Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

Everybody knows I been here ever since there’s been a here—even helped dig the first foundation. The Old Man hired me, nobody else; and, by God, it’ll take the Old Man to fire me!”

No, he was making something down here, something that had to do with paint, and probably something too filthy and dangerous for white men to be willing to do even for money.

it gets pretty loud down here, all right; this here’s the uproar department and I’m in charge

watching him go over and push a switch. Shuddering into motion, the machine gave a sudden scream like a circular saw, and sent a tattoo of sharp crystals against my face. I moved clumsily away, seeing Brockway grin like a dried prune.

“But I thought the paint was made upstairs …” “Naw, they just mixes in the color, make it look pretty. Right down here is where the real paint is made. Without what I do they couldn’t do nothing, they be making bricks without straw. An’ not only do I make up the base, I fixes the varnishes and lots of the oils too …”

“How long have you been doing this?” “Long enough to know what I’m doing,” he said. “And I learned it without all that education that them what’s been sent down here is suppose to have. I learned it by doing it. Them personnel fellows don’t want to face the facts, but Liberty Paints wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel if they didn’t have me here to see that it got a good strong base.

you know, a man could make hisself all kinds of money if he found out what makes paint bleed.

I got it in my head so good I can trace it out on paper down to the last nut and bolt; and ain’t never been to nobody’s engineering school neither, ain’t even passed by one, as far as I know.

You caint forgit down here, ’cause if you do, you liable to blow up something.

We make the best white paint in the world, I don’t give a damn what nobody says. Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through!” His eyes glinted with humorless conviction and I had to drop my head to hide my grin.

“They thinks ’cause everything down here is done by machinery, that’s all there is to it. They crazy! Ain’t a continental thing that happens down here that ain’t as iffen I done put my black hands into it! Them machines just do the cooking, these here hands right here do the sweeting.

Weren’t you told about the meeting?” “Meeting? Why, no, sir, I wasn’t.” The chairman frowned. “You see, the bosses are not co-operating,” he said to the others. “Brother, who’s your foreman?” “Mr. Brockway, sir,” I said. Suddenly the men began scraping their feet and cursing. I looked about me. What was wrong? Were they objecting to my referring to Brockway as Mister? “Quiet, brothers,” the chairman said, leaning across his table, his hand cupped to his ear. “Now what was that, brother; who is your foreman?” “Lucius Brockway, sir,” I said, dropping the Mister. But this seemed only to make them more hostile. “Get him the hell out of here,” they shouted.

A first-class enameled fink!”

Finkism is born into some guys. It’s born into some guys, just like a good eye for color is born into other guys. That’s right, that’s the honest, scientific truth! A fink don’t even have to have heard of a union before,” he cried in a frenzy of words. “All you have to do is bring him around the neighborhood of a union and next thing you know, why, zip! he’s finking his finking ass off!”

I couldn’t move; too much was happening to me.

cold pork chop

Is that the best idea either?!;(

My face stung as though it had been slapped. They had made their decision without giving me a chance to speak for myself. I felt that every man present looked upon me with hostility; and though I had lived with hostility all my life, now for the first time it seemed to reach me, as though I had expected more of these men than of others—even though I had not known of their existence.

feeling as though my bowels had been flooded with acid.

I looked at him abstractedly, seeing how the light caught on his wrinkled forehead, his snowy hair.

trembling like the needle of one of the gauges as he pointed toward the stairs, his voice shrieking.

shouting, more at a black blur that irritated my eyes than at a clearly defined human face,

adding insults I’d heard my grandfather use. “Why, you old-fashioned, slavery-time, mammy-made, handkerchief-headed bastard,

Are you people crazy? Does this paint go to your head? Are you drinking it?”

You people must be out of your minds.

The old fool had bitten me. A wild flash of laughter struggled to rise from beneath my anger. He had bitten me!

