Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

My hand was in my pocket now, Brother Tarp’s leg chain around my knuckles. I looked at each of them individually, trying to hold myself back and yet feeling it getting away from me. My head was whirling as though I were riding a supersonic merry-go-round.

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!”

suddenly something seemed to erupt out of his face. You’re seeing things, I thought, hearing it strike sharply against the table and roll as his arm shot out and snatched an object the size of a large marble and dropped it, plop! into his glass, and I could see the water shooting up in a ragged, light-breaking pattern to spring in swift droplets across the oiled table top. The room seemed to flatten.

“I sincerely hope it never happens to you. Sincerely.” “If it should, maybe you’ll recommend me to your oculist,” I said, “then I may not-see myself as others see-me-not.”

So he knows how I feel. Which eye is really the blind one?

But I would never be the same. Never. After tonight I wouldn’t ever look the same, or feel the same. Just what I’d be, I didn’t know; I couldn’t go back to what I was—which wasn’t much—but I’d lost too much to be what I was.

had seen it thousands of times, but suddenly what I had considered an empty imitation of a Hollywood fad was flooded with personal significance. Why not, I thought, why not, and shot across the street and into the air-conditioned chill of a drugstore.

At the first hat shop I went in and bought the widest hat in stock and put it on. With this, I thought, I should be seen even in a snowstorm—only they’d think I was someone else.

My eyes adjusted quickly; the world took on a dark-green intensity, the lights of cars glowed like stars, faces were a mysterious blur; the garish signs of movie houses muted down to a soft sinister glowing.

To the rear they were lined up two deep before the store windows. Before me the listeners merged in a green-tinted gloom. The Exhorter gestured violently,

“Ras said chase them! It is time Ras the Exhorter become Ras the DESTROYER!” Shouts of agreement arose and I looked behind me, seeing the men who had followed me and thinking, What did he mean, destroyer?

What do you THINK?

“Hey now!” “Hey now!” I said. It was as though by dressing and walking in a certain way I had enlisted in a fraternity in which I was recognized at a glance—not by features, but by clothes, by uniform, by gait. But this gave rise to another uncertainty. I was not a zoot-suiter, but a kind of politician. Or was I? What would happen in a real test?

“Yeah? How much you know about ribs?” He raised his head slowly, looking across at the spitted chickens revolving before the low blue rotisserie flames. “I reckon I know as much about ’em as you,” he said, “and probably more, since I probably been eatin’ ’em a few years longer than you, and in a few more places.

coolcrack the motherfouler!”

Here I’d set out to test a disguise on a friend and now I was ready to beat him to his knees—not because I wanted to but because of place and circumstance. Okay, okay, it was absurd and yet real and dangerous and if he moved, I’d let him have it as brutally as possible. To protect myself I’d have to, or the drunks would gang me.

I walked, struck by the merging fluidity of forms seen through the lenses. Could this be the way the world appeared to Rinehart? All the dark-glass boys?

the street was alive with pedestrians, all moiling along in the mysterious tint of green.

What on earth was hiding behind the face of things? If dark glasses and a white hat could blot out my identity so quickly, who actually was who?

No Problem too Hard for God. Come to the Way Station. BEHOLD THE INVISIBLE!

Behind me I heard the rise and fall of an old-fashioned prayer such as I hadn’t heard since leaving the campus; and then only when visiting country preachers were asked to pray. The voice rose and fell in a rhythmical, dreamlike recital—part enumeration of earthly trials undergone by the congregation, part rapt display of vocal virtuosity, part appeal to God.

And, Rever’n, last night I sold ten recordings of your inspiring sermon. Even sold one to the white lady I work for.”

a slender woman in a rusty black robe played passionate boogie-woogie on an upright piano along with a young man wearing a skull cap who struck righteous riffs from an electric guitar which was connected to an amplifier that hung from the ceiling above a gleaming white and gold pulpit. A man in an elegant red cardinal’s robe and a high lace collar stood resting against an enormous Bible and now began to lead a hard-driving hymn which the congregation shouted in the unknown tongue.

Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? And I knew that it was. I had heard of it before but I’d never come so close. Still, could he be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he himself be both rind and heart?

In the South everyone knew you, but coming North was a jump into the unknown. How many days could you walk the streets of the big city without encountering anyone who knew you, and how many nights? You could actually make yourself anew. The notion was frightening, for now the world seemed to flow before my eyes. All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.

Outside the Brotherhood we were outside history; but inside of it they didn’t see us. It was a hell of a state of affairs, we were nowhere.

I tucked the hat under my arm and put the glasses in my pocket along with Brother Tarp’s leg chain and Clifton’s doll. My pocket was getting overloaded.

“Like a charlatan,” I said. Hambro laughed. “I thought you had learned about that, Brother.” I looked at him quickly. “Learned what?” “That it’s impossible not to take advantage of the people.”

It was all a swindle, an obscene swindle! They had set themselves up to describe the world. What did they know of us, except that we numbered so many, worked on certain jobs, offered so many votes, and provided so many marchers for some protest parade of theirs? I leaned there, aching to humiliate them, to refute them.

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.

Let them gag on what they refused to see. Let them choke on it. That was one risk they hadn’t calculated. That was a risk they had never dreamt of in their philosophy.

The more I thought of it the more I fell into a kind of morbid fascination with the possibility. Why hadn’t I discovered it sooner? How different my life might have been! How terribly different! Why hadn’t I seen the possibilities?

Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time.

It was a dreary prospect but a means of destroying them, at least in Harlem.

Where would we go? There were no allies with whom we could join as equals; nor were there time or theorists available to work out an over-all program of our own—although I felt that somewhere between Rinehart and invisibility there were great potentialities.

But to hell with that, I thought, I would remain and become a well-disciplined optimist, and help them to go merrily to hell. If I couldn’t help them to see the reality of our lives I would help them to ignore it until it exploded in their faces.

didn’t like the look of things, for all my wish to see the committee confounded.

and as for that outhouse Wrestrum—well.

Yeah! ;)

Sybil

Uh-oh....

She was more interested in the drinks, in which I had to join her glass for glass, and in little dramas which she had dreamed up around the figures of Joe Louis and Paul Robeson. And, although I had neither the stature nor the temperament for either role, I was expected either to sing “Old Man River” and just keep rolling along, or to do fancy tricks with my muscles. I was confounded and amused and it became quite a contest, with me trying to keep the two of us in touch with reality and with her casting me in fantasies in which I was Brother Taboo-with-whom-all-things-are-possible.

“What was that!” I said, and she repeated it. Had life suddenly become a crazy Thurber cartoon?

I could not tell if it were horror speaking to me out of innocence, or innocence emerging unscathed from the obscene scheme of the evening.

She would soon be a biddy, stout, with a little double chin and a three-ply girdle.

it’s good to be seen,

my responsibility? All of it? I’m invisible.

“I’m ill,” I said. “What’s wrong?” “There’s trouble, Brother, and you’re the only one who can—” “What kind of trouble?” “Bad trouble, Brother; they trying to—” Then the harsh sound of breaking glass, distant, brittle and fine, followed by a crash, and the line went dead.

Why should I worry over bureaucrats, blind men? I am invisible.

“The Time Is Now …” the sign across the river began, but with history stomping upon me with hobnailed boots, I thought with a laugh, why worry about time?

there was a sudden and brilliant suspension of time, like the interval between the last ax stroke and the felling of a tall tree, in which there had been a loud noise followed by a loud silence.

sent up a curtain of sparks that lit up the block like a blue dream;

He wore three hats upon his head, and several pairs of suspenders flopped about his shoulders, and now as he came toward us I saw that he wore a pair of gleaming new rubber hip boots. His pockets bulged and over his shoulder he carried a cloth sack that swung heavily behind him.