Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

but I believe one eye is enough to lose without resistance and I think that’s your belief. So let’s get together. Did you ever notice, my dumb one-eyed brothers, how two totally blind men can get together and help one another along? They stumble, they bump into things, but they avoid dangers too; they get along. Let’s get together, uncommon people. With both our eyes we may see what makes us so uncommon, we’ll see who make us so uncommon!

“Let’s make a miracle,” I shouted. “Let’s take back our pillaged eyes! Let’s reclaim our sight; let’s combine and spread our vision. Peep around the corner, there’s a storm coming. Look down the avenue, there’s only one enemy. Can’t you see his face?”

“Careful now,” he whispered. “Don’t end your usefulness before you’ve begun.”

The light seemed to boil opalescently, like liquid soap shaken gently in a bottle.

I am a new citizen of the country of your vision, a native of your fraternal land. I feel that here tonight, in this old arena, the new is being born and the vital old revived. In each of you, in me, in us all.

“You did it, goddamnit! You did it!” And I was puzzled by the hot mixture of hate and admiration bursting through his words as I thanked him and removed my hand from his crushing grasp. “Thanks,” I said, “but the others had raised them to the right pitch.”

“Listen to them,” he said. “Just waiting to be told what to do!”

He pronounced “incorrect” as though the term described the most heinous crime imaginable, and I stared at him openmouthed, feeling a vague guilt.

come down, Brothers, come down or you’ll land on your dialectics; the stage of history hasn’t built that far.

what’s happening here tonight represents only one step in the experiment. The initial step, the release of energy. I can understand that it should make you timid—you’re afraid of carrying through to the next step—because it’s up to you to organize that energy.

“Stephen’s problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face. Our task is that of making ourselves individuals. The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record … We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that doesn’t exist? For, you see, blood and skin do not think!”

By kicking me into the dark they’d made me see the possibility of achieving something greater and more important than I’d ever dreamed. Here was a way that didn’t lead through the back door, a way not limited by black and white, but a way which, if one lived long enough and worked hard enough, could lead to the highest possible rewards.

larger than life, the pink and white image of a girl smiled down from a summery beer ad on which a calendar said April One. Then, as our drinks were placed before us, Brother Jack came alive, his mood changing as though in the instant he had settled whatever had been bothering him and felt suddenly free. “Here, come back,” he said, nudging me playfully. “She’s only a cardboard image of a cold steel civilization.”

Don’t underestimate the discipline. It is very strict, but within its framework you are to have full freedom to do your work. And your work is very important. Understand?”

he possessed the chiseled, black-marble features sometimes found on statues in northern museums and alive in southern towns in which the white offspring of house children and the black offspring of yard children bear names, features and character traits as identical as the rifling of bullets fired from a common barrel.

saw a small X-shaped patch of adhesive upon the subtly blended, velvet-over-stone, granite-over-bone, Afro-Anglo-Saxon contour of his cheek.

“We’ll have trouble with the Extortor—I mean the Ex-horter,” a big woman said. “His hoodlums would attack and denounce the white meat of a roasted chicken.”

the young leader, looked somehow like a hipster, a zoot suiter, a sharpie—except his head of Persian lamb’s wool had never known a straightener.

Things are so bad they’ll listen, and when they listen they’ll go along.” “I hope so,” I said. “They will. You haven’t been around the movement as I have, for three years now, and I can feel the change. They’re ready to move.” “I hope your feelings are right,” I said. “They’re right, all right,” he said. “All we have to do is gather them in.”

Clifton’s arms were moving in short, accurate jabs against the head and stomach of Ras the Exhorter, punching swiftly and scientifically, careful not to knock him into the window or strike the glass with his fists, working Ras between rights and lefts jabbed so fast that he rocked like a drunken bull, from side to side. And as I came up Ras tried to bull his way out

I saw his face gleam with red angry tears as he stood above Clifton with the still innocent knife and the tears red in the glow of the window sign.

You from down South! You from Trinidad! You from Barbados! Jamaica, South Africa, and the white mahn’s foot in your ass all the way to the hip. What you trying to deny by betraying the black people? Why you fight against us? You young fellows. You young black men with plenty education; I been hearing your rabble rousing. Why you go over to the enslaver? What kind of education is that?

Their money bleed black blood, mahn. It’s unclean! Taking their money is shit, mahn. Money without dignity— That’s bahd shit!”

Look at you two and look at me—is this sanity? Standing here in three shades of blackness! Three black men fighting in the street because of the white enslaver? Is that sanity? Is that consciousness, scientific understahnding? Is that the modern black mahn of the twentieth century? Hell, mahn! Is it self-respect—black against black?

Don’t deny you’self! It took a billion gallons of black blood to make you.

His chest was heaving and a note of pleading had come into the harsh voice. He was an exhorter, all right, and I was caught in the crude, insane eloquence of his plea.

