Three Days Before the Shooting ... (5 page)

Because so much of the material from the earliest phase of Ellison’s composition found its way into the drafts he revised in the two periods that followed—the Book I and II typescripts, followed much later by the three computer fragments—we have elected not to include these drafts. It would be impracticable to publish such fragmented drafts in a volume such as this, though they will surely be of interest to those scholars of Ellison’s fiction concerned with his habits of composition.

IV

T
HREE
D
AYS
B
EFORE THE
S
HOOTING
… is not the novel readers were waiting for at the time of Ralph Ellison’s passing. It is at once much less, and perhaps something more. It is less in that it offers no clear resolution to the story it tells; it doesn’t end so much as stop. It bears the marks of its incompletion in a variety of ways, from the unpolished nature of some of the prose to Ellison’s failure to settle certain basic matters of craft. An author of Ellison’s exacting standards would likely not have published much of this material in its present state. Yet it is precisely the incompletion of the manuscripts that makes them such a compelling and fascinating contribution to American literature. In Ellison’s numerous drafts we see a literary master at work as he confronts the challenges presented by his novelistic form as well as those presented by the nation whose abiding and shifting identity he was so intent upon rendering in fiction.

This volume draws its title from the opening line of the novel: “Three
days before the shooting, a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator.” Among the things Ellison left unfinished was the task of settling on a title for the book. In a way, ours is not a title at all but a means of calling the reader’s attention to the fact of these manuscripts’ incompletion. We believe that
Three Days Before the Shooting …
is fitting, not only because it gestures toward the central incident of the novel—the shooting of Senator Adam Sunraider—but also because the numerous changes Ellison would make to the opening sentence over the years reflect the novel’s dogged incompletion. As Ellison revised the manuscript, the three days became two—a small change, but one that suggests a significant adjustments to the architecture of the plot, telescoping action and underscoring the narrative tension that charges this central incident. We have kept “three days” in the title as a gesture to the many other small changes across the manuscripts that, in their sum, embody so much of what Ellison’s second novel is—and is not.

The present edition has been in the works since 1999, when
Juneteenth
was published. In the judgment of its editor,
Juneteenth
represented “the most ambitious and latest, freestanding, compelling, extended fiction in the saga.” He promised then an edition would be published that would “enable scholars and readers alike to follow Ellison’s some forty years of work on his novel-in-progress.” This edition makes good on that promise, reproducing Ellison’s words precisely as he wrote them, save for the occasional silent correction to typographical or spelling errors. We have made a special effort to preserve rather than obscure the provisional character of some of Ellison’s writing—including tics and quirks that might well have been edited out of the manuscript had Ellison been alive to oversee its publication. These are important to the intrinsic value of these drafts for what they reveal about Ellison as a stylist and his idiosyncratic process of composition and revision.

In every case, the text selected represents the latest continuous sequence of narrative from the particular period of Ellison’s composition. For the Book I and II typescripts, we’ve reproduced the manuscripts clearly marked with the latest date in Fanny Ellison’s hand. With the computer drafts, we have reproduced those files marked with the most recent dates. (This process is described in detail in the essay that introduces the computer sequences.) We carefully reviewed all earlier variants with an eye toward noting textual differences and understanding Ellison’s compositional process and have included a sample of these variants in Part III. All of these materials will now be made available to scholars in the Ralph Ellison Papers at the Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress holdings include twenty-seven boxes (115 to 141) containing files related to the second novel, compared with only eleven boxes related to
Invisible Man
. Two boxes (132 and 133) include the typescripts
for Books I and II that Ellison composed in 1972 and continued revising until at least 1986. Another four boxes (138 to 141) include Ellison’s notes relating to the novel during the entire span of its composition. Four others (134 to 137 and a single file in 138) comprise sequential fragments Ellison printed out from his computer and often amended by hand. The remainder of the collection includes episodic drafts filed by scene or character containing material from throughout the novel’s composition, much of it with ample revisions.

To say that Ellison did not come close to completing his second novel is not to say that he failed to produce a work of fiction with scenes as fully rendered and realized as anything he had ever written. One forgets that
Invisible Man
was a first novel and, even in its brilliance, displayed some of the signs of an initial work. The second novel sometimes reveals Ellison working at the height of his writerly powers, in command of voice, in command of the rudiments of his prose style, in ways not seen in
Invisible Man
. Other times, it sees him at his lowest points—unfocused, and finally unable to master his own creation.

For all their disconnections, Ellison’s manuscripts reward the active reader. For those willing to confront the challenges of the work’s fragmentary form, for those capable of simultaneously grasping multiple versions of the same scene,
Three Days Before the Shooting …
offers unparalleled access to the craft of Ellison’s fiction and an unprecedented glimpse into the writer’s mind. Whether one reads this edition from start to finish or jumps from section to section, the experience involves a kind of collaboration with Ellison in the creation of the novel he left forever in progress.

