Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

“We ought to done this long ago,” a man said. “We damn sho should.” “I feel so good,” a woman said. “I feel so good!” “Black men, I’m proud of you,” the West Indian woman shrilled. “Proud!”

I was uneasy about their presence and disappointed when they all joined the crowd and started lugging the evicted articles back inside. Where had I heard of them?

The longer you remain unknown to the police, the longer you’ll be effective.”

as I swung over a partition and went brushing past a huge cote and arousing a flight of frantic white birds, suddenly as large as buzzards as they beat furiously against my eyes, dazzling the sun as they fluttered up and away and around in a furious glide

If only it were like at home where I knew someone in all the houses, knew them by sight and by name, by blood and by background, by shame and pride, and by religion.

This was awful. What on earth had I said to have brought on all this? How would it end? Someone might be killed.

I cut through a block in which there were close to a dozen funeral parlors,

all on one block?!

His movements, as he peered through the brightly lighted shelves of pastry, were those of a lively small animal, a fyce, interested in detecting only the target cut of cake.

I had a feeling that somehow he was acting a part; that something about him wasn’t exactly real—an idea which I dismissed immediately, since there was a quality of unreality over the whole afternoon.

where did you learn to speak?” “Nowhere,” I said, much too quickly. “Then you’re very talented. You are a natural. It’s hard to believe.” “I was simply angry,”

Dead-in-living … a unity of opposites.”

they reminded me of folks I know down South. It’s taken me a long time to feel it, but they’re folks just like me, except that I’ve been to school a few years.”

You might not recognize it just now, but that part of you is dead! You have not completely shed that self, that old agrarian self, but it’s dead and you will throw it off completely and emerge something new. History has been born in your brain.”

as though he had everything figured out—whatever he was talking about.

“Are they relatives of yours?” “Sure, we’re both black,” I said, beginning to laugh. He smiled, his eyes intense upon my face. “Seriously, are they your relatives?” “Sure, we were burned in the same oven,” I said. The effect was electric.

sometimes the difference between individual and organized indignation is the difference between criminal and political action,” he said.

No doubt he was laughing at me. I must have looked silly hurtling across the roofs, and like a black-face comedian shrinking from a ghost when the white pigeons shot up around me.

What on earth was it, I mused, bending my head to the wind, that made us leave the warm, mild weather of home for all this cold, and never to return, if not something worth hoping for, freezing for, even being evicted for?

much better than I with my college training—training! Bledsoing, that was the term.

I lay listening as the sound flowed to and around me, bringing me a calm sense of my indebtedness.

We were flashing through Central Park, now completely transformed by the snow. It was as though we had plunged suddenly into mid-country peace, yet I knew that here, somewhere close by in the night, there was a zoo with its dangerous animals. The lions and tigers in heated cages, the bears asleep, the snakes coiled tightly underground.

went swiftly toward a lobby lighted by dim bulbs set behind frosted glass, going past the uniformed doorman with an uncanny sense of familiarity; feeling now, as we entered a sound-proof elevator and shot away at a mile a minute, that I had been through it all before. Then we were stopping with a gentle bounce and I was uncertain whether we had gone up or down.

“We’re very thirsty men. This young man pushed history ahead twenty years today.”

It was not the harsh uninterested-in-you-as-a-human-being stare that I’d known in the South, the kind that swept over a black man as though he were a horse or an insect; it was something more, a direct, what-type-of-mere-man-have-we-here kind of look that seemed to go beneath my skin

We were up very high; street lamps and traffic cut patterns in the night below.

Maybe she wants to see me sweat coal tar, ink, shoe polish, graphite. What was I, a man or a natural resource?

I had the sense of being present at the creation of important events, as though a curtain had been parted and I was being allowed to glimpse how the country operated.

I was swept into the large room and introduced by my new name. Everyone smiled and seemed eager to meet me, as though they all knew the role I was to play. All grasped me warmly by the hand.

Suddenly I felt laughter bubbling inside me. I’d have to catch up with this science of history business.

“The brother does not sing!” Brother Jack roared staccato.

