Three Days Before the Shooting ... (98 page)

Ellison’s numerous notes over the decades show him laboring exhaustively with plotting and sequence. In an undated note, perhaps from the late 1960s or early 1970s, Ellison offers this potential sequence (Library of Congress, 139/4):

Three days before the shooting

Janey’s letter Trip west, Janey’s tale, return to Georgia, trip to Washington

McIntyre gives something of Severen’s background

Goes west Janey, Cliofus, Love

Logically, this would come after shooting—unless he has seen Severen before. He hasn’t so this is out.

If this is so, Hickman has to convey needed information.

Severen introduced when Hickman is still in town.

As is often the case throughout the notes, tables of contents become occasions for expansive speculation. What begins as a list of episodes quickly transforms into Ellison’s conscious construction and reconstruction of intent, motive, and meaning. An even more dramatic example appears in the following undated, handwritten note found among Ellison’s papers at the Library of Congress (139/5):

Prologue

They arrive in D.C.

McIntyre reports

But when does Hickman go looking for information?

This comes with the extension of the prologue, or through chapters in which they search

Visit to Rockmore’s house where they encounter the cross-eyed woman

The Lincoln Memorial

The hotel where the senator has a suite

Walk on which they come upon the end of car-burning

Hickman goes on walk alone and encounters Leroy, glimpses Severen in window—which suggests that he will have to visit Janey
before
he leads group to Washington. And this is because he arrives in Oklahoma while Severen is still there. They see one another—or Severen sees him—in some neutral spot. But later Severen sees him in Washington, puts two and two together, and follows him in hope that he will be led to Sunraider—of whose identity he is uncertain…

Actually, Severen might be their
observer
who is bent upon discovering their mission.

Interspersed within the outline of narrative sequence are questions, explanations, hypothetical suggestions; one can see Ellison seeking order out of possibility. These examples (and there are numerous others) demonstrate Ellison’s constantly shifting vision of how he might construct his house of fiction. The tables of contents he saved to computer, fortunately, are more
direct and definitive than those written by hand, consisting of ordered file names that provide a clear, if incomplete, indication of narrative sequence.

The computer files show Ellison fashioning imperfect provisional solutions to long-standing textual puzzles. For instance, he seems to have begun inserting Oklahoma flashbacks into the D.C. narrative through passing references to Janey, Millsap, and the Oklahoma hotel. He leaves open the connection between McIntyre at Rockmore’s and Hickman (with Wilhite) at Rockmore’s by having “a couple of colored fellows” appear near the end of the McIntyre sequence (“Dance”), and by having Hickman collide with an unidentified white man at the beginning of the Hickman at Rockmore scene (“McMillen”). These remnants are gestures of intentionality rather than fully achieved resolutions to textual problems. They demonstrate, however, that Ellison’s mind was at work making connections and experimenting with possibilities up to his last days of composition.

Rather than reinventing his novel, Ellison’s computer sequences tell old stories in new ways. His writing shows a striking consistency of detail across decades of composition. Ellison returns to the same core scenes and characters, and often to the same language that he used in drafts dating back as far as the 1950s. With few exceptions it appears likely that he had the typescript draft at his side as he composed; the phrases are often identical. Among Ellison’s early drafts are versions of almost every scene he would produce on the computer. Rather than representing a radical new direction for the novel, the computer files mark an atavistic turn to past characters and conceptions.

Alongside the 1970s Book I and II typescripts, however, Ellison’s computer files stand out. Where the typescripts render Hickman and Bliss/ Sunraider’s dual narrative voices, the computer files emphasize Hickman’s alone (albeit Hickman’s bifurcated voice of jazzman and preacher). Where the typescripts move action to the psychological realm, the computer files most often push it out into the street, to the picaresque narrative plane his earlier protagonist inhabited in
Invisible Man
. Where the typescripts approach Ellison’s fully achieved voice and style, the computer files contain numerous typographical errors and elisions.

