Authors: Ralph Ellison
“My kid,” Hambro said, “filibustering against going to bed. A real sea lawyer, that kid.”
The child was singing
Hickory Dickory Dock
, very fast, as Hambro shut the door. He was saying something about the child and I looked at him with sudden irritation. With Rinehart on my mind, why had I come here?
Hambro was so tall that when he crossed his legs both feet touched the floor. He had been my teacher during my period of indoctrination and now I realized that I shouldn’t have come. Hambro’s lawyer’s mind was too narrowly logical. He’d see Rinehart simply as a criminal, my obsession as a fall into pure mysticism … You’d better hope that is the way he’ll see it, I thought. Then I decided to ask him about conditions uptown and leave …
“Look, Brother Hambro,” I said, “what’s to be done about my district?”
He looked at me with a dry smile. “Have I become one of those bores who talk too much about their children?”
“Oh, no, it’s not that,” I said. “I’ve had a hard day. I’m nervous. With Clifton’s death and things in the district so bad, I guess …”
“Of course,” he said, still smiling, “but why are you worried about the district?”
“Because things are getting out of hand. Ras’s men tried to rough me up tonight and our strength is steadily going to hell.”
“That’s regrettable,” he said, “but there’s nothing to be done about it that wouldn’t upset the larger plan. It’s unfortunate, Brother, but your members will have to be sacrificed.”
The distant child had stopped singing now, and it was dead quiet. I looked at the angular composure of his face searching for the sincerity in his words. I could feel some deep change. It was as though my discovery of Rinehart had opened a gulf between us over which, though we sat within touching distance, our voices barely carried and then fell flat, without an echo. I tried to shake it away, but still the distance, so great that neither could grasp the emotional tone of the other, remained.
“Sacrifice?” my voice said. “You say that very easily.”
“Just the same, though, all who leave must be considered expendable. The new directives must be followed rigidly.”
It sounded unreal, an antiphonal game. “But why?” I said. “Why must the directives be changed in my district when the old methods are needed—especially now?” Somehow I couldn’t get the needed urgency into my words, and beneath it all something about Rinehart bothered me, darted just beneath the surface of my mind; something that had to do with me intimately.
“It’s simple, Brother,” Hambro was saying. “We are making temporary alliances with other political groups and the interests of one group of brothers must be sacrificed to that of the whole.”
“Why wasn’t I told of this?” I said.
“You will be, in time, by the committee— Sacrifice is necessary now—”
“But shouldn’t sacrifice be made willingly by those who know what they are doing? My people don’t understand why they’re being sacrificed. They don’t even
know
they’re being sacrificed—at least not by us …” But what, my mind went on, if they’re as willing to be duped by the Brotherhood as by Rinehart?
I sat up at the thought and there must have been an odd expression on my face, for Hambro, who was resting his elbows upon the arms of his chair and touching his fingertips together, raised his eyebrows as though expecting me to continue. Then he said, “The disciplined members will understand.”
I pulled Tarp’s leg chain from my pocket and slipped it over my knuckles. He didn’t notice. “Don’t you realize that we have only a handful of disciplined members left? Today the funeral brought out hundreds who’ll drop away as soon as they see we’re not following through. And now we’re being attacked on the streets. Can’t you understand? Other groups are circulating petitions, Ras is calling for violence. The committee is mistaken if they think this is going to die down.”
He shrugged. “It’s a risk which we must take. All of us must sacrifice for the good of the whole. Change is achieved through sacrifice. We follow the laws of reality, so we make sacrifices.”
“But the community is demanding equality of sacrifice,” I said. “We’ve never asked for special treatment.”
“It isn’t that simple, Brother,” he said. “We have to protect our gains. It’s inevitable that some must make greater sacrifices than others …”
“That ‘some’ being my people …”
“In this instance, yes.”
“So the weak must sacrifice for the strong? Is that it, Brother?”
