Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

I tried desperately, diving below the blackness until I was limp with fatigue. It was as though a vein had been opened and my energy syphoned away;

But it was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body. Maybe I was just this blackness and bewilderment and pain, but that seemed less like a suitable answer than something I’d read somewhere.

I looked at him, feeling a quick dislike and thinking, half in amusement, I don’t play the dozens. And how’s your old lady today?

I laughed, deep, deep inside me, giddy with the delight of self-discovery and the desire to hide it.

Who am I? It was no good. I felt like a clown. Nor was I up to being both criminal and detective—though why criminal I didn’t know.

I had no desire to destroy myself even if it destroyed the machine; I wanted freedom, not destruction.

“What is your name? Oh here, I have it,” he said, studying the chart. And it was as though someone inside of me tried to tell him to be silent, but already he had called my name and I heard myself say, “Oh!” as a pain stabbed through my head and I shot to my feet and looked wildly around me and sat down and got up and down again very fast, remembering.

He shook my hand gravely, without surprise or distaste. I looked down, he was there somewhere behind the lined face and outstretched hand.

I had the feeling that I had been talking beyond myself, had used words and expressed attitudes not my own, that I was in the grip of some alien personality lodged deep within me. Like the servant about whom I’d read in psychology class who, during a trance, had recited pages of Greek philosophy which she had overheard one day while she worked. It was as though I were acting out a scene from some crazy movie. Or perhaps I was catching up with myself and had put into words feelings which I had hitherto suppressed.

I dropped through the roar, giddy and vacuum-minded, sucked under and out into late afternoon Harlem.

Lenox Avenue seemed to careen away from me at a drunken angle, and I focused upon the teetering scene with wild, infant’s eyes, my head throbbing. Two huge women with spoiled-cream complexions seemed to struggle with their massive bodies as they came past, their flowered hips trembling like threatening flames. Out across the walk before me they moved, and a bright orange slant of sun seemed to boil up and I saw myself going down, my legs watery beneath me, but my head clear, too clear, recording the crowd swerving around me: legs, feet, eyes, hands, bent knees, scuffed shoes, teethy-eyed excitement; and some moving on unhalting.

And looking like that, you must be worse off even than you look,

you need some help ’cause here you black as me and white as a sheet,

If I don’t think I’m sinking, look what a hole I’m in, and then the soft cool splash of sleep.

“I don’t know now; I came here wanting to be an educator. Now I don’t know.” “So what’s wrong with being an educator?” I thought about it while sipping the good hot soup. “Nothing, I suppose, I just think I’d like to do something else.” “Well, whatever it is, I hope it’s something that’s a credit to the race.” “I hope so,” I said. “Don’t hope, make it that way.” I looked at her, thinking of what I’d tried to do and of where it had gotten me,

“It’s you young folks what’s going to make the changes,” she said. “Y’all’s the ones. You got to lead and you got to fight and move us all on up a little higher. And I tell you something else, it’s the ones from the South that’s got to do it, them what knows the fire and ain’t forgot how it burns. Up here too many forgits.

looks to me like you might make something out of yourself, so you be careful.”

The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head:

the younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream—the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah’s Ark but who yet were drunk on finance.

was certain that it was he and stooped without thought and lifted it shining, full and foul, and moved forward two long steps, dumping its great brown, transparent splash upon the head warned too late by someone across the room. And too late for me to see that it was not Bledsoe but a preacher, a prominent Baptist, who shot up wide-eyed with disbelief and outrage, and I shot around and out of the lobby before anyone could think to stop me.

“Everybody worth his salt has his hard times, and when you git to be somebody you’ll see these here very same hard times helped you a heap.”

reminded me constantly that something was expected of me, some act of leadership, some newsworthy achievement; and I was torn between resenting her for it and loving her for the nebulous hope she kept alive.

a new, painful, contradictory voice had grown up within me, and between its demands for revengeful action and Mary’s silent pressure I throbbed with guilt and puzzlement. I wanted peace and quiet, tranquillity, but was too much aboil inside.

