them, and yet realizing that I was listening to something within myself, and for a second I heard the shattering stroke of my heart.

all were touched; the song had aroused us all. 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.

digging for the words, and feeling a futility about it all and an anger. For this they gathered by thousands. What were they waiting to hear?

What did they want and what could they do? Why hadn’t they come when they could have stopped it all?

So what if you wait for what little I can tell you? Can I say in twenty minutes what was building twenty-one years and ended in twenty seconds?

repeat

Say his name...

It’s an old story and there’s been too much blood to excite you. Besides, it’s only important when it fills the veins of a living man. Aren’t you tired of such stories? Aren’t you sick of the blood?

Yes!!!! And this was how long ago?

his death was as senseless as his life was futile.

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.

I crept along, walking a southern walk in southern weather, closing my eyes from time to time against the dazzling reds, yellows and greens of cheap sport shirts and summer dresses. The crowd boiled, sweated, heaved;

There was no denying it; it was there and something had to be done before it simmered away in the heat.

It was as though I had expected to find them there, just as in those dreams in which I encountered my grandfather looking at me from across the dimensionless space of a dream-room. I looked back without surprise or emotion, although I knew even in the dream that surprise was the normal reaction and that the lack of it was to be distrusted, a warning.

“What was that?” he said. “Your what?”

This sounds familiar...

Someone poured a glass of water and I could hear it fill up very fast, then the rapid rill-like trickle of the final drops dripping from the pitcher-lip into the glass.

alive or dead he was jam-full of contradictions. So full that he attracted half of Harlem to come out and stand in the sun in answer to our call.

You don’t really think that crowd turned out today because Clifton was a member of the Brotherhood?” “And why did they turn out?” Jack said, getting set as if to pounce forward. “Because we gave them the opportunity to express their feelings, to affirm themselves.”

there’s nothing like isolating a man to make him think,”

You were not hired to think.” He was speaking very deliberately and I thought, So … So here it is, naked and old and rotten. So now it’s out in the open … “So now I know where I am,” I said, “and with whom—”

We’re graduates and while you are a smart beginner you skipped several grades. But they were important grades, especially for gaining strategical knowledge.

the political consciousness of Harlem is exactly a thing I know something about. That’s one class they wouldn’t let me skip. I’m describing a part of reality which I know.”

He had gray eyes and his irises were very wide, the muscles ridged out on his jaws.

Ask your wife to take you around to the gin mills and the barber shops and the juke joints and the churches, Brother. Yes, and the beauty parlors on Saturdays when they’re frying hair. A whole unrecorded history is spoken then, Brother. You wouldn’t believe it but it’s true. Tell her to take you to stand in the areaway of a cheap tenement at night and listen to what is said. Put her out on the corner, let her tell you what’s being put down.