“No, a part of the whole is sacrificed—and will continue to be until a new society is formed.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “I just don’t get it. We work our hearts out trying to get the people to follow us and just when they do, just when they see their relationship to events, we drop them. I don’t see it.”
Hambro smiled remotely. “We don’t have to worry about the aggressiveness of the Negroes. Not during the new period or any other. In fact, we now have to slow them down for their own good. It’s a scientific necessity.”
I looked at him, at the long, bony, almost Lincolnesque face. I might have liked him, I thought, he seems to be a really kind and sincere man and yet he can say this to me …
“So you really believe that,” I said quietly.
“With all my integrity,” he said.
For a second I thought I’d laugh. Or let fly with Tarp’s link.
Integrity!
He talks to me of
integrity!
I described a circle in the air. I’d tried to build my integrity upon the role of Brotherhood and now it had changed to water, air. What was integrity? What did it have to do with a world in which Rinehart was possible and successful?
“But what’s changed?” I said. “Wasn’t I brought in to arouse their aggressiveness?” My voice fell sad, hopeless.
“For that particular period,” Hambro said, leaning a little forward. “Only for that period.”
“And what will happen now?” I said.
He blew a smoke ring, the blue-gray circle rising up boiling within its own jetting form, hovering for an instant then disintegrating into a weaving strand.
“Cheer up!” he said. “We shall progress. Only now they must be brought along more slowly …”
How would he look through the green lenses? I thought, saying, “Are you sure you’re not saying that they must be held back?”
He chuckled. “Now, listen,” he said. “Don’t stretch me on a rack of dialectic. I’m a brother.”
“You mean the brakes must be put on the old wheel of history,” I said. “Or is it the little wheels
within
the wheel?”
His face sobered. “I mean only that they must be brought along more slowly. They can’t be allowed to upset the tempo of the master plan. Timing is all important. Besides, you still have a job to do, only now it will be more educational.”
“And what about the shooting?”
“Those who are dissatisfied will drop away and those who remain you’ll teach …”
“I don’t think I can,” I said.
“Why? It’s just as important.”
“Because they are against us; besides, I’d feel like Rinehart …” It slipped out and he looked at me.
“Like who?”
“Like a charlatan,” I said.
Hambro laughed. “I thought you had learned about that, Brother.”
I looked at him quickly. “Learned what?”
“That it’s impossible
not
to take advantage of the people.”
“That’s Rinehartism—cynicism …”
“What?”.
“Cynicism,” I said.
“Not cynicism—realism. The trick is to take advantage of them in their own best interest.”
I sat forward in my chair, suddenly conscious of the unreality of the conversation. “But who is to judge? Jack? The committee?”
“We judge through cultivating scientific objectivity,” he said with a voice that had a smile in it, and suddenly I saw the hospital machine, felt as though locked in again.
“Don’t kid yourself,” I said. “The only scientific objectivity is a machine.”
“Discipline, not machinery,” he said. “We’re scientists. We must take the risks of our science and our will to achieve. Would you like to resurrect God to take responsibility?” He shook his head. “No, Brother, we have to make such decisions ourselves. Even if we must sometimes appear as charlatans.”
“You’re in for some surprises,” I said.
“Maybe so and maybe not,” he said. “At any rate, through our very position in the vanguard we must do and say the things necessary to get the greatest number of the people to move toward what is for their own good.”
Suddenly I couldn’t stand it.
“Look at me! Look at
me!”
I said. “Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my good—only
they
were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop? Is this the new true definition, is Brotherhood a matter of sacrificing the weak? If so, at what point do we stop?”
Hambro looked as though I were not there. “At the proper moment science will stop us. And of course we as individuals must sympathetically debunk ourselves. Even though it does only a little good. But then,” he shrugged, “if you go too far in that direction you can’t pretend to lead. You’ll lose your confidence. You won’t believe enough in your own correctness to lead others. You must therefore have confidence in those who lead you—in the collective wisdom of Brotherhood.”
I left in a worse state than that in which I’d come. Several buildings away I heard him call behind me, watched him approach through the dark.
