Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

me I rolled away as a fumbled football rolls off the receiver’s fingertips,

my dry mouth, filling up with blood from the cut, almost strangled me. I coughed, wanting to stop and go to one of the tall brass, sand-filled spittoons to relieve myself, but a few of the men, especially the superintendent, were listening and I was afraid. So I gulped it down, blood, saliva and all, and continued. (What powers of endurance I had during those days! What enthusiasm! What a belief in the rightness of things!)

The speech seemed a hundred times as long as before, but I could not leave out a single word. All had to be said, each memorized nuance considered, rendered. Nor was that all. Whenever I uttered a word of three or more syllables a group of voices would yell for me to repeat it.

He makes a good speech and some day he’ll lead his people in the proper paths. And I don’t have to tell you that that is important in these days and times.

I even felt safe from grandfather, whose deathbed curse usually spoiled my triumphs. I stood beneath his photograph with my brief case in hand and smiled triumphantly into his stolid black peasant’s face. It was a face that fascinated me. The eyes seemed to follow everywhere I went.

I always come this far and open my eyes. The spell breaks

I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.

Why is a bird-soiled statue more commanding than one that is clean?

what was real, what solid, what more than a pleasant, time-killing dream? For how could it have been real if now I am invisible? If real, why is it that I can recall in all that island of greenness no fountain but one that was broken, corroded and dry? And why does no rain fall through my recollections, sound through my memories, soak through the hard dry crust of the still so recent past?

(Time was as I was, but neither that time nor that “I” are anymore.)

I had just come from dinner and in bending forward to suppress a belch, I accidentally pressed the button on the wheel and the belch became a loud and shattering blast of the horn. Folks on the road turned and stared. “I’m awfully sorry, sir,” I said, worried lest he report me to Dr. Bledsoe, the president, who would refuse to allow me to drive again.

Your people did not know in what direction to turn and, I must confess, many of mine didn’t know in what direction they should turn either.

faded and yellowed pictures of the school’s early days displayed in the library flashed across the screen of my mind, coming fitfully and fragmentarily to life—photographs of men and women in wagons drawn by mule teams and oxen, dressed in black, dusty clothing, people who seemed almost without individuality, a black mob that seemed to be waiting, looking with blank faces, and among them the inevitable collection of white men and women in smiles, clear of features, striking, elegant and confident.

I was puzzled: How could anyone’s fate be pleasant? I had always thought of it as something painful. No one I knew spoke of it as pleasant—not even Woodridge, who made us read Greek plays.

Far down the road the sun glared cruelly against a tin sign nailed to a barn. A lone figure bending over a hoe on the hillside raised up wearily and waved, more a shadow against the skyline than a man.

A flock of birds dipped down, circled, swung up and out as though linked by invisible strings. Waves of heat danced above the engine hood. The tires sang over the highway.

That has been my real life’s work, not my banking or my researches, but my firsthand organizing of human life.”

She was a being more rare, more beautiful, purer, more perfect and more delicate than the wildest dream of a poet.

today, dressed in one of the smart, well-tailored, angular, sterile, streamlined, engine-turned, air-conditioned modern outfits you see in the women’s magazines, she would appear as ordinary as an expensive piece of machine-tooled jewelry and just as lifeless.

Was he talking to me like someone in a book just to see how I would take it?

You have yours, and you got it yourself, and we have to lift ourselves up the same way.”

as you develop you must remember that I am dependent upon you to learn my fate. Through you and your fellow students I become, let us say, three hundred teachers, seven hundred trained mechanics, eight hundred skilled farmers, and so on. That way I can observe in terms of living personalities to what extent my money, my time and my hopes have been fruitfully invested.

we were swept by a wave of scorching air and it was as though we were approaching a desert. It almost took my breath away and I leaned over and switched on the fan, hearing its sudden whirr. “Thank you,” he said as a slight breeze filled the car.

We were embarrassed by the earthy harmonies they sang, but since the visitors were awed we dared not laugh at the crude, high, plaintively animal sounds Jim Trueblood made as he led the quartet.

I didn’t understand in those pre-invisible days that their hate, and mine too, was charged with fear. How all of us at the college hated the black-belt people, the “peasants,” during those days! We were trying to lift them up and they, like Trueblood, did everything it seemed to pull us down.

“What about their men folk?” I hesitated. Why did he find this so strange? “He hates us, sir,” I said.

he covered the yard with a familiarity that would have allowed him to walk in the blackest darkness with the same certainty.

They became silent, their faces clouding over, their features becoming soft and negative, their eyes bland and deceptive.

The wound was raw and moist and from time to time he lifted his handkerchief to fan away the gnats.

We sat on the porch in a semi-circle in camp chairs, me between the sharecropper and the millionaire. The earth around the porch was hard and white from where wash water had long been thrown.

Why, I guess there ain’t a colored man in the county who ever got to take so much of the white folkses’ time as I did.

It was dark, plum black. Black as the middle of a bucket of tar.

the smell of the fat meat seemed to git cold and still in the air just like meat grease when it gits set in a cold plate of molasses.

The gal looks just like the ole lady did when she was young and I first met her, only better lookin’. You know, we gittin’ to be a better-lookin’ race of people …

heard a whippoorwill callin’, and I thought to myself, Go on away from here, we’ll whip ole Will when we find him.

Them boss quails is like a good man, what he got to do he do.

they say if you put the hand of a person who’s talkin’ in his sleep in warm water he’ll say it all,

Then swoosh! all of a sudden a flock of little white geese flies out of the bed like they say you see when you go to dig for buried money.

a red mist of anguish before my eyes.

I runs and runs till I should be tired but ain’t tired but feelin’ more rested as I runs, and runnin’ so good it’s like flyin’ and I’m flyin’ and sailin’ and floatin’ right up over the town. Only I’m still in the tunnel.

I flew in but I had to walk out. I had to move without movin’.

and if you’all ever seen them geld them young boar pigs in the fall, you know I knowed that that was too much to pay to keep from sinnin’.

wringlin’

good word!

“ ‘That there’s buckshot, woman, BUCKshot!’ “ ‘Yes, it is!’

Don’t make no blood-sin on accounta no dream-sin!’

“I might as well been pleadin’ with a switch engine,”

ten million back-breakin’ years, it seems to me like I waits.

there’s nothin’ but the clear bright mornin’ sun. “But don’ nothin’ happen and I knows then that somethin’ worse than anything I ever heard ’bout is in store for me.

No man’d do what you did.’ “ ‘I’m still a man,’ I says. “ ‘But what you gon do after it happens?’ says Kate. “ ‘After what happens?’ I says.

They were blocking the road and Mr. Norton was gasping for breath. Ahead of the radiator’s gleaming curve they looked like a chain gang on its way to make a road. But a chain gang marches single file and I saw no guards on horseback.