Modern American Memoirs (35 page)

At times I saw houses across icy fields and thought of going to them for help. “Don't steal. Don't beg.” I had never lowered myself that much, and I was not ready to begin.

Sundown came and darkness, but I went on, finding it harder and harder to make my feet move. They were sore and swollen—too swollen for me to take off my shoes.

“A little piece more,” I kept telling myself. Then I could rest in a barn or haystack. The next night I would be in Dallas.

It was bare prairie and there were no barns or haystacks, or a patch of woods where I could build a fire. I had to keep walking or freeze.

Then I stopped and rubbed my eyes. Ahead of me and off the tracks a light shone at the level of the barbed-wire fence. Without thinking, I started toward it. I crossed the ice-covered ditch, climbed a frozen bank, and rolled under the fence. After crossing a narrow stretch of prairie I came to a small house. The light was shining
through a window. Inside I could see people sitting in front of a fireplace.

“Hello,” I called.

I could see them leave their chairs and look out the window.

“Hello.”

A man came to the door and opened it.

“What you want this time of night?” he asked.

“I want to warm myself.”

He might not let me. I had not thought before that he might not let me.

“Who are you?” he asked. “What's your name?”

I gave it, and then gave it again.

“Never heard tell of you. Where do you live?”

“Nowheres right now. I was walking down the tracks and saw your light. I've got to get warm.”

He closed the door and I could see him with the others around the fireplace. Then he opened the door again.

“Come on in.”

He held the door open for me to pass. I went past him and straight to the fire.

“You cold?”

A woman in a rocking chair asked the question.

“Yes'm.”

“Don't stand too close. It'll hurt if you stand too close.”

I stood back a little, on the other side from her chair. She was older than my mother, thin, and wrapped in quilts—sickly looking but friendly. The man sat beside her. On her other side there was a young man in a blue suit and a boy my age in a blue shirt and overalls. She handed each an apple from a bowl in her lap.

“Want an apple?” she asked me.

“Yes'm.”

I took it and ate it down to the core without stopping, with all of them watching.

“You ain't et for a spell,” the woman said.

“No'm.”

“We've got bread and milk.”

The young man brought a glass of milk and a piece of corn bread from the kitchen. The man pulled a chair up to the fire for me.

“Eat and warm yourself,” he said. “Then tell us how you got to Celeste.”

Celeste. Closer to Dallas than I thought.

While I ate they told me about themselves. The woman was a cripple and had to do most of her work from her chair. When she was by herself the man had to come in from the field to move her from one job to another. The young man was a teacher in a country school. The boy went to high school in Celeste.

“We could make a bed for you if you want to stay all night,” the man said.

The way he said it, I was not begging. It was not like being a tramp coming in begging for a place to stay.

“I'd be thankful.”

They gave me warm water for washing and cough syrup for my cold. Then they let me sit by the fire and talk. It was easy to tell them about Pin Hook and the jobs in Dallas. It was easy to talk to a teacher about how I wanted to go to school. I could not tell them about my days on the road. They could see that I was hungry and cold.

“What will you do tomorrow?” the man asked.

“Go on to Dallas.”

“Walking?”

“It's not so far now.”

But they would not let me walk. The man would let me have money for a ticket and pay him back when I could. The teacher would take me to the station and put me on the train.

When I could keep awake no longer they put a mustard plaster on my chest and put me to bed in a featherbed.

When I woke up again it was late morning and the man was in the kitchen helping the woman cook dinner. We ate and talked again of what I would do.

“You c'n work your way through school,” the woman said. “Anybody can if he wants to bad enough.”

After school the teacher came in his Ford and took me to Celeste. On the way he told me what it was like to go to school at Commerce, and what he said made me want to go there more than ever.

He bought my ticket and when the train came in he gave it to me and shook my hand.

“I'm glad you saw our light,” he said.

I knew he meant it—they all meant it.

“Me, too.”

Then I was on the train looking out at the ice-covered fields.

It was warm in the Union Station, cold and dark outside. I thought of sitting on a bench all night and going from there in the morning to look for a job, but I went out and walked down Commerce Street. They were going to fuss at me anyway. Better to get it over with.

When I got to the house, Maggie, Cain, and the two girls were sitting in front of an open gas stove in the front room. I could see them through the window and went in without knocking.

