Chapter Nineteen
"The Woman Question"
"I was lost, for the conflict between the ideological and biological, duty and desire, had become too subtly confused. I went to her, thinking, Let them break down the door, whosoever will, let them come" (416).The specter of the cuckolded husband and the nature of his quiet acceptance -- invisibility vs. "sophistication, decadence, over-civilization" (418). A question of the consequences of his action with regard to the Brotherhood. The Invisible Man thinks that this "man who had spoken like an indifferent husband...seemed to recall to me some important member of the Brotherhood -- someone so familiar that my failure to identify him was driving me almost to distraction" (418).
The Invisible Man somewhat changes his approach thereafter. He is "unable to shrug off the notion that [he] had been tested and had failed," he knows "nothing definite of where I stood," and is "caught between guilt and innocence, so that now they seemed one and the same" (419). He puts on a new public front:
"work had to be done and I would play the waiting game. And despite my guilt and uncertainty I learned to forget that I was a lone guilty black Brother and to go striding confidently into a roomful of whites. It was chin up, a not too wide-stretched smile, the out-thrust hand for the firm warm hand shake. And with it just the proper mixture of arrogance and down-to-earth humility to satisfy all. I threw myself into the lectures, defending, asserting the rights of women; and though the girls continued to buzz around, I was careful to keep the biological and ideological carefully apart" (419).Chapter 19 draws to a close with the Invisible Man being suddenly shifted back to Harlem in spite of all of his self-development downtown. The Brotherhood cannot determine "'[w]hat has become of Brother Tod Clifton'" who has "'disappeared'" and they need the Invisible Man to contain a "'crisis'" in his old district:
"'Brother Tod Clifton has not only disappeared but failed in his assignment. On the other hand, Ras the Exhorter and his gang of racist gangsters are taking advantage of this and are increasing their agitation. You are to get back there and take measures to regain our strength in the community. You'll be given the forces you need and you'll report to us for a strategy meeting about which you'll be notified tomorrow'" (421).
Chapter Twenty
During this time, the Harlem office and member base that the Invisible Man worked so hard to build has been dissolved by the shifting agendas of the Brotherhood. The Invisible Man receives a rude welcome back to Harlem in Barrelhouse's Jolly Dollar, a "dark hole of a bar and grill on upper Eighth Avenue" that used to have ties to the Brotherhood (423). He swiftly realizes that things have changed -- in Barrelhouse's words, "'Business is bad. Very bad'" -- and that he is particularly blamed for deserting his district.
One of the men antagonizing the Invisible Man at Barrelhouse's suggests that he "'got the white fever and left'" rather than being reassigned. This perception has to do not only with changing Brotherhood practices, but also the manner in which the Invisible Man departed back at the end of Chapter Eighteen:
"I couldn't bring myself to say good-bye to anyone...I simply slipped my papers into my brief case and left as though going downtown for a meeting" (408).The Invisible Man discovers through Barrelhouse that "'lots of folks who got jobs through you people (the Brotherhood) have lost them'" including '"people in [the] organization'" itself (426). The Invisible Man returns to the Harlem headquarters only to discover that the Harlem office has been emptied and basically shut down Even Brother Tarp, who lived in the headquarters, is nowhere to be found (426-27). The portrait of Frederick Douglass that Tarp gave to the Invisible Man is also missing (428).
The Invisible Man is lost between his present and past actions. In his desperation, he makes his first (subconscious) attempt to return to Mary's on 427 and reflects that "[e]verything seemed to be slipping away from me and I could find no quick absorbing action that would get it under control." Along the lines of the suspicions regarding his betrayal of his district and race voiced in Barrelhouse's bar, he comes to realize that some of his former "brothers" and "sisters" likely
"believed that [he] had requested to be transferred because I hated my own people...No doubt there would be some who'd resent my return, so it was best to confront them all at once without giving any one of them the opportunity to organize any sentiment against me" (427).
Tod Clifton's Disappearance
When members do arrive, the Invisible Man discovers that no one knows what has happened to Tod Clifton or the Brotherhood itself.
