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

had to happen to you. Here you’ve worked up a sweat on this hot morning, and not a thing has been changed—except that you’ve interfered with something that doesn’t concern you. After all, you’re only a guard, you’re not a mind reader. Because if you were, you’d be trying to get me in there as fast as you could instead of trying to keep meout. You’re probably not even a good guard, and I wonder what on earth you’d do if I came here prepared to make some trouble. You think of trouble as coming from numbers, but you’re wrong. It comes in all sizes.”
    Fortunately, there were too many spectators present for the guard to risk giving the old fellow a demonstration, and he was compelled to stand silent, his thumbs hooked over his cartridge belt, while old Hickman strolled—or, more accurately, floated —up the walk and disappeared around the corner.
    Except for two attempts by telephone, once to the Senator’s office and later to his home, the group made no further effort until that afternoon, when Hickman sent a telegram asking Senator Sunraider to phone him at a T Street hotel. A message, which, thanks again to the secretary, the Senator did not see. Following this attempt there was silence.
    During the late afternoon the group of closemouthed old folk were seen praying quietly within the Lincoln Memorial. An amateur photographer, a high-school boy from the Bronx, was there at the time, and it was his chance photograph of the group, standing with bowed heads beneath old Hickman’s outspread arms while facing the great sculpture, that was flashed over the wires following the shooting. Asked why he had photographed that particular group, the boy replied that he had seen them as a “good composition ….
    I thought their faces would make a fine scale of grays between the whiteness of the marble and the blackness of the shadows.” And for the rest of the day the group appears to have faded into those same peaceful shadows, to remain there until the next morning—when they materialized shortly before chaos erupted.

BOOK I

CHAPTER 1
    U NDERSTAND ME , I was there; sitting in the press section at the start of the shooting. I had been rereading M. Vannec’s most unexpected letter when suddenly it was as though a certain long-forgotten night of violence to which he referred had flared from the page and accelerated into chaotic life.
    First, the popping sound had drawn my attention down to the orating Senator; then, far across in the visitors’ gallery, there came a flash of movement—and then it was as though the letter had caught flame in my hands. Then, for some reason the photographic image of the elegant magnesium-bodied sports car which ignited and burned during the recent running of the Le Mans Grand Prix—that awe-inspiring sabre of flame and destruction—flashed through my mind just as I was looking out past the great chandelier of the chamber to see an elegantly dressed man lean over the visitors’- gallery rail and point down to where, gripping the sides of the lectern and tossing his head, Senator Sunraider was speaking. Then things seemed to reel out of phase.
    Directly below me, on the floor of the chamber, the Senator’s colleagues sat calmly engrossed in his argument, while along the curving rail to either side of the pointing man I could see visitors leaping to their feet and away, scattering. Then something thudded against the lectern, and somewhere above me I could hear a gay, erratic ringing, like the musical jangling of a huge bunch of keys.
    Then, as the sound and the rising of the man’s arm flew together in my mind, my nerves snapped like a window shade: He was firing a pistol at the Senator. Oh, no , I thought, OH, NO! We were only betting, it was all in fun. This can’t be happening!
    Yet, with the swiftness of glass ornaments sent bursting from a Christmas tree by the fire of a circus sharpshooter, arrows of prismatic light were flying from the swaying chandelier. And above the