“Where've you been?” Maggie asked.

“Rambling.”

I had made up my mind to tell them that and no more—nothing of the places I had been, the hard times on the road.

“Did you find Pat Swindle?”

“No'm.”

“I don't see why you thought you would. You know how long he's been hoboing it. It's a good thing you didn't. Next thing you hear, he'll be behind bars. You could a been with him.”

I thought of the bums in the Texarkana post office, and the policeman walking through. I knew better than to tell them how close I had come to being arrested because of Pat. It was bad enough to have to think of it myself.

As I got warm again my coughing got worse.

“You sure caught a cold all right,” they said.

They gave me warm milk, soup, and salve to open my head and ease my throat.

“You want us to take you in again?” Cain asked.

“Yes, sir. For a little while—till I get a job.”

“Or go off bumming agin?”

“I won't. Not any more. I'll get me a job and pay you every cent I owe you.”

“What do you think, Cain?” Maggie asked.

“It's all right with me if he gets a job. I won't have him hanging around the house in the daytime.”

“You c'n make your pallet tonight,” Maggie said. “In the morn
ing you've got to look for a job and you cain't be choosy.”

The girls had got their laundry jobs from an employment agency on Lamar Avenue.

“I'll show you in the morning,” one of them said. “They're bound to have something.”

They helped me make my pallet. Then they went to bed.

“Get a good night's sleep,” they said. “You've got to look peart in the morning.”

Ralph Ellison was born and raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where a public library now bears his name. In 1933, he enrolled as a music major at Tuskegee Institute. After graduation, he worked for five years as a researcher and writer on the Federal Writers' Project in New York City. It was on this research job that he met the coal-shovelers he describes in this narrative
.

In 1953, his novel
, Invisible Man,
won the National Book Award. He was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1969 and the National Medal of Arts in 1985. At New York University, he was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities from 1970 to 1979
.

Shadow and Act,
a collection of biographical and critical essays, appeared in 1964. A second collection
, Going to the Territory
(1986), includes “The Little Man at the Chehaw Station,” which first appeared in
The American Scholar.
This story comes from that autobiographical essay
.

Chehaw Station is a railroad stop near Tuskegee, Alabama. Hazel Harrison, a concert pianist, headed the piano department in Tuskegee's school of music. From her Ellison learned to expect high standards everywhere. In his essays and lectures he refers to her frequently
.

 

from G
OING TO THE
T
ERRITORY

I
t was at Tuskegee Institute during the mid-1930s that I was made aware of the little man behind the stove. At the time I was a trumpeter majoring in music and had aspirations of becoming a classical composer. As such, shortly before the little man came to my attention, I had outraged the faculty members who judged my monthly student's recital by substituting a certain skill of lips and fingers for the intelligent and artistic structuring of emotion that was demanded in performing the music assigned to me. Afterward, still dressed in my hired tuxedo, my ears burning from the harsh negatives of their criticism, I had sought solace in the basement studio of
Hazel Harrison, a highly respected concert pianist and teacher. Miss Harrison had been one of Ferruccio Busoni's prize pupils, had lived (until the rise of Hitler had driven her back to a U.S.A. that was not yet ready to recognize her talents) in Busoni's home in Berlin, and was a friend of such masters as Egon Petri, Percy Grainger, and Sergei Prokofiev. It was not the first time that I had appealed to Miss Harrison's generosity of spirit, but today her reaction to my rather adolescent complaint was less than sympathetic.

“But, baby,” she said, “in this country you must always prepare yourself to play your very best wherever you are, and on all occasions.”

“But everybody tells you that,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “but there's more to it than you're usually told. Of course you've always been taught to
do
your best,
look
your best,
be
your best. You've been told such things all your life. But now you're becoming a musician, an artist, and when it comes to performing the classics in this country, there's something more involved.”

Watching me closely, she paused.

“Are you ready to listen?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“All right,” she said, “you must
always
play your best, even if it's only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country there'll always be a little man hidden behind the stove.”

“A
what?
”

She nodded. “That's right,” she said. “There'll always be the little man whom you don't expect, and he'll know the
music
, and the
tradition
, and the standards of
musicianship
required for whatever you set out to perform!”