"Not one could give me any definite information. Brother Clifton had appeared at the district as usual up to the time of his disappearance. There had been no quarrels with committee members, and he was as popular as ever. Nor had there been any clashes with Ras the Exhorter -- although in the past week he had been increasingly active. As for the loss of membership and influence, it was a result of a new program which had called for the shelving of our old techniques of agitation. There had been, to my surprise, a switch in emphasis from local issues to those more national and international in scope, and it was felt that for the moment the interests of Harlem were not of first importance. I didn't know what to make of it, since there had been no such change of program downtown" (429).The Invisible Man is left out of a Brotherhood meeting on 429 and wanders the streets in "new summer shoes" that he purchases until he comes upon the lookout for a street vendor selling "some kind of toy":
"at my feet I saw a square piece of cardboard upon which something was moving with furious action. It was some kind of toy and I glanced at the crowd's fascinated eyes and down again, seeing it clearly this time. I'd seen nothing like it before. A grinning doll of orange-and-black tissue paper with thin flat cardboard disks forming its head and feet and which some mysterious mechanism was causing to move up and down in a loose-jointed, shoulder-shaking, infuriatingly sensuous motion, a dance that was completely detached from the black, mask-like face. It's no jumping jack, but what, I thought, seeing the doll throwing itself about with the fierce defiance of someone performing a degrading act in public, dancing as though it received a perverse pleasure from its motions" (431).
The spiel of the street vendor, whom the Invisible Man quickly identifies as Clifton, is given on 431-434:
"Shake it up! Shake it up!
He's Sambo, the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen,
Shake him, stretch him by the neck and set him down,
--He'll do the rest. Yes!
He'll make you laugh, he'll make you sight, si-igh.
He'll make you want to dance, and dance --
[...]
Buy one for your baby. Take him to your girl friend and she'll
love you, loovve you!
He'll keep you entertained. He'll make you weep sweet --
Tears from laughing
[...]
What makes him happy, what makes him dance,
This Sambo, this jambo, this high-stepping joy boy?
He's more than a toy, ladies and gentlemen, he's Sambo, the
dancing doll, the twentieth-century miracle.
[...]
Sambo-Woogie, you don't have to feed him, he sleeps collapsed,
he'll kill your depression
And your dispossesion, he lives upon the sunshine of your lordly
smile
And only twenty-five cents, the brotherly two bits of a dollar be-
cause he wants me to eat.
It gives him pleasure to see me eat.
You simply take him and shake him...and he does the rest" (431-33).
The Invisible Man does not immediately recognize the vendor as Clifton, even given the diction of his sales pitch. At first he is "held by the inanimate, boneless bouncing of the grinning doll and strugged between the desire to join in the laughter and to leap upon it with both feet" until he recognizes that
"the voice didn't go with the hand. It was a though I had waded out into a shallow pool only to have the bottom drop out and the water close over my head...'Not you...' I began. But his eyes looked past me deliberately unseeing. I was paralyzed, looking at him, knowing I wasn't dreaming" (432).Clifton himself has assumed a peculiar stride and attitude, "riding easily back and forth in his knees, flexing his legs without moving his feet, his right shoulder raised at an angle and his arm pointing stiffly at the bouncing doll as he spieled from the corner of his mouth" (433). Clifton continues in his pitch, pointing out that there is "'no license'" required to obtain this "'little...joy spreader'" because "'[y]ou can't tax joy.'"
The Invisible Man is horrified by these caricatures and the fact that instead of striving to meaningfully assist the public, Clifton has become a street huckster seeking to make a profit through the sale of controversially entertaining items. Clifton's sell-out is even more offensive to the Invisible Man than if he had gone over to Ras's side to step up what Ras understands as their racial responsibilities (as black men).
"For a second our eyes met and he gave me a contemptuous smile, then he spieled again. I felt betrayed. I looked at the doll and felt my throat constrict. The rage welled behind the phlegm" (433).He tries to disrupt Clifton's pitch, but the crowd is resistant. They prefer entertainment to efforts to promote the Brotherhood's self-interested science which ultimately does not seek to benefit the black (or, one might argue, any other particular) community or group of individuals. Clifton relocates around the corner and the Invisible Man tries to avoid encountering him again.