P
ART
I

EDITORS’ NOTE TO BOOK I

T
HE FULL PROVENANCE OF
Book I is uncertain. The best information we have is a note in Fanny Ellison’s hand indicating that the most recent surviving draft was typed in 1972 and that Ellison’s editor, Albert Erskine, had read it. Drafts of individual episodes written, in all probability, during the mid-to late 1950s exist on both blue and yellow paper in the Ellison Papers.

Readers will quickly see that, unlike the thoroughly revised, apparent last typescripts of Book II and “Bliss’s Birth,” the text of Book I drifts between truly polished and rough work. Nevertheless, however rough the composition of several passages in the typescript, the prologue and fourteen chapters answer in the affirmative for Book I the question Mrs. Ellison posed for the entire novel. (“Does it have a beginning, middle, and end?” she asked in Ralph’s teeming study a few days after his death in 1994.) For, unlike Book II, and unlike the sequences of computer printouts published in Part II of this volume, Book I, even in its current form, somewhat uneven and full of small inconsistencies, unquestionably has “a beginning, middle, and end.”

In contrast to Book II, which though highly polished for the most part and put through multiple revisions over at least two decades, seems to break off in midair without any true hint of what is to come, Book I ends with a perfectly modulated sentence. The words both recapitulate the action and point toward what follows in Book II. “But at least the Senator was still alive,” McIntyre observes, recovering his reporter’s equilibrium after he watches Hickman and Hickman alone disappear through the closing door of Sun-raider’s hospital room. At once we know that the Senator has conferred special status on Reverend Hickman in the present moment and that he likely is doomed to die of his wounds. Like a crafty veteran major league pitcher, the novelist can throw any number of pitches from this delivery, and he does so by opening Book II with Sun-raider speaking extemporaneously, floridly, provocatively on the Senate floor just before an assassin’s bullets silence him.

Clearly the trajectory of Book I is true to the central narrative Ellison refers to over and over again in his notes. After the prologue’s biblically toned chronicle of Reverend Hickman and his congregation’s arrival in Washington, D.C., Book I unfolds in first-person voice from the point of view of Welborn McIntyre, a Kentucky-born and - bred white reporter who witnesses Senator Sun-raider’s assassination, and sets out to unravel the identity, mystery, and motive of the “pale young Negro” who leaps to his death after shooting the Senator. Throughout Book I McIntyre and Ellison tantalize the reader with cryptic hints of the assassin’s tie to the Senator and Sun-raider’s former life as Bliss, the boy of indeterminate race raised by Reverend Hickman and the women in his black congregation.

McIntyre roots his narrative in both the present and the past. The present episodes bring to life the fascination Sun-raider inspires in McIntyre’s journalists’ fraternity and in others, most notably the antic, tragicomic figure of jazzman LeeWillie Minifees, whose burning of his Cadillac on the Senator’s lawn lands him in the psychiatric ward of the same hospital where Sun-raider rests uneasily in critical condition. But McIntyre is also a failed novelist. And although his narrative begins focused keenly on the assassination, it is soon apparent that Ellison intends him to be an important character in his own right as well as a witness to and commentator on the life and times of the Senator and the nation. For example, McIntyre interrupts his account of the assassination and its aftermath with excursions and reveries into his own life, including his affair in the 1930s with a Negro girl, whose mother unleashes her fury on him when he comes to tell her he wants to marry her pregnant daughter and be a true father to their child. Book I also puts Hickman squarely into McIntyre’s path as a presence in his own right and as a black preacher who explodes the white reporter’s assumptions about racial boundaries and the Senator’s history.

This volume presents Book I in its totality as a draft much less polished and revised than the more finished drafts that survive of Book II and “Bliss’s Birth.”
Chapters 4
and
5
of the version published here are Ellison’s drafts of “Cadillac Flambé” and “It Always Breaks Out,” episodes he published separately during his lifetime and which are included in Part III as they appeared in print, in the case of “It Always Breaks Out” considerably revised from the version in Book I.

PROLOGUE

T
HREE 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 quite elderly: old ladies dressed in little white caps and white uniforms made of surplus nylon parachute material, the men dressed in neat but old-fashioned black suits and 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 heard of all her life—and old ones; yet, instead of being already in the herdlike movement toward the door, which she expected, 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 to them. They just stood there, now looking oddly like a delegation of Asians who had lost their interpreter along the way, and who 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 dream-like incongruity came over her. They were so many that she could no longer see the large abstract paintings which 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.