CHAPTER 1
Two days before the
shooting a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the
District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator. They were all quite
elderly: old ladies dressed in little white caps and white uniforms made
of surplus nylon parachute material, and men dressed in neat but old-fashioned
black suits, wearing wide-brimmed, deep-crowned panama hats which, in
the Senator's walnut-paneled reception room now, they held with a grave
ceremonial air. Solemn, uncommunicative and quietly insistent, they were
led by a huge, distinguished-looking old fellow who on the day of the
chaotic event was to prove himself, his age notwithstanding, an extraordinarily
powerful man. Tall and broad and of an easy dignity, this was the Reverend
A. Z. Hickman--better known, as one of the old ladies proudly informed
the Senator's secretary, as "God's Trombone."
This, however, was
about all they were willing to explain. Forty-four in number, the women
with their fans and satchels and picnic baskets, and the men carrying
new blue airline take-on bags, they listened intently while Reverend Hickman
did their talking.
"Ma'am," Hickman said,
his voice deep and resonant as he nodded toward the door of the Senator's
private office, "you just tell the Senator that Hickman has arrived. When
he hears who's out here he'll know that it's important and want to see
us."
"But I've told you
that the Senator isn't available," the secretary said. "Just what is your
business? Who are you, anyway? Are you his constituents?"
"Constituents?" Suddenly
the old man smiled. "No, miss," he said, "the Senator doesn't even have
anybody like us in his state. We're from down where we're among the counted
but not among the heard."
"Then why are you
coming here?" she said. "What is your business?"
"He'll tell you, ma'am,"
Hickman said. "He'll know who we are; all you have to do is tell him that
we have arrived. . . ."
The secretary, a young
Mississippian, sighed. Obviously these were Southern Negroes of a type
she had known all her life--and old ones; yet instead of being already
in herdlike movement toward the door they were calmly waiting, as though
she hadn't said a word. And now she had a suspicion that, for all their
staring eyes, she actually didn't exist for them. They just stood there,
now looking oddly like a delegation of Asians who had lost their interpreter
along the way, and were trying to tell her something which she had no
interest in hearing, through this old man who himself did not know the
language. Suddenly they no longer seemed familiar, and a feeling of dreamlike
incongruity came over her. They were so many that she could no longer
see the large abstract paintings hung along the paneled wall, nor the
framed facsimiles of State Documents which hung above a bust of Vice-President
Calhoun. Some of the old women were calmly plying their palm-leaf fans,
as though in serene defiance of the droning air conditioner. Yet she could
see no trace of impertinence in their eyes, nor any of the anger which
the Senator usually aroused in members of their group. Instead, they seemed
resigned, like people embarked upon a difficult journey who were already
far beyond the point of no return. Her uneasiness grew; then she blotted
out the others by focusing her eyes narrowly upon their leader. And when
she spoke again her voice took on a nervous edge.
"I've told you that
the Senator isn't here," she said, "and you must realize that he is a
busy man who can only see people by appointment. . . ."
"We know, ma'am,"
Hickman said, "but . . ."
"You don't just walk
in here and expect to see him on a minute's notice."
"We understand that,
ma'am," Hickman said, looking mildly into her eyes, his close-cut white
head tilted to one side, "but this is something that developed of a sudden.
Couldn't you reach him by long distance? We'd pay the charges. And I don't
even have to talk, miss; you can do the talking. All you have to say is
that we have arrived."
"I'm afraid this is
impossible," she said.
The very evenness
of the old man's voice made her feel uncomfortably young, and now, deciding
that she had exhausted all the tried-and-true techniques her region had
worked out (short of violence) for getting quickly rid of Negroes, the
secretary lost her patience and telephoned for a guard.
They left as quietly
as they had appeared, the old minister waiting behind until the last had
stepped into the hall, then he turned, and she saw his full height, framed
by the doorway, as the others arranged themselves beyond him in the hall.
"You're really making a mistake, miss," he said. "The Senator knows us
and--"
"Knows you," she said
indignantly. "I've heard Senator Sunraider state that the only colored
he knows is the boy who shines shoes at his golf club."
"Oh?" Hickman shook
his head as the others exchanged knowing glances. "Very well, ma'am. We're
sorry to have caused you this trouble. It's just that it's very important
that the Senator know we're on the scene. So I hope you won't forget to
tell him that we have arrived, because soon it might be too late."
There was no threat
in it; indeed, his voice echoed the odd sadness which she thought she
detected in the faces of the others just before the door blotted them
from view.
In the hall they exchanged
no words, moving silently behind the guard who accompanied them down to
the lobby. They were about to move into the street when the security-minded
chief guard observed their number, stepped up, and ordered them searched.
They submitted patiently,
amused that anyone should consider them capable of harm, and for the first
time an emotion broke the immobility of their faces. They chuckled and
winked and smiled, fully aware of the comic aspect of the situation. Here
they were, quiet, old, and obviously religious black folk who, because
they had attempted to see the man who was considered the most vehement
enemy of their people in either house of Congress, were being energetically
searched by uniformed security police, and they knew what the absurd outcome
would be. They were found to be armed with nothing more dangerous than
pieces of fried chicken and ham sandwiches, chocolate cake and sweet-potato
fried pies. Some obeyed the guards' commands with exaggerated sprightliness,
the old ladies giving their skirts 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 mold'ing!"
"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 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 offices of the newspaper which was 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--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 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 me out. 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."
Fortunately, there were too many spectators present for the guard to risk
giving the old fellow a demonstration. 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 closed-mouthed 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 facing the great sculpture with bowed heads beneath old
Hickman's outspread arms, 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 good 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
Excerpted from Juneteenth © Copyright 2008 by Ralph Ellison. Reprinted with permission by Vintage Books. All rights reserved.
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