Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

Some fellow said the kid made the paddy mad by grabbing a candy named after a white woman.” “Damn if that’s the way I heard it,” another man said. “When I come up they said a white woman set it off by trying to take a black gal’s man.” “Damn who started it,” Dupre said. “All I want is for it to last a while.”

kicked something—a pound of butter, sending it smearing across the hot street.

We stepped aside, amazed, as she bowed graciously from side to side like a tipsy fat lady in a circus parade, the dipper like a gravy spoon in her enormous hand. Then she laughed and drank deeply while reaching over nonchalantly with her free hand to send quart after quart of milk crashing into the street.

I was seized with a fierce sense of exaltation. They’ve done it, I thought. They organized it and carried it through alone; the decision their own and their own action. Capable of their own action …

Damn! wasn’t for this noise I’d swear those bullets was mosquitoes.”

an eerie slapping sound followed by a precise and hallucinated cry—

A new Ras of a haughty, vulgar dignity, dressed in the costume of an Abyssinian chieftain; a fur cap upon his head, his arm bearing a shield, a cape made of the skin of some wild animal around his shoulders. A figure more out of a dream than out of Harlem, than out of even this Harlem night, yet real, alive, alarming.

Well, they used me to catch you and now they’re using Ras to do away with me and to prepare your sacrifice. Don’t you see it? Isn’t it clear …?”

I would perhaps move them one fraction of a bloody step closer to a definition of who they were and of what I was and had been. But the definition would have been too narrow; I was invisible, and hanging would not bring me to visibility,

“Look, men, give me a break, we’re all black folks together … Nobody cares.” Though now I knew we cared, they at last cared enough to act—so I thought. If only I could say, “Look, they’ve played a trick on us, the same old trick with new variations—let’s stop running and respect and love one another …” If only

Georgia voice sticks his head out the window and yells, ‘Ride ’em, cowboy. Give ’em hell and bananas.’

looking like death eating a sandwich,

he lets out a roar like a lion and rears way back and starts shooting spurs into that hoss’s ass fast as nickels falling in the subway at going-home time

“Come on down,” I said. “Ha! Ha! I’ve had you in my brief case all the time and you didn’t know me then and can’t see me now.”

It was a state neither of dreaming nor of waking, but somewhere in between, in which I was caught like Trueblood’s jaybird that yellow jackets had paralyzed in every part but his eyes.

And I looked up through a pain so intense now that the air seemed to roar with the clanging of metal, hearing, HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE FREE OF ILLUSION …

They were all up there somewhere, making a mess of the world. Well, let them. I was through

Once you get used to it, reality is as irresistible as a club, and I was clubbed into the cellar before I caught the hint.

I’ve never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to “justify” and affirm someone’s mistaken beliefs; or when I’ve tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear.

had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house in a high wind.

So I became ill of affirmation, of saying “yes” against the nay-saying of my stomach—not to mention my brain.

I became ill of affirmation, of saying “yes” against the nay-saying of my stomach...

I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man. Thus I have come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from the point in society toward which I originally aspired.

I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man. Thus I have come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from the point in society toward which I originally aspired.

I got away from it all. But that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t be still even in hibernation. Because, damn it, there’s the mind, the mind.

Of course it is.

Of course not.

“Agree ’em to death and destruction,” grandfather had advised. Hell, weren’t they their own death and their own destruction except as the principle lived in them and in us?

It came upon me slowly, like that strange disease that affects those black men whom you see turning slowly from black to albino, their pigment disappearing as under the radiation of some cruel, invisible ray. You go along for years knowing something is wrong, then suddenly you discover that you’re as transparent as air.

Yes, but what is the next phase?

But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase—still it’s a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn’t accept any other;

my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase—still it’s a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn’t accept any other;

A PERSON

Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its def...

I’m invisible, not blind.

Just as in my nightmare, Jack and the boys are waiting with their knives, looking for the slightest excuse to … well, to “ball the jack,” and I do not refer to the old dance step, although what they’re doing is making the old eagle rock dangerously.

Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain.

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.

but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.

But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?