Ralph Ellison - Invisible man

I SAW her across the room when I awoke, reading a newspaper, her glasses low across the bridge of her nose as she stared at the page intently. Then I realized that though the glasses still slanted down, the eyes were no longer focused on the page, but on my face and lighting with a slow smile.

"How you feel now?" she said.

"Much better."

"I thought you would be. And you be even better after you have a cup of soup I got for you in the kitchen. You slept a good long time."

"Did I?" I said. "What time is it?"

"It's about ten o'clock, and from the way you slept I suspects all you needed was some rest ... No, don't git up yet. You got to drink your soup, then you can go," she said, leaving.

She returned with a bowl in a plate. "This here'll fix you up," she said. "You don't get this kind of service up there at Men's House, do you? Now, you just sit there and take your time. I ain't got nothing to do but read the paper. And I like company. You have to make time in the morning?"

"No, I've been sick," I said. "But I have to look for a job."

"I knowed you wasn't well. Why you try to hide it?"

"I didn't want to be trouble to anyone," I said.

"Everybody has to be trouble to somebody. And you just come from the hospital too."

I looked up. She sat in the rocking chair bent forward, her arms folded at ease across her aproned lap. Had she searched my pockets?

"How did you know that?" I said.

"There you go getting suspicious," she said sternly. "That's what's wrong with the world today, don't nobody trust nobody. I can smell that hospital smell on you, son. You got enough ether in those clothes to put to sleep a dog!"

"I couldn't remember telling you that I had been in the hospital."

"No, and you didn't have to. I smelled that out. You got people here in the city?"

"No, ma'm," I said. "They're down South. I came up here to work so I could go to school, and I got sick."

"Now ain't that too bad! But you'll make out all right. What you plan to make out of yourself?"

"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, seeing her heavy, composed figure before 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 one's 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. They finds a place for theyselves and forgits the ones on the bottom. Oh, heap of them talks about doing things, but they done really forgot. No, it's you young ones what has to remember and take the lead."

"Yes," I said.

"And you have to take care of yourself, son. Don't let this Harlem git you. I'm in New York but New York ain't in me, understand what I mean? Don't git corrupted."

"I won't. I'll be too busy."

"All right now, you looks to me like you might make something out of yourself, so you be careful."

I got up to go, watching her raise herself out of her chair and come with me to the door.

"You ever decide you want a room somewhere beside Men's House, try me," she said. "The rent's reasonable."

"I'll remember that," I said.

I WAS to remember sooner than I had thought. The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men's House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility. My overalls were causing stares and I knew that I could live there no longer, that that phase of my life was past. The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with Utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community "leaders" without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil-War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed nothing beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; 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. Yes, and that older group with similar aspirations, the "fundamentalists," the "actors" who sought to achieve the status of brokers through imagination alone, a group of janitors and messengers who spent most of their wages on clothing such as was fashionable among Wall Street brokers, with their Brooks Brothers suits and bowler hats, English umbrellas, black calfskin shoes and yellow gloves; with their orthodox and passionate argument as to what was the correct tie to wear with what shirt, what shade of gray was correct for spats and what would the Prince of Wales wear at a certain seasonal event; should field glasses be slung from the right or from the left shoulder; who never read the financial pages though they purchased the Wall Street Journal religiously and carried it beneath the left elbow, pressed firm against the body and grasped in the left hand -- always manicured and gloved, fair weather or foul -- with an easy precision (Oh, they had style) while the other hand whipped a tightly rolled umbrella back and forth at a calculated angle; with their homburgs and Chesterfields, their polo coats and Tyrolean hats worn strictly as fashion demanded.

I could feel their eyes, saw them all and saw too the time when they would know that my prospects were ended and saw already the contempt they'd feel for me, a college man who had lost his prospects and pride. I could see it all and I knew that even the officials and the older men would despise me as though, somehow, in losing my place in Bledsoe's world I had betrayed them ... I saw it as they looked at my overalls.

I had started toward the elevator when I heard the voice raised in laughter and turned to see him holding forth to a group in the lobby chairs and the rolls of fat behind the wrinkled, high-domed, close-cut head, and I 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.

No one followed me and I wandered the streets amazed at my own action. Later it began to rain and I sneaked back near Men's House and persuaded an amused porter to slip my things out to me. I learned that I had been barred from the building for "ninety-nine years and a day."

"You might not can come back, man," the porter said, "but after what you did, I swear, they never will stop talking about you. You really baptized ole Rev!"

So THAT same night I went back to Mary's, where I lived in a small but comfortable room until the ice came.