Three Days Before the Shooting ...

ALSO BY RALPH ELLISON

Invisible Man
Shadow and Act
Going to the Territory
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
Flying Home and Other Stories
Juneteenth
Living with Music
Trading Twelves

RALPH ELLISON

R
ALPH
W
ALDO
E
LLISON WAS
born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on March 1, 1913. His father, a construction foreman and later the owner of a small ice-and-coal business, died when his son was three. Ellison and his younger brother, Herbert, were raised by their mother, who worked as a nursemaid, janitor, and domestic, and was active in politics. As a child he was drawn to music, playing trumpet from an early age and studying classical composition at Tuskegee Institute under the instruction of William L. Dawson. Of his musical influences he later said: “The great emphasis in my school was upon classical music, but such great jazz musicians as Hot Lips Page, Jimmy Rushing, and Lester Young were living in Oklahoma City …. As it turned out, the perfection, the artistic dedication which helped me as a writer, was not so much in the classical emphasis as in the jazz itself.”

In July 1936, after his junior year at Tuskegee, Ellison went to New York to earn money for his senior year and to study sculpture, and stayed. In June 1937 his friendship with Richard Wright began and led him toward becoming a writer. Ellison also made the acquaintance of Langston Hughes and the painter Romare Bearden, among others. From 1938 until World War II he worked on the New York Federal Writers Project of the WPA. Starting in the late 1930s, he contributed reviews, essays, and short fiction to
New Masses, Tomorrow, The Negro Quarterly
(of which he was for a time managing editor),
The New Republic, Saturday Review, The Antioch Review, Reporter
, and other periodicals. During the war he served in the merchant marine, and afterward he worked at a variety of jobs, including freelance photography and the building and installation of audio systems.

Over a period of seven years Ellison wrote
Invisible Man
, which was recognized upon its publication in 1952 as one of the most important works of fiction of its time. It was on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks and won the National Book Award. Its critical reputation and popularity have only grown
in the more than five decades since its publication. Although an excerpt from a second novel was published in the magazine
Noble Savage
in 1960, and seven other selections in various literary magazines between then and 1977, no other work of fiction appeared under Ellison’s name during his lifetime.
Shadow and Act
(1964) and
Going to the Territory
(1986) collect essays and interviews written over more than forty years.

From 1955 to 1957 Ellison was a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Returning to the United States, he taught and lectured at a wide range of institutions including Bard College, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Chicago, Rutgers, Harvard, Brown, and Yale. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969; was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1970 by the French minister of culture, André Malraux; and was given the National Medal of Arts in 1985. He was a charter member of the National Council on the Arts and Humanities, and from 1970 to 1979 was Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at New York University.

After a brief first marriage Ellison married Fanny McConnell in 1946; for more than forty years, until his passing on April 16, 1994, they lived on Riverside Drive in Harlem.

Posthumous editions of Ellison’s work, edited and with an introduction by John F. Callahan, include
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
(1995);
Flying Home and Other Stories
(1996);
Juneteenth
(1999), the central narrative in the unfinished second novel; and
Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray
(2000), each published by Random House, Inc.

CONTENTS

B
IOGRAPHICAL
N
OTE

C
HRONOLOGY OF
C
OMPOSITION

G
ENERAL
I
NTRODUCTION TO
Three Days Before the Shooting …

PART I

E
DITORS’
N
OTE TO
B
OOK
I

P
ROLOGUE

B
OOK
I

B
OOK
II

E
DITORS’
N
OTE TO
B
OOK
II

E
DITORS’
N
OTE TO
“B
LISS’S
B
IRTH”

B
LISS’S
B
IRTH

PART II

I
NTRODUCTION TO
R
ALPH
E
LLISON’S
C
OMPUTER
S
EQUENCES

E
DITORS’
N
OTE TO
“H
ICKMAN IN
W
ASHINGTON
, D.C.”

H
ICKMAN IN
W
ASHINGTON
, D.C.