“Thinking like that will get you lost in the backwash of history,” I said. “Start thinking with your mind and not your emotions.” He shook his head vehemently, looking at Clifton. “This black mahn talking to me about brains and thinking. I ask both of you, are you awake or sleeping? What is your pahst and where are you going? Never mind, take your corrupt ideology and eat out your own guts like a laughing hyena.

It’s three hundred years of black blood to build this white mahn’s civilization and wahn’t be wiped out in a minute.

One tree grew close by and I could see the rain streaking its bark and its sticky buds. Trees were rowed the length of the long block beyond me, rising tall in dripping wetness above a series of cluttered backyards. And it occurred to me that cleared of its ramshackle fences and planted with flowers and grass, it might form a pleasant park. And just then a paper bag sailed from a window to my left and burst like a silent grenade, scattering garbage into the trees and pancaking to earth with a soggy, exhausted plop!

And it went so fast and smoothly that it seemed not to happen to me but to someone who actually bore my new name. I almost laughed into the phone when I heard the director of Men’s House address me with profound respect. My new name was getting around.

I organized a drill team of six-footers whose duty it was to march through the streets striking up sparks with their hob-nailed shoes. On the day of the parade they drew crowds faster than a dogfight on a country road. The People’s Hot Foot Squad, we called them, and when they drilled fancy formations down Seventh Avenue in the springtime dusk they set the streets ablaze.

and the new public self that spoke for the Brotherhood and was becoming so much more important than the other that I seemed to run a foot race against myself.

it was the one organization in the whole country in which I could reach the very top and I meant to get there. Even if it meant climbing a mountain of words.

“You start Saul, and end up Paul,” my grandfather had often said. “When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul—though you still Sauls around on the side.”

“But what about the others?” “What others?” “The ones who don’t think so much of me?” “Them’s the ones I haven’t heard about, son.”

“You from down South, ain’t you, son?” “Yes,” I said. He turned in his chair, sliding one hand into his pocket as he rested his chin upon the other. “I don’t really have the words to say what just come into my head, son. You see, I was down there for a long time before I come up here, and when I did come up they was after me. What I mean is, I had to escape, I had to come a-running.” “I guess I did too, in a way,” I said. “You mean they were after you too?” “Not really, Brother Tarp, I just feel that way.”

what started out as an argument between a couple of men turned out to be a crime worth nineteen years of my life.”

It was such a link as I had seen on Bledsoe’s desk, only while that one had been smooth, Tarp’s bore the marks of haste and violence, looking as though it had been attacked and conquered before it stubbornly yielded. I looked at him and shook my head as he watched me inscrutably. Finding no words to ask him more about it, I slipped the link over my knuckles and struck it sharply against the desk. Brother Tarp chuckled. “Now there’s a way I never thought of using it,” he said.

I ask myself every day, ‘What are you doing against Brotherhood?’ and when I find it, I root it out, I burn it out like a man cauterizing a mad-dog bite.

They want a true flag, one that’s as much theirs as anybody else’s. You know what I mean?” “Yes, I think I do,” I said, remembering that there was always that sense in me of being apart when the flag went by. It had been a reminder, until I’d found the Brotherhood, that my star was not yet there …

I wanted to punch that face. It no longer seemed real, but a mask behind which the real face was probably laughing, both at me and at the others. For he couldn’t believe what he had said. It just wasn’t possible. He was the plotter and from the serious looks on the committee’s faces he was getting away with it.

Wrestrum,

Good name for this toilet of a person! To the bog with him!

I’ve tried to do my work and if the brothers don’t know that, then it’s too late to tell them.

Yet I had to fight him as I could, in terms he understood, even though we sounded like characters in a razor-slinging vaudeville skit.

I’m interested in all manner of odd behavior. Who wouldn’t be, when one wild man can make a roomful of what I’d come to regard as some of the best minds in the country take him seriously.

I looked into their smoke-washed faces; not since the beginning had I faced such serious doubts.

If only I were a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier, I could simply stand before them with a sign across my chest, stating I KNOW ALL ABOUT THEM, and they’d be as awed as though I were the original boogey man—somehow reformed and domesticated. I’d no more have to speak than Paul Robeson had to act; they’d simply thrill at the sight of me.

the kind of woman who glows as though consciously acting a symbolic role of life and feminine fertility.

Through no effort of my own, I have economic security and leisure, but what is that, really, when so much is wrong with the world? I mean when there is no spiritual or emotional security, and no justice?”

I felt some of the air escape from the room, leaving it unnaturally quiet. “You don’t mean primitive?” I said. “Yes, primitive; no one has told you, Brother, that at times you have tom-toms beating in your voice?” “My God,” I laughed, “I thought that was the beat of profound ideas.”