For one of us to join one of them damn unions is like we was to bite the hand of the man who teached us to bathe in a bathtub!

to see him scrambling for the stairs, his hands clasping the back of his head, and his neck pulled in close, like a small boy who has thrown a brick into the air.

hearing the clear new note arising while I seemed to run swiftly up an incline and shot forward with sudden acceleration into a wet blast of black emptiness that was somehow a bath of whiteness.

It was a fall into space that seemed not a fall but a suspension. Then a great weight landed upon me and I seemed to sprawl in an interval of clarity beneath a pile of broken machinery, my head pressed back against a huge wheel, my body splattered with a stinking goo.

pain shot around the curve of my head and bounced me off into blackness for a distance, only to strike another pain that lobbed me back. And in that clear instant of cons...

I was understanding something fully and trying again to answer but seemed to sink to the center of a lake of heavy water and pause, transfixed and numb with the sense that I had lost irrevocably an important victory.

A thin voice with a mirror on the end of it said,

the bright eye still burning into mine, although the man was gone.

it was fiery and above it all I kept hearing the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth—three short and one long buzz, repeated again and again in varying volume,

a desert of heat waves away,

The voice throbbed with icy authority

My mind was blank, as though I had just begun to live. When the next face appeared I saw the eyes behind the thick glasses blinking as though noticing me for the first time.

I seemed to go away; the lights receded like a tail-light racing down a dark country road. I couldn’t follow. A sharp pain stabbed my shoulder. I twisted about on my back, fighting something I couldn’t see.

that I was not lying on an operating table but in a kind of glass and nickel box, the lid of which was propped open. Why was I here?

The vox humana of a hidden organ?

heard a sweet-voiced trumpet rendering “The Holy City” as from an echoing distance, buoyed by a choir of muted horns; and above, the mocking obligato of a mocking bird.

A pair of eyes peered down through lenses as thick as the bottom of a Coca-Cola bottle, eyes protruding, luminous and veined, like an old biology specimen preserved in alcohol.

“The patient will live as he has to live, and with absolute integrity. Who could ask more? He’ll experience no major conflict of motives, and what is even better, society will suffer no traumata on his account.”

“What’s that definition of a surgeon, ‘A butcher with a bad conscience’?” They laughed.

steeled myself for the shocks, but was blasted nevertheless. The pulse came swift and staccato, increasing gradually until I fairly danced between the nodes. My teeth chattered. I closed my eyes and bit my lips to smother my screams. Warm blood filled my mouth. Between my lids I saw a circle of hands and faces, dazzling with light. Some were scribbling upon charts.

Something had been disconnected. For though I had seldom used my capacities for anger and indignation, I had no doubt that I possessed them; and, like a man who knows that he must fight, whether angry or not, when called a son of a bitch, I tried to imagine myself angry—only to discover a deeper sense of remoteness. I was beyond anger. I was only bewildered.

Where did my body end and the crystal and white world begin? Thoughts evaded me, hiding in the vast stretch of clinical whiteness to which I seemed connected only by a scale of receding grays. No sounds beyond the sluggish inner roar of the blood.

The sterile and weightless texture of a sheet enfolded me. I felt myself bounce, sail off like a ball thrown over the roof into mist, striking a hidden wall beyond a pile of broken machinery and sailing back. How long it took, I didn’t know. But now above the movement of the hands I heard a friendly voice, uttering familiar words to which I could assign no meaning. I listened intensely, aware of the form and movement of sentences and grasping the now subtle rhythmical differences between progressions of sound that questioned and those that made a statement. But still their meanings were lost in the vast whiteness in which I myself was lost.

Faces hovered above me like inscrutable fish peering myopically through a glass aquarium wall. I saw them suspended motionless above me, then two floating off, first their heads, then the tips of their finlike fingers, moving dreamily from the top of the case. A thoroughly mysterious coming and going, like the surging of torpid tides.

seeing them from this angle was disturbing. They appeared utterly stupid and I didn’t like it. It wasn’t right. I could see smut in one doctor’s nose; a nurse had two flabby chins. Other faces came up, their mouths working with soundless fury. But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.