“You left your hat,” he said, handing it to me along with the mimeographed sheets of instructions outlining the new program. I looked at the hat and at him, thinking of Rinehart and invisibility, but knew that for him it would have no reality. I told him good night and went through the hot street to Central Park West, starting toward Harlem.
Sacrifice and leadership, I thought. For him it was simple. For
them
it was simple. But hell, I was both. Both sacrificer and victim. I couldn’t get away from that, and Hambro didn’t have to deal with it. That was reality too, my reality. He didn’t have to put the knife blade to his own throat. What would he say if
he
were the victim?
I walked along the park in the dark. Cars passed. From time to time the sound of voices, squealing laughter, arose from beyond the trees and hedges. I could smell the sun-singed grass. The sky against which an airplane beacon played was still overcast. I thought of Jack, the people at the funeral, Rinehart. They’d asked us for bread and the best I could give was a glass eye—not so much as an electric guitar.
I stopped and dropped to a bench. I should leave, I thought. That would be the honest thing to do. Otherwise I could only tell them to have hope and try to hold on to those who’d listen. Was that also what Rinehart was, a principle of hope for which they gladly paid? Otherwise there was nothing but betrayal, and that meant going back to serve Bledsoe, and Emerson, jumping from the pot of absurdity to the fire of the ridiculous. And either was a self-betrayal. But I couldn’t leave; I had to settle with Jack and Tobitt. I owed it to Clifton and Tarp and the others. I had to hold on … and then I had an idea that shook me profoundly: You don’t have to worry about the people. If they tolerate Rinehart, then they will forget it and even with them you are invisible. It lasted only the fraction of a second and I rejected it immediately; still it had flashed across the dark sky of my mind. It was just like that. It didn’t matter because they didn’t realize just what had happened, neither my hope nor my failure. My ambition and integrity were nothing to them and my failure was as meaningless as Clifton’s. It had been that way all along. Only in the Brotherhood had there seemed a chance for such as us, the mere glimmer of a light, but behind the polished and humane façade of Jack’s eye I’d found an amorphous form and a harsh red rawness. And even that was without meaning except for me.
Well, I
was
and yet I was invisible, that was the fundamental contradiction. I was and yet I was unseen. It was frightening and as I sat there I sensed another frightening world of possibilities. For now I saw that I could agree with Jack without agreeing. And I could tell Harlem to have hope when there was no hope. Perhaps I could tell them to hope until I found the basis of something real, some firm ground for action that would lead them onto the plane of history. But until then I would have to move them without myself being moved … I’d have to do a Rinehart.
I leaned against a stone wall along the park, thinking of Jack and Hambro and of the day’s events and shook with rage. It was all a swindle, an obscene swindle! They had set themselves up to describe the world. What did they know of us, except that we numbered so many, worked on certain jobs, offered so many votes, and provided so many marchers for some protest parade of theirs? I leaned there, aching to humiliate them, to refute them. And now all past humiliations became precious parts of my experience, and for the first time, leaning against that stone wall in the sweltering night, I began to accept my past and, as I accepted it, I felt memories welling up within me. It was as though I’d learned suddenly to look around corners; images of past humiliations flickered through my head and I saw that they were more than separate experiences. They were me; they defined me. I was my experiences and my experiences were me, and no blind men, no matter how powerful they became, even if they conquered the world, could take that, or change one single itch, taunt, laugh, cry, scar, ache, rage or pain of it. They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their own voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves and I’d help them. I laughed. Here I had thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn’t see either color or men … For all they were concerned, we were so many names scribbled on fake ballots, to be used at their convenience and when not needed to be filed away. It was a joke, an absurd joke. And now I looked around a corner of my mind and saw Jack and Norton and Emerson merge into one single white figure. They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me. I was simply a material, a natural resource to be used. I had switched from the arrogant absurdity of Norton and Emerson to that of Jack and the Brotherhood, and it all came out the same—except I now recognized my invisibility.