Even my hat would go; its green was sun-faded and brown, like a leaf struck by the winter’s snows. I would require a new one for my new name. A black broad-brimmed one; perhaps a homburg … humbug? I laughed.

History makes harsh demands of us all. But they were demands that had to be met if men were to be the masters and not the victims of their times. Did I believe that? Perhaps I had already begun to pay.

The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time.

“Shut up!” I screamed, which seemed only to enrage the hidden knocker. The din was deafening. Tenants up and down the entire line of apartments joined in. I hammered back with the iron naps, seeing the silver fly, striking like driven sand against my face. The pipe fairly hummed with the blows. Windows were going up. Voices yelled obscenities down the airshaft. Who started all this, I wondered, who’s responsible? “Why don’t you act like responsible people living in the twentieth century?” I yelled, aiming a blow at the pipe. “Get rid of your cottonpatch ways! Act civilized!”

Why don’t folks act according to what they know?”

picking up a piece of the bank, a part of the red-shirted chest, reading the legend, FEED ME in a curve of white iron letters, like the team name on an athlete’s shirt. The figure had gone to pieces like a grenade, scattering jagged fragments of painted iron among the coins. I looked at my hand; a small trickle of blood showed. I wiped it away, thinking, I’ll have to hide this mess! I can’t take her this and the news that I’m moving at the same time.

Why, I thought with anguish, would Mary have something like this around anyway?

The knocking had gone beyond mere protest over heatlessness now, they had fallen into a ragged rumba rhythm:

“That’s enough out of you, you piece of yellow gone-to-waste. Unless you still want to call the police.” My voice had taken on a new shrill pitch. “I’ve done what you wanted me to do; another word and I’ll do what I want to do—” She looked at me with widening eyes. “I believe you would,” she said, opening the door. “I believe you would.” “I not only would, I’d love it,” I said.

Who would have thought I’d ever come here? How things were twisted around!

the pimples, “courage bumps,” too many and too well-defined.

I never heard that one before--it's...a positive spin on the rotten things!

Perhaps the part of me that observed listlessly but saw all, missing nothing, was still the malicious, arguing part; the dissenting voice, my grandfather part; the cynical, disbelieving part—the traitor self that always threatened internal discord. Whatever it was, I knew that I’d have to keep it pressed down.

looking out across the hole past a Hooverville shanty of packing cases and bent tin signs, to a railroad yard that lay beyond. Dark depthless water lay without motion in the hole, and past the Hooverville a switch engine idled upon the shining rails, and as a plume of white steam curled slowly from its funnel I saw a man come out of the shanty and start up the path which led to the walk above. Stooped and dark and sprouting rags from his shoes, hat and sleeves, he shuffled slowly toward me, bringing a threatening cloud of carbolic acid. It was a syphilitic who lived alone in the shanty between the hole and the railroad yard, coming up to the street only to beg money for food and disinfectant with which to soak his rags.

I watched them, feeling very young and inexperienced and yet strangely old, with an oldness that watched and waited quietly within me.

I liked, but didn’t trust old Master; I wanted to please, but did not trust the crowd. Then I looked at Brother Jack and grinned: That was it; in some ways, he was like a toy bull terrier.

Below and above us was the audience, row after row of faces, the arena a bowl-shaped aggregation of humanity.

entering the spot of light that surrounded me like a seamless cage of stainless steel. I halted. The light was so strong that I could no longer see the audience, the bowl of human faces. It was as though a semi-transparent curtain had dropped between us, but through which they could see me—for they were applauding—without themselves being seen. I felt the hard, mechanical isolation of the hospital machine and I didn’t like it.

“Sorry, folks. Up to now they’ve kept me so far away from these shiny electric gadgets I haven’t learned the technique … And to tell you the truth, it looks to me like it might bite! Just look at it, it looks like the steel skull of a man! Do you think he died of dispossession?”

“And do you know what makes us so uncommon?” I whispered hoarsely. “We let them do it!” The silence was profound. The smoke boiled in the spotlight.

These are the days of dispossession, the season of homelessness, the time of evictions. We’ll be dispossessed of the very brains in our heads! And we’re so un-common that we can’t even see it!