Three Days Before the Shooting ... (198 page)

This man McIntyre is a modern reporter who goes around with a compact tape recorder which he uses instead of the regulation sheets of folded paper. He is thus able to come away with the exact dialogue, the exact words of the interviewee. He thus [is] able to report to Vannec in detail and to present McMillen’s story in transcription. He is no less confused by what he sees and hears but for once his is accurate. // One must keep to this device; it offers endless opportunities nevertheless, it is no explanation of how McMillen comes by his detailed memory or his ability to recall the action so completely. The answer here, of course, is that he remembers what he remembers, that he is telling the story to a group of white men and thus under psychological pressure to shape the story, to give it form in a way which eliminates that which he finds resistant, that which he fears is too loaded with taboo, and that which was insignificant to his sense of the facts. In short, McMillen is a story-teller and thus an artist. While McIntyre who has wanted to be an artist can only be a reporter because he is dominated by facts—and even then is without the insight which would raise the facts to broader significance. (140/4)

Hickman and Leroy
// It seems that Leroy is telling Hickman about an initiation ritual in which the figure in his dark room is conducting. Thus the seven questions—or mistakes—have to do with a riddle. But in the street scene Leroy is putting
Hickman
through an initiation in which Leroy and his fantasies constitute the riddle. That riddle points to politics and thus to the complex meaning which lies in Hickman’s relationship with Sunraider. What is the secret knowledge which underlies all this craziness? (140/2)

Janey could reveal secret out of guilt; or, Oedipus-like, Severen could badger Love until Love tells him directly. Or someone could show Severen a snapshot of his mother and Bliss. This perhaps could be the owner of the movie house who has a collection of photographs taken of entertainers who had performed in theater. But by putting information together Severen learns enough to proceed to Washington. (139/4)

The burning of the Cadillac and Jessie Rockmore’s rejection of God are of the same substance. They represent a collapse of walls which kept despair within bounds. And while both are comic they are nevertheless tragic in what they imply for the nation. They should prepare us for the shooting. (140/6)

Rockmore is trying to say that what the president views [as] peace is actually the Civil War continued in the form of words and the manipulation of prejudices. // N.B. Try introducing Hickman and Wilhite immediately after McIntyre leaves the building. And this time it is he who leaves the door open. (RE 51, 9/14/93)

Rereading the Rockmore incident it appears that along with the car burning and the encounter with the senator’s secretary et al, trivial chaos is building to some kind of disaster. Each complaint—LeeWillie’s, the crossedeyed woman’s, Rockmore’s—are all concerned with serious matters that are not allowed to be viewed seriously. Lonnie Barnes, like A. B. McDonald is a fool who aspires to play a serious role in government. Sunraider is a trickster who plays a serious role, and perhaps it is he who is behind what’s happening. (139/6)

Ellison: Oh for God’s sake! I didn’t make the statement, Hickman made the statement. He was preaching a sermon about transformation; the recovery—the refusal—to be decimated by slavery. Besides, he was speaking as a Christian minister of the role of his religion in giving unity and a sense of hope to a people that had been deliberately deprived of continuity with their past and its traditions. (139/1)

THINGS TO REMEMBER WHEN PLOTTING
// The blue-print of the plot should contain scenes on a rising note of dramatic intensity, leading to the crisis and climax. // No scene within a story has value unless it develops conflict of at least a minor sort.

A………. Plot Idea.

B………. Sub-plot (stairs)

C………. Collateral Material: Characterization, atmosphere, motivation.

    Use one chief character at a time.

Milk the sub-scenes for everything emotional and dramatic that is inherent in them.

   Nota Bene: Remember that the sound of your machine, typewriter or computer, helps you work! Start it going, even if at random. (139/4)

TWO EARLY DRAFTS OF THE OPENING OF BOOK II

Editors’ Note: The surviving 4- and 11-page drafts of the opening of Book II are impossible to date precisely. The former opens the 185-page partial draft of Book II from which Ellison in 1959 culled and edited “And Hickman Arrives” for Saul Bellow’s journal,
Noble Savage
, published in 1960. Like the prologue to Book I, which became the opening of “And Hickman Arrives,” this early draft is spare and dramatic, focused keenly and single-mindedly on the immediate action of the assassination from the perspective of Senator Sunraider, aka Bliss, as he is struck down on the floor of the Senate.