Somewhere beneath the load of the emotion-freezing ice which my life had conditioned my brain to produce, a spot of black anger glowed and threw off a hot red light of such intensity that had Lord Kelvin known of its existence, he would have had to revise his measurements.

If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance; yes, and avoided the uncertain extremes of the scale. But there was no relief.

The streets were covered with ice and soot-flecked snow and from above a feeble sun filtered through the haze.

for a moment there was an eerie quiet. I imagined I heard the fall of snow upon snow.

the snowflakes lacing swift between, simultaneously forming a curtain, a veil, and stripping it aside. A flash of red and gold from a window filled with religious articles caught my eye. And behind the film of frost etching the glass I saw two brashly painted plaster images of Mary and Jesus surrounded by dream books, love powders, God-Is-Love signs, money-drawing oil and plastic dice.

everything what looks good ain’t necessarily good,” he said. “But these is.”

“Bledsoe, you’re a shameless chitterling eater! I accuse you of relishing hog bowels! Ha! And not only do you eat them, you sneak and eat them in private when you think you’re unobserved! You’re a sneaking chitterling lover!

“They’re my birthmark,” I said. “I yam what I am!”

🍠

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do? What a waste, what a senseless waste!

I had no problem concerning them and I would eat them whenever and wherever I took the notion. Continue on the yam level and life would be sweet—though somewhat yellowish.

trusties.

trustees?

the old female, mind-plunging crying.

I was wary of what the sight of them crying there on the sidewalk was making me begin to feel. I wanted to leave, but was too ashamed to leave, was rapidly becoming too much a part of it to leave.

Seeing them look back at me as though even then in that nineteenth-century day they had expected little, and this with a grim, unillusioned pride that suddenly seemed to me both a reproach and a warning.

I felt nauseated. In my hand I held three lapsed life insurance policies with perforated seals stamped “Void”; a yellowing newspaper portrait of a huge black man with the caption: MARCUS GARVEY DEPORTED.

I folded it quickly, blotting out the single drop of melted snow which glistened on the yellowed page, and dropped it back into the drawer. My hands were trembling, my breath rasping as if I had run a long distance or come upon a coiled snake in a busy street.

And it was as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing which I could not bear to lose; something confounding, like a rotted tooth that one would rather suffer indefinitely than endure the short, violent eruption of pain that would mark its removal. And with this sense of dispossession came a pang of vague recognition:

I both wanted it and feared the consequences, was outraged and angered at what I saw and yet surged with fear; not for the man or of the consequences of an attack, but of what the sight of violence might release in me. And beneath it all there boiled up all the shock-absorbing phrases that I had learned all my life. I seemed to totter on the edge of a great dark hole.

Eighty-seven and look at all he’s accumulated in eighty-seven years, strewn in the snow like chicken guts, and we’re a law-abiding, slow-to-anger bunch of folks turning the other cheek every day in the week.

Eighty-seven years, and poof! like a snort in a wind storm.

She’s let her religion go to her head, but we all know that religion is for the heart, not for the head. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ it says. Nothing about the poor in head. What’s she trying to do? What about the clear of head? And the clear of eye, the ice-water-visioned who see too clear to miss a lie?

not a pit to hiss in,

How about it, Mr. Law? Do we get our fifteen minutes worth of Jesus? You got the world, can we have our Jesus?”

these old folks had a dream book, but the pages went blank and it failed to give them the number.

but the eye was blind, it lost its luster. It’s all cataracted like a cross-eyed carpenter and it doesn’t saw straight.

they were dragging him down into the snow; punching him left and right, uttering a low tense swelling sound of desperate effort; a grunt that exploded into a thousand softly spat, hate-sizzling curses.

Suddenly I saw a pair of handcuffs arc gleaming into the air and sail across the street. A boy broke out of the crowd, the marshal’s snappy hat on his head. The marshal was spun this way and that, then a swift tattoo of blows started him down the street. I was beside myself with excitement. The crowd surged after him,