Speechless, I stared at her. After the working-over I'd just received from the faculty, I was in no mood for joking. But no, Miss Harrison's face was quite serious. So what did she mean? Chehaw Station was a lonely whistle-stop where swift north-or southbound trains paused with haughty impatience to drop off or take on passengers; the point where, on homecoming weekends, special coaches crowded with festive visitors were cut loose, coupled to a waiting switch engine, and hauled to Tuskegee's railroad siding. I knew it well, and as I stood beside Miss Harrison's piano, visualizing the station, I told myself,
She has GOT to be kidding!

For, in my view, the atmosphere of Chehaw's claustrophobic lit
tle waiting room was enough to discourage even a blind street musician from picking out blues on his guitar, no matter how tedious his wait for a train. Biased toward disaster by bruised feelings, my imagination pictured the vibrations set in motion by the winding of a trumpet within that drab, utilitarian structure: first shattering, then bringing its walls “a-tumbling down”—like Jericho's at the sounding of Joshua's priest-blown ram horns.

True, Tuskegee possessed a rich musical tradition, both classical and folk, and many music lovers and musicians lived or moved through its environs, but—and my regard for Miss Harrison notwithstanding—Chehaw Station was the last place in the area where I would expect to encounter a connoisseur lying in wait to pounce upon some rash, unsuspecting musician. Sure, a connoisseur might hear the haunting, blues-echoing, train-whistle rhapsodies blared by fast express trains as they thundered past—but the classics? Not a chance!

So as Miss Harrison watched to see the effect of her words, I said with a shrug, “Yes, ma'am.”

She smiled, her prominent eyes a-twinkle.

“I hope so,” she said. “But if you don't just now, you will by the time you become an artist. So remember the little man behind the stove.”

With that, seating herself at her piano, she began thumbing through a sheaf of scores—a signal that our discussion was ended.

So
, I thought,
you ask for sympathy and you get a riddle
. I would have felt better if she had said, “Sorry, baby, I know how you feel, but after all, I was
there
, I
heard
you; and you treated your audience as though you were some kind of confidence man with a horn. So forget it, because I will not violate my own standards by condoning sterile musicianship.” Some such reply, by reaffirming the “sacred principles” of art to which we were both committed, would have done much to supply the emotional catharsis for which I was appealing. By refusing, she forced me to accept full responsibility and thus learn from my offense. The condition of artistic communication is, as the saying goes, hard but fair…

 

Three years later, after having abandoned my hope of becoming a musician, I had just about forgotten Miss Harrison's mythical little
man behind the stove. Then, in faraway New York, concrete evidence of his actual existence arose and blasted me like the heat from an internally combusted ton of coal.

As a member of the New York Writers' Project, I was spending a clammy, late fall afternoon of freedom circulating a petition in support of some now long-forgotten social issue that I regarded as indispensable to the public good. I found myself inside a tenement building in San Juan Hill, a Negro district that disappeared with the coming of Lincoln Center. Starting on the top floor of the building, I had collected an acceptable number of signatures and, having descended from the ground floor to the basement level, was moving along the dimly lit hallway toward a door through which I could hear loud voices. They were male Afro-American voices, raised in violent argument. The language was profane, the style of speech a southern idiomatic vernacular such as was spoken by formally uneducated Afro-American workingmen. Reaching the door, I paused, sounding out the lay of the land before knocking to present my petition.

But my delay led to indecision. Not, however, because of the loud, unmistakable anger sounding within; being myself a slum dweller, I knew that voices in slums are often raised in anger, but that the
rhetoric
of anger, being in itself cathartic, is not necessarily a prelude to physical violence. Rather, it is frequently a form of symbolic action, a verbal equivalent of fisticuffs. No, I hesitated because I realized that behind the door a mystery was unfolding. A mystery so incongruous, outrageous, and surreal that it struck me as a threat to my sense of rational order. It was as though a bizarre practical joke had been staged and its perpetrators were waiting for me, its designated but unknowing scapegoat, to arrive; a joke designed to assault my knowledge of American culture and its hierarchal dispersal. At the very least, it appeared that my pride in my knowledge of my own people was under attack.