"What a way to find him, I thought. What had happened to Clifton? It was all so wrong, so unexpected. How on earth could he drop from Brotherhood to this in so short a time? And why if he had to fall back did he try to carry the whole structure with him? What would non-members who knew him say? It was as though he had chosen -- how had he put it the night he fought with Ras? -- to fall outside of history...'To plunge,' he had said. But he knew that only in the Brotherhood could we make ourselves known, could we avoid being empty Sambo dolls. Such an obscene flouncing of everything human! My God! And I had been worrying about being left out of a meeting! I'd overlook it a thousand times; no matter why I wasn't called. It'd forget it and hold on desperately to Brotherhood with all my strength. For to break away would be to plunge...To plunge! And those dolls, where had they found them? Why had he picked that way to earn a quarter? Why not sell apples or song sheets, or shine shoes?" (435).In an almost dream-like sequence on 435-38 the Invisible Man witnesses Clifton challenge and be shot by a policeman. He wanders onto the subway at the chapter's close where he contemplates the meaning of rejecting one's place in "history":
"Why should a man deliberately plunge outside history and peddle an obscenity...Why should he choose to disarm himself, give up his voice and leave the only organization offering him a chance to 'define' himself?...Why had he turned away? Why had he chosen to step off the platform and fall beneath the train?Why did he choose to plunge into nothingness, into the void of faceless faces, of soundless voices, lying outside history? I tried to step away and look at it from a distance of words read in books, half-remembered. For history records the patterns of men's lives, they say...All things, it is said, are duly recorded -- all things of importance, that is. But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard, and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies his keepers keep their power by. But the cop would be Clifton's historian, his judge, his witness, and his executioner, and I was the only brother in the watching crowd. And I, the only witness for the defense, knew neither the extent of his guilt nor the nature of his crime. Where were the historians today? And how would they put it down?
"What did they ever think of us transitory ones? Ones such as I had been before I found Brotherhood -- birds of passage who were too obscure for learned classification, too silent for the most sensitive recorders of sound; or natures too ambiguous for the most ambiguous words, and too distant from the centers of historical decision to sign or even to applaud the signers of historical documents? We who write no novels, histories, or other books. What about us[?]" (439).
The Invisible Man finally actually notices the people around him for the first time -- zoot suiters on 440, women shoppers on 440-41. He reflects that these young men
"speak a jived-up transitional language...think transitional thoughts, though perhaps they dream the same old ancient dreams. They were men out of time -- unless they found Brotherhood. Men out of time, who would soon be gone and forgotten...But who knew (and now I began to tremble so violently I had to lean against a refuse can) -- who knew but that they were the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of something precious? The stewards of something uncomfortable, burdensome, which they hated because, living outside the realm of history, there was no one to applaug their value and they themselves failed to understand it. What if Brother Jack were wrong? What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment, and the boys his ace in the hole? What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile and these boys his agents, his big surprise! His own revenge? For they were outside, in the dark with Sambo, the dancing paper doll; taking it on the lambo with my fallen brother, Tod Clifton...running and dodging the forces of history instead of making a dominating stand" (441).He then sees a pairing of a white and a black nun and contemplates his own position "in relation to the boys," who are now reading comic books. The Invisible Man contemplates himself (and the youths) as "[p]erhaps an accident, like Douglass":
"Perhaps each hundred years or so men like them, like me, appeared in society, drifting through; and yet by all historical logic we, I, should have disappeared around the first part of the nineteenth century, rationalized out of existence.Perhaps, like them, I was a throwback, a small distant meteorite that died several hundred years ago and now lived only by virtue of the light that speeds through space at too great a pace to realize that its source has become a piece of lead" (442).For the first time he pays attention to and recognizes the people swarming around him and recognizes his own smallness and anonymity, even in the context of the Brotherhood. For the first time, he takes responsibility for his actions (and actions that extend beyond him) upon himself -- however rightfully:
"All our work had been very little, no great change had been made. And it was all my fault. I'd been so fascinated by the motion that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd been asleep, dreaming" (444).
