Three Days Before the Shooting ... by Ralph Ellison Read Free Book Online Page A

whirl as they turned in their flat-heeled shoes. When ordered to remove his wide-brimmed hat, one old man held it for the guard to look inside; then, flipping out the sweatband, he gave the crown a tap, causing something to fall to the floor, then waited with a callused palm extended as the guard bent to retrieve it. Straightening and unfolding the object, the guard saw a worn but neatly creased fifty-dollar bill which he dropped upon the outstretched palm as though it were hot. They watched silently as he looked at the old man and gave a dry, harsh laugh; then as he continued laughing the humor slowly receded behind their eyes. Not until they were allowed to file into the street did they give further voice to their amusement.
    “These here folks don’t understand nothing,” one of the old ladies said. “If we had been the kind to depend on the sword instead of on the Lord, we’d been in our graves long ago—ain’t that right, Sis Arter?”
    “You said it,” Sister Arter said. “In the grave and done long finished molding!”
    “Let them worry, our conscience is clear on that ….”
    “Amen!”
    On the sidewalk now, they stood around Reverend Hickman, holding a hushed conference, then in a few minutes they had disappeared in a string of taxis and the incident was thought closed.
    Shortly afterwards, however, they appeared mysteriously at a hotel where the Senator leased a private suite, and tried to see him. How they knew of this secret suite they would not explain.
    Next, they appeared at the editorial office of the newspaper which had been most critical of the Senator’s methods, but here, too, they were turned away. They were taken for a protest group, just one more lot of disgruntled Negroes crying for justice as though theirs were the only grievances in the world. Indeed, they received less of a hearing here than elsewhere. They weren’t even questioned as to why they wished to see the Senator—which was poor newspaper work, to say the least; a failure of technical alertness, and, as events were soon to prove, a gross violation of press responsibility.
    So once more they moved away.
    Although the Senator returned to Washington the following day, his secretary failed to report his strange visitors. There were important interviews scheduled, and she had understandably classified the old people as just another annoyance. Once the reception room was cleared of their disquieting presence, they seemed no more significant than the heavy mail received from white liberals and Negroes, liberal and reactionary alike, whenever the Senator made one of his taunting remarks. She forgot them. Then at about eleven A.M . Reverend Hickman reappeared without the others and started into the building. This time, however, he was not to reach the secretary. One of the guards, the same who had picked up the fifty-dollar bill, recognized him and pushed him bodily from the building.
    Indeed, the old man was handled quite roughly, his sheer weight and bulk and the slow rhythm of his normal movements infuriating the guard to that quick, heated fury which springs up in one when dealing with the unexpected recalcitrance of some inanimate object. Say, the huge stone that resists the bulldozer’s power or the chest of drawers that refuses to budge from its spot on the floor. Nor did the old man’s composure help matters. Nor did his passive resistance hide his distaste at having strange hands placed upon his person. As he was being pushed about, old Hickman looked at the guard with a kind of tolerance, an understanding which seemed to remove his personal emotions to some far, cool place where the guard’s strength could never reach them. He even managed to pick up his hat from the sidewalk, where it had been thrown after him, with no great show of breath or hurry, and arose to regard the guard with a serene dignity.
    “Son,” he said, flicking a spot of dirt from the soft old panama with a white handkerchief, “I’m sorry that this