For the angry voices behind the door were proclaiming an intimate familiarity with a subject of which, by all the logic of their linguistically projected social status, they should have been oblivious. The subject of their contention confounded all my assumptions regarding the correlation between educational levels, class, race, and
the possession of conscious culture. Impossible as it seemed, these foulmouthed black workingmen were locked in verbal combat over which of two celebrated Metropolitan Opera divas was the superior soprano!

I myself attended the opera only when I could raise the funds, and I knew full well that opera going was far from the usual cultural pursuit of men identified with the linguistic style of such voices. And yet, confounding such facile logic, they were voicing (and loudly) a familiarity with the Met far greater than my own. In their graphic, irreverent, and vehement criticism they were describing not only the sopranos' acting abilities but were ridiculing the gestures with which each gave animation to her roles, and they shouted strong opinions as to the ranges of the divas' vocal equipment. Thus, with such a distortion of perspective being imposed upon me, I was challenged either to solve the mystery of their knowledge by entering into their midst or to leave the building with my sense of logic reduced forever to a level of college-trained absurdity.

So challenged, I knocked. I knocked out of curiosity, I knocked out of outrage. I knocked in fear and trembling. I knocked in anticipation of whatever insights—malicious or transcendent, I no longer cared which—I would discover beyond the door.

For a moment there was an abrupt and portentous silence; then came the sound of chair legs thumping dully upon the floor, followed by further silence. I knocked again, loudly, with an authority fired by an impatient and anxious urgency.

Again silence—until a gravel voice boomed an annoyed “Come in!”

Opening the door with an unsteady hand, I looked inside, and was even less prepared for the scene that met my eyes than for the content of their loud-mouthed contention.

In a small, rank-smelling, lamp-lit room, four huge black men sat sprawled around a circular dining-room table, looking toward me with undisguised hostility. The sooty-chimneyed lamp glowed in the center of the bare oak table, casting its yellow light upon four water tumblers and a half-empty pint of whiskey. As the men straightened in their chairs I became aware of a fireplace with a coal
fire glowing in its grate, and leaning against the ornate marble facing of its mantelpiece, I saw four enormous coal scoops.

“All right,” one of the men said, rising to his feet. “What the hell can we do for
you?
”

“And we ain't buying nothing, buddy,” one of the seated men added, his palm slapping the table.

Closing the door, I moved forward, holding my petition like a flag of truce before me, noting that the men wore faded blue overalls and jumper jackets, and becoming aware that while all were of dark complexion, their blackness was accentuated in the dim lamplight by the dust and grime of their profession.

“Come on, man, speak up,” the man who had arisen said. “We ain't got all day.”

“I'm sorry to interrupt,” I said, “but I thought you might be interested in supporting my petition,” and began hurriedly to explain.

“Say,” one of the men said, “you look like one of them relief investigators. You're not out to jive us, are you?”

“Oh, no, sir,” I said. “I happen to work on the Writers' Project….”

The standing man leaned toward me. “You on the Writers' Project?” he said, looking me up and down.

“That's right,” I said. “I'm a writer.”

“Now is that right?” he said. “How long you been writing?”

I hesitated. “About a year,” I said.

He grinned, looking at the others. “Y'all hear that? Ole Homeboy here has done up and jumped on the
gravy
train! Now that's pretty good. Pretty damn good! So what did you do before that?” he said.

“I studied music,” I said, “at Tuskegee.”

“Hey, now!” the standing man said. “They got a damn good choir down there. Y'all remember back when they opened Radio City? They had that fellow William L. Dawson for a director. Son, let's see that paper.”

Relieved, I handed him the petition, watching him stretch it between his hardened hands. After a moment of soundlessly mouthing the words of its appeal, he gave me a skeptical look and turned to the others.

“What the hell,” he said, “signing this piece of paper won't do no good, but since Home here's a musician, it won't do us no harm to help him out. Let's go along with him.”

Fishing a blunt-pointed pencil from the bib of his overalls, he wrote his name and passed the petition to his friends, who followed suit.

This took some time, and as I watched the petition move from hand to hand, I could barely contain myself or control my need to unravel the mystery that had now become far more important than just getting their signatures on my petition.

“There you go,” the last one said, extending the petition toward me. “Having our names on there don't mean a thing, but you got 'em.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

They watched me with amused eyes, expecting me to leave, but, clearing my throat nervously, I stood in my tracks, too intrigued to leave and suddenly too embarrassed to ask my question.