For all the incompletion and imperfection of Ellison’s last literary efforts, they provide multiple instances that recall him at his best. Readers familiar with
Invisible Man
and the
Collected Essays
will be reminded again of Ellison’s masterly command of the African American vernacular tradition. Through Hickman, Ellison weaves the sacred and profane strains of black expressive culture into a whole that finds Stackalee beside Brueghel’s Icarus, Jesus Christ beside Peetie Wheatstraw. Palpable, too, is Ellison’s abiding faith in American identity and black people’s essential place in the nation’s past, present, and future. His characters revere America and its founding principles in a manner that runs deeper than flag-waving pageantry. Theirs is a patriotism sometimes embraced at the price of freedom. As far as these themes
are concerned, Ellison has extended what he began so many years ago in
Invisible Man
.

In July 1993 Ellison revised all sixteen “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” files. He had long envisioned beginning the novel with Hickman and his parishioners arriving to warn Sunraider of an impending assassination attempt at the hands of the Senator’s estranged son, Severen. “Two days before the bewildering incident a chartered plane-load of those who at that time were politely identified as Southern ‘Negroes’ swooped down upon Washington’s National Airport and disembarked in a confusion of paper bags, suitcases, and picnic baskets.” Versions of this sentence begin the excerpt called “And Hickman Arrives,” the first one Ellison published from his novel-in-progress, as well as “Prologue” from the 1970s typescripts and “Arrival” from the computer sequence. In Ellison’s early notes he mentions beginning with this scene. “The first seven pages,” he writes in an undated note, “wherein Hickman and the old people are introduced, could be a prologue.”

In the computer files, however, Hickman’s arrival becomes much more than a prologue. What began as a seven-page introduction leading to Sun-raider’s assassination has transmogrified into more than three hundred pages unified by Hickman’s governing consciousness. The essential encounters Ellison renders with such force in Book II (Hickman at Sunraider’s bedside) and Book I (Hickman and McIntyre’s hallway exchanges) are nowhere to be found. Instead, the computer sequence places Hickman and his roving consciousness in the foreground.

Instead of moving directly to the assassination attempt after Hickman and his parishioners arrive, as in “Prologue,” the computer sequence follows the group for the entire day. After being dismissed by the Senator’s secretary, Hickman and his followers are searched by security guards (the last scene that the computer sequence shares with Book II). After checking into the Hotel Longview, Hickman takes a nap, tries to intercept the Senator at his mistress’s penthouse, attempts to contact the Senator through a “middle-of-the-road” newspaper, returns to the Senate offices but is turned back by a guard, looks for Walker Millsap (a “veteran white-folks-watcher”) only to be confronted by a vernacular character named Leroy who mistakes Hickman for “Chief Sam,” notices a mural of a black Christ, returns to the hotel where he daydreams in the lobby, talks with Deacon Wilhite, takes his parishioners sightseeing at the Lincoln Memorial, returns to the Longview to take a shower, retires to the lounge where he studies a reproduction of Brueghel’s
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
, catches a cab with Wilhite to visit Aubrey McMillen at Jessie Rockmore’s townhouse, and after encountering the wild scene within, leaves to return to the Longview, no closer to finding Sunraider than when the day began.

The sequence ends abruptly with Hickman and Wilhite exiting Rock-more’s
house with “a quick look at the glowing 369 on the fanlight.”
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In his notes Ellison speculates at different times about fusing the Hickman and McIntyre sections, using the Rockmore scene as the bridge. Elsewhere, he considers cutting to flashbacks of Georgia and Oklahoma or moving ahead to the car-burning scene on the next day. He left no clear indications of how he might have executed these plans. Curiously, both “Hickman in D.C.” and “Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma” end with Hickman exiting a building—Rockmore’s townhouse in D.C. and a bar called the Cave of Winds in Oklahoma. Crossing a threshold is, of course, a useful transitional device. However, it is unclear in both instances where Ellison intented Hickman, and the novel as a whole, to head next.