Chapter Twenty-One
Tod Clifton's Funeral
Fewer details on this chapter, though it is significant . The major consideration is why the Brotherhood objects so strongly to the funeral and the Invisible Man's role in organizing it.
The Invisible Man realizes that in lashing out against Clifton's sale of the Sambo dolls he has betrayed his "political stupidity" (445). When he examines the Sambo doll in his office he realizes how the contraption operates: "a fine black thread...Clifton had been making it dance all the time and the black thread had been invisible" (446).
The remainder of the Harlem branch finds out about Clifton on 448 and the Invisible Man unsuccessfully attempts to contact headquarters on 449. He arranges the funeral (450-459) on his own "personal responsibility" lacking the oversight of higher Brotherhood committees. He delivers an ambiguous tribute to Clifton in the form of a speech on 454-459, in which he repeatedly suggests that "Clifton believed in Brotherhood," an endorsement that the Brotherhood -- we discover in Chapter Twenty-Two -- is unwilling to permit.
Chapter Twenty-Two
1) He conceives of the organization as one where African American individuals can develop as individuals
2) He understands himself as being in a position of legitimate leadership and capable of acting on his own "personal responsibility" (463)
3) He still fails to understand why he was moved from Harlem (individuality, emotional vs. scientific appeals, mob-like popularity vs. informed membership). See back in Chapter 20:
As for the loss of membership and influence, it was a result of a new program which had called for the shelving of our old techniques of agitation. There had been, to my surprise, a switch in emphasis from local issues to those more national and international in scope, and it was felt that for the moment the interests of Harlem were not of first importance (429).The Invisible Man has gone back to Harlem and has been left intentionally uninformed so that the Brotherhood can see what he will do. He organizes and delivers the speech at Clifton's funeral (as an individual leader) and does so in the name of the Brotherhood. See the debate over "personal responsibility" starting on 463-464.
The Invisible Man discovers that the Brotherhood likely knowingly alienated Clifton in addition to their objections to the funeral beginning on 466:
(Brother Jack) "'Under your leadership, a traitorous merchant of vile instruments of anti-Negro, anti-minority racist bigotry has received the funeral of a hero. Do you still ask what's wrong?'"The Invisible Man insists that he has only "'dramatized the shooting down of an unarmed black man,'" but Jack insists that this "'black man, as you call him, was a traitor'" (467). The Invisible Man insists upon the popular appeal of the event as well as its ability to incite support for the movement on 467: "'But hell, isn't the shooting of an unarmed man of more importance than the fact that he sold obscene dolls?'"
A misunderstanding develops when the Invisible Man responds to objections to his drawing out mass support from the black community in racially charged terms starting on 468. He objects to what he comprehends as a racial discrepancy in the movement when the Brotherhood members and Brother Jack object to his reliance on "personal responsibility" rather than awaiting orders.
(Brother Jack) "'Don't twist my meaning. For all of us, the committee does the thinking. For all of us. And you were hired to talk...We furnish all ideas. We have some acute ones. Ideas are part of our apparatus. Only the correct ideas for the correct occasion.'"
(IM) "'And suppose you misjudge the occasion?'"
(Jack) "'Should that ever happen, you keep quiet.'"
(IM) "'Even though I am correct?'"
(Jack) "'You say nothing unless it is passed by the committee. Otherwise I suggest you keep saying the last thing you were told.
(IM) "'And when my people demand that I speak?'"
(Jack) "'The committee will have an answer!...Let us handle the theory and the business of strategy....We are experienced. We're graduates and while you are a smart beginner you skipped several grades. But they were important grades, especially for gaining strategical knowledge. For such is necessary to see the overall picture. More is involved than meets the eye. With the long view and the short view and the over-all view mastered, perhaps you won't slander the political consciousness of the people of Harlem'" (470).
