Three Days Before the Shooting ... (196 page)

WHAT MUST BE DONE
// Narrative must be kept moving, and if possible, stepped-up in pace. If we begin with Senator’s version of the shooting, we plunge immediately into his consciousness, his past and we are introduced to Hickman at one remove, even while we are wondering about his presence in the Hospital. (139/6)

How to begin before the action? What is the tragic mistake? And who makes it? As things stand we do begin before one tragic mistake, that of the Senator’s, when he refuses to see Hickman and company. But if we consider the mistake from the point of Severen then it would require beginning before he acts. ‘Two days before the shooting … ‘ begins the first section as it now stands; ‘I was there, etc.” is how the Second section begins—what is there to prevent our starting the Severen section with ‘Several months before the shooting … (140/3)

Hickman and the group go to Washington to warn Sunraider that he is in danger but in so doing they lead Severen to him and bring about his death. This is a
peripeteia
. And, ironically, it is Sunraider’s refusal to see them which ruins him. He must recognize this fatal irony. The crucial mistake is, of course, Hickman’s. He is the hero and set[s] the plan going out of his love for the little Bliss. // The hospital becomes a sanctuary (and a death room) wherein the sickness of American society comes into conscious focus. Hickman and company, being Christians, turn the other cheek; that is why they come to Washington. But Bliss-Sunraider is pagan. He seeks power and has sought to be formidable and thus above race, human ties and history. // Hickman struggles to understand his “Americanness.” (138/4)

Why have they undertaken the trip? To warn him and to see what he has become, this child they all loved in whom they invested such mystical hope. // Why? Out of their fidelity to Hickman. Hickman knows that he is acting obsessively but the circumstances under which he received [the] child are charged with emotion. He lost his brother and mother, his life was endangered by the presence of the white woman and he had taken the child in defiance of the very absurdity of his situation. He feels guilty for having rejected his parents’ religion, and feels that had he followed his father’s wishes he might have prevented the tragic incident. In other words he has been pushed into an extreme situation and withdrawn from his old free life of jazz. Coupled with this is his acceptance
of the religious life and his hope of bringing up the child as a bridge between the old savage relationship which obtained between the races and his vision of a more human society. His vision is a version of the peaceful kingdom, unreal but compelling precisely because it defies the state of things. He undergoes a period of withdraw[al] after the lynching, then emerges a changed man. He fasts, gives up drinking, and although attractive to women abstains from sex. After Bliss runs away he becomes a reader and [he] and his group raise money with which they send young people north to college. // How do they keep in touch with activities of Bliss? // They do so through members of the group who have scattered to the west and north, people who recognize him but whom he fails to see, once he passes and thinks he is secure. Sometimes they are mistaken, but they recognize him as a minstrel man, movie maker, Billy Sunday type preacher, etc. They lose him, only to have him turn up in another part of the country playing a different role. Hickman, realizing the need to keep up with the lives of his people, has persuaded those who leave the state to write him letters, especially those who were Bliss’s age. And it’s through this that he is able to track the runaway—up to a point, learns also of his triumphs and reversals of expectation in the North and West. (140/1)

Action takes place on the eve of the Rights movement but it forecasts the chaos which would come later. This is a reversal of expectations to consider inasmuch as it reaches beyond the frame of the fiction. This looks forward to the reassertion of the Klan and the terrible, adolescent me-ism of the ‘70’s. (139/5)

One of the main tasks is to dramatize the theories which lead to the unleashing of violence. This should come during an earlier period—but not too early—when the Senator discusses the problem of power with an ambitious white southern politician who sees that he can never become president of the U.S. This frustration increases when he observes another southerner change and become pro-Negro and thus move toward a wider acceptability as possible nominee … (140/2)

Make Washington function in Hickman’s mind as a place of power and mystery, frustration and possibility. It is historical, it is the past, it is slavery, the Emancipation and a continuation of the betrayal of Reconstruction. He would have to imagine or try to imagine what Bliss knew about the city and its structure of power. He would wonder how, given his early background, Bliss could have gone so far in the gaining and manipulation of power, the juxtapositions of experience and intelligence which allowed him to make his way. (139/4)

If it were a jam session all would start from single incident then proceed to give their own versions. This would allow for extremes of variation while based upon the basic themes, but the ‘truth’ would remain in the minds of Hickman and Bliss (not Sunraider). // What the white woman gives Hickman is a promise—a descendent of slaves is entrusted with the future and must train the future out of the limitations imposed by his experience. (138/5)

Looking back it seems that three people were involved. A woman, a politician and a preacher. And yet that leaves out many others, and especially the young man who brought down the intricate structure of time and emotion, the joker, the wild card. The unexpected emotional agent of chaos. But even so, this leaves out another woman, long dead, and by her own hand, and the earlier metamorphosis of the man who was responsible and who later paid for his willfulness with his life and who thus was exposed for what he was and for who and what he had been. [Editors’ Note: Written on postmarked envelope dated March 24, 1977; Ellison has sketched an American flag in the middle of the note.] (138/2)