Unlike Book II, in which Ellison tests the themes of American identity and democracy through two equal protagonists, the computer files render these same concerns through Hickman’s consciousness alone. Ellison attempts to make Hickman a richer and deeper character than in the typescripts, albeit at the cost of his antiphonal relationship with Bliss/Sunraider. Through Hickman Ellison explores the contrasts and the connections in a double voice. Hickman, Ellison writes, is of “two minds”—one doubtful, the other hopeful; one blues-toned, the other sanctified. One notable example of this duality comes during Hickman’s solitary search through the streets of Washington when he encounters the mural depicting the black Christ’s march to his crucifixion bearing a cross topped by a “bundle consisting of red, white, and blue cotton,” partly unfurled. Hickman interprets this arresting religious and nationalist iconography in a way that a more limited character could not. Such a doubling of vision connects to a long-standing tradition in African American expression balancing the faith of the spirituals with the tragicomic sensibility of the blues. Hickman’s riffs and reflections draw equally from both traditions, with references to New Testament scripture and folk tales, the life of the spirit and the desires of the flesh.

Throughout the sequence, Hickman’s musings punctuate a series of otherwise perfunctory events. This external-internal schism is never reconciled. The result is a jarring dissonance between Hickman’s calm, expansive, brooding tone and the putative necessity of action. Numerous times in his notes Ellison underscores the importance of action. “N.B.,” he writes in a note from the computers dated 3/14/1991 (“After.hat”), “Whatever he [Hickman] does must maintain dramatic tension.” Despite this tone of self-admonition, so much of what Ellison accomplished in these late revisions comes at the expense of narrative tension. Ellison would have us believe that
Hickman and his followers have come to the capital on urgent business—namely, to stave off Sunraider’s assassination. And yet, after Hickman is rebuffed at the Senator’s offices, this sense of purpose dissipates.

The computer files’ most vivid encounters are at an almost unfathomable distance from Ellison’s original purpose of rendering Hickman’s efforts to save the Senator. Such obsolescence of action shifts the burden of meaning to Hickman’s mind. As a result the narrative often takes on a quality more reminiscent of Ellison’s essays than of the typescripts. Rather than reading the computer files for their absences or deficiencies, it may be most useful to consider them for what they contribute to Hickman, as potentially epic a character in Ellison’s mind as Invisible Man.

“Hickman in Washington, D.C.” contains relatively few textual anomalies compared to “Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma,” undoubtedly because, unlike the other two sequences, he revised the entire sequence in a single month. The biggest editorial challenge was in cleaning up the computer-file corruptions occurring during file transfer—perhaps during his lifetime (records show he had his files transferred in 1988). These corruptions consisted of random characters appearing in the text and unintended line breaks, neither of which disturbed the integrity of the text itself. We have removed these corruptions silently and standardized the format in all the sequences in this volume.

In addition to problems in formatting, the D.C. sequence includes a limited number of other anomalies, most dealing with transitions between files. “Trombone” ‘s transition to “Hotel” does not include nine lines of text found in several of “Trombone”‘s variants. We have included these lines, marking them off with brackets, for the purposes of context and clarity. Another imperfect transition comes between “Maude Eye” and “Legend.” “Legend” offers an alternative version of the last two paragraphs in “Maude Eye.” Both are included for the purposes of comparison, respecting the absence of any clear preference on Ellison’s part. Additionally, the sequence includes several narrative inconsistencies, most notably the aforementioned references to Georgia and Oklahoma, and also the numbering of Hickman’s parishioners as forty-four and fifty in different files. We have left such inconsistencies unchanged as further evidence of the unfinished nature of Ellison’s work.

Originally, Ellison imagined his second novel as an “Oklahoma book.” The 1950s typewritten drafts dealing with McIntyre (and occasionally Hickman) in Oklahoma are among the earliest material Ellison composed for the second novel. After a long hiatus, he continued revising them in the 1990s. “Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma” consists of twenty-five files, seven Georgia and eighteen Oklahoma. While it is clear that Ellison conceived of
them as a unit, they are usefully discussed separately for the purposes of summary and editorial analysis.
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