The subsequent 11-page draft is undated. In its expanding themes and focus it lies between the earlier 4-page draft and the longer 24-page draft found in Book II. In it Ellison gives a taste of Sunraider’s somewhat florid and ambivalent speech, which is greatly expanded, to mixed effect, in the longest draft of Book II, published of the current volume (and also as chapter 2 of
Juneteenth
in 1999).

Considered together with the long opening of Book II published here, these drafts show Ellison’s growing purpose and his evolving concern with the Senator’s ambiguous political rhetoric.

I
[Circa 1959, the opening of a 185-page partial draft of Book II]

The Senator had no idea what struck him. He had been in the full-throated roar of his rhetoric, had moved beyond the mere meaning of his words onto that plane of verbal exhilaration for which he was notorious and, having placed his audience under the spell of his eloquence, had then decided in the capriciousness of his virtuosity to better the old Senate record for shattering the building’s
window panes by the sheer resonance of the projected voice. It was then he saw the tall young man rising in the distant visitor’s gallery and leaning casually across the rail as though about to point out some detail of a scene to some still seated friend, pausing there in space, the light behind his head. And he thought,
I’ve lost this one, he’s leaving. How can he escape me? Then
as he continued in the full flow of his / suddenly pieces of glass / were bursting from the chandelier above him.
My God!
he thought,
it’s the chandelier; I’ve shattered the chandelier!
hearing the dry, popping sound even before he realized that he had been hit or that the man was shooting at him.
Me
, he thought.
It’s come to me at last … with a silencer noiselessly
, still standing, his arms outflung in rhetorical gesture, as something struck his side with the impact of a solid invisible club; then again, the right side this time, and he staggered backwards then forward, thinking,
“I’m going … I’m …
“and he knew it was important to retreat, to fall backwards, but it was as though he was propped up and held by an invisible cable. Nor could he get his arms down, yet his eyes were recording with the impassive and precise inclusiveness of a motion picture camera thrown suddenly out of phase; the image of the remote man high there in the gallery above firing down at him as calmly as if he were shooting clay pigeons sailing from a trap on a remote shooting range; he could see the others, those on the floor and those around the man above, caught in their attitudes of surprise, disbelief or horror, turning slowly with puppet gestures, some rising, some looking at their neighbors, but none moving even now toward the calm man, who seemed as detached from his act and the rise and fall of his pistol arm as he was from the Senator.
A silencer
, he thought with awe.
And the others are thrown out of stance. What breed of men are—who’s laying me low …? down …? who?
When it was as though someone had dragged a poker at white heat straight down the center of his scalp and at last he felt himself going over backwards, crashing against a chair, thinking,
Down
and feeling something searing hot on the sole of his right foot and his mind spinning out of control even as he heard himself cry out words he knew should not be uttered but which he could no longer control: “Lord, Lawd!” he cried, “Why hast Thou forsaken me?” his voice rising with hysterical shrillness like that of a Negro preacher who sounded in his practiced fervor somewhat like an accomplished actor shouting his lines. And as his words flew up he heard from far away a sound as of shattering glass, and even as he heard his voice begin its echoed return he was filled with a profound sense of self-betrayal as though stripped naked in the Senate. He had the sensation of perspiration bursting from his face like water from a suddenly activated sprinkler. Still trying to rise now he was gripped by the hot impression that somehow he was trying to fold a huge white circus tent into a packet while a playful wind kept blowing it out of his hands; listening all the time for he was waiting for his voice to ricochet back to him; and now he seemed to hear the words floating calmly down, “For thou had forsaken me …” But no longer his words nor his echoed voice and now he felt, hearing what sounded like singing, a sudden fear,
thinking,
No! No! and
trying desperately to sit up, thinking,
Hickman? But how? His voice? Hickman?
Then the very idea that Hickman was there above him raised him up, clutching onto a chair, into a sitting position, trying to see clearly above him as now there came another shot, but this one he did not feel.