E
DITORS’
N
OTE TO
“H
ICKMAN IN
G
EORGIA
& O
KLAHOMA”

H
ICKMAN IN
G
EORGIA
& O
KLAHOMA

E
DITORS’
N
OTE TO
“M
C
I
NTYRE AT
J
ESSIE
R
OCKMORE’S”

M
C
I
NTYRE AT
J
ESSIE
R
OCKMORE’S

PART III

A S
ELECTION OF/
E
LLISON’S
N
OTES

T
WO
E
ARLY
D
RAFTS OF THE
O
PENING OF
B
OOK
II

V
ARIANTS FOR
“A
RRIVAL”

E
IGHT
E
XCERPTS
P
UBLISHED BY
E
LLISON

And Hickman Arrives

The Roof, the Steeple and the People

It Always Breaks Out

Juneteenth

Night-Talk

A Song of Innocence

Cadillac Flambé

Backwacking, a Plea to the Senator

CHRONOLOGY OF COMPOSITION

1951

M
AY
14

Ellison writes to the essayist and novelist Albert Murray that he is “trying to get started on my next novel (I probably have enough stuff left from the other if I can find the form).”
^*

1953

A
PRIL
9

Writes Murray of his intention “to drive out to Oklahoma this spring … and I plan to scout the southwest. I’ve got to get real mad again,
and talk
with the old folks a bit. I’ve got
one
Okla. book in me I do believe.”

1954

F
EBRUARY
14

Writes to Murray, “As for me I’m in my old agony trying to write a novel. I’ve got some ideas that excite me and a few scenes and some characters, but the rest is coming like my first pair of long pants—slow as hell. Never mind, I’ll get it out, it just takes time to do
anything
worth while.”

M
AY
19

Writes to Morteza Sprague, an English professor at Tuskegee, that “the whole road [of post-segregationist America] stretched out and it got all mixed up with this book I’m trying to write and it left me twisted with joy and a sense of inadequacy.” He says he is “writing about the evasion of identity which is another characteristically American problem which must be about to change. I hope so, it’s giving me enough trouble.” [Written two days after Supreme Court handed down
Brown v. Board of Education
decision.]

1955

A
PRIL

Sends to Murray “a few riffs from Cliofus,” an early draft excerpt from his work-in-progress.

S
EPTEMBER

Arrives in Rome to take up residence as a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Letters (until September 1957).

N
OVEMBER
22

Writes to his editor, Albert Erskine, “Dear Albert: I received your message about spending eight hours in my study and I’m glad to inform you that while I don’t quite manage eight hours, I do spend the major part of the day here—and working.”

D
ECEMBER
14

Writes to Erskine, “As for me the cold and my upset over the misunderstanding [over
Invisible Man
printings and stocking] threw me off schedule for a few days but I’m back at it, with the first section still giving me hell. I’d like to junk it but without it I wouldn’t have a story. But thank the gods that I haven’t reached the point where you have to be worried with that!”

1956

M
ARCH
20

Murray writes to Ellison, “Dear Ralph, You writin’ good, boy, realgood, blowing good, cutting good, keen & deep. If you gettin’ any of this stuff working in there with old Cleofus & em you still swinging that switchblade and you aint got nothing to worry about. For my money you’re in there with that shit, man.”

J
UNE
22

Writes to the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, “As for me, most of my writing is on the book, which is much more difficult than I had imagined. Still it’s rolling along and I’ve become quite fond of the Old preacher and his six year old revivalist whose great act is an antiphonal rendering of the seven last words of Christ with the little boy sitting in a small coffin. Wild things arise from this, but I’m still having trouble giving the book the dramatic drive I feel it needs. Will do, though; will do. Just learned that the kid preacher’s name, Bliss, means rapture, a yielding to experience. Very American because of the overtones of progress and this guy really becomes Dick Lewis’ ‘in space.’ Having fun, as you can see. Today the old preacher is talking Aristotle (though unaware) as he tells kid just why coffin has to be a certain size. So I guess if I don’t succeed in making book
dramatic I can at least reveal the principles as they operate in life. Trick of course it
[sic]
to do both. Read Radin’s TRICKSTER, give it a look if you haven’t …”

1957

A
PRIL
4

Writes to Murray, “I’ve been up to my ass in typescript and have only just climbed out of one level of the mess after another back to my novel.”

S
EPTEMBER

Returns to United States from American Academy in Rome.

1958

F
EBRUARY
6

Writes to Murray, “As for me I’m working hard now both with the novel and a piece which Hyman feinted me into doing …”

F
EBRUARY
26

Writes to Saul Bellow, “Things aint coming worth a damn.”

J
UNE
27/J
ULY
17

“I’ve been working frantically on the book, trying to complete a section while the emotion was still strong within me.… I guess I must be nearing the completion, recently the typewriter has been drawing me like a magnet. Bellow has read book two and is to publish about fifty pages in a new mag which he is editing—THE NOBLE SAVAGE—of all things!”

S
EPTEMBER
21

Writes to Bellow from Bellow’s house in Tivoli, New York, where Ellison is living while he teaches at Bard College, that he has brought up his electric typewriter in hopes that it will expedite his work on the novel.