The Invisible Man continues to insist on the validity of his own "'political consciousness of Harlem'" in spite of all of the committee members' objections (471). The Brotherhood is also unwilling to allow that there are things (like community or racial issues) that their science fails to explain. When the Invisible Man mentions that Harlem residents have begun to "'insult me and accuse us of betraying them,'" Jack calls out his report as "'an indefensible lie'" (472).
Ellison's references to the "'great white father'" and "'Marse Jack'" on 473 invoke an array of earlier themes: the reefer dream in the introduction in which a slave woman who has poisoned her master and the father of her sons reveals her mixed emotions (11), the vets' comments about Norton -- "'it's Thomas Jefferson'" (77-8), and his comparison of Master the bulldog with the crowd at his first Brotherhood speech and with Jack himself (338).
Jack insists that he is "'[n]ot their father, [but] their leader,'" that the Brotherhood knows best, and that the organization does "'not shape [their] policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them!'" (473).
Another early motif of blindness is rounded out at the close of the chapter through Jack's glass eye (474). The Invisible Man's shock over the false eye and empty socket leads Jack to label him "'a sentimentalist'" and to go on to clarify that he "'lost [his] eye in the line of duty'" (475).
Note prior invocations of blindness (this is not a complete list):
- Invisibility of some persons as a "peculiar disposition of the eyes...with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality" (3)The chapter closes with the Brotherhood reasserting its discipline over the Invisible Man and Jack redefining "'Personal Responsibility'" as "'sacrifice, sacrifice, SACRIFICE'" (475). The Invisible Man realizes that the Brotherhood members do "'not-see'" him (477) and questions which of Jack's eyes is "really the blind one" (478).
- The man that doesn't see him and whom he beats in the introduction (4)
- Blindfolding at the battle royal (21-25)
- The revelation of Reverend Barbee's blindness following his speech back in the college chapel on 133
- The Invisible Man waking from his dream and actually seeing the people around him on 438-44
- The Invisible Man's blindness throughout the development of the plot
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Invisible Man walks by the efforts stemming from Clifton's funeral at the opening of Chapter Twenty-Three including a bar argument, "a group of civil-liberties workers circulating a petition demanding the dismissal of the guilty policeman," and a sermon by the "familiar woman street preacher...about the slaughter of the innocents" (479). Rather than causing a unified response, the Invisible Man's efforts have given rise to the emergence of "[l]ittle groups" (479).
The Invisible Man is mobbed by Ras and his followers on 480-82. In escaping from Ras's "'goons'" he finds himself on Lenox avenue where he buys a pair of sunglasses with the "darkest lenses [he] could find" (482). These dark glasses disguise his identity and make him see the world differently, "swarmed in a green vagueness" (483). He is mistaken for Rinehart first by a woman who flirts with him until she discovers that he is not who he appears to be and warns him that he had "'better not let him catch you pretending to be him.'" Disguised, he heads back to the meeting, and on the way he is waylaid by men seeking to play the numbers game: "'Rinehart, poppa, tell us what you putting down'" (484). He does not initially put all of this together -- "Who was this Rinehart and what was he putting down? I'd have to learn more about him to avoid further misidentifications" (484).
On 485, Ras the Exhorter (first introduced by name back on 365) is reborn as "Ras the DESTROYER" and in fleeing this new incarnation, the Invisible Man finds himself back (unrecognized) at Barrelhouse's bar where he starts a fight with his former-brother Maceo (487-490). More Rinehart misidentifications follow on 490-91, eventually taking the specific form of being mistaken for "'Rine the runner'" or "'Rinehart the number man'" (491).
Note that the theme of lotteries or "playing the numbers" courses throughout the novel:
- The Invisible Man claims to have won the money he gives to Mary (really his first Brotherhood funding) by, in Mary's words, "'playing the numbers'" (324).
- Ras argues that "'white folks'" have taken over '"the numbers racket'" as well as "'all the stores'" in Harlem on 374.
In being mistaken for Rinehart, he realizes that a man who looks basically like himself (black, disguised) is a major force in the community invisible to the Brotherhood or other institutionally governed structures of power, or operating under the table, as with the cops who insist that he "'better have [their] cut in the right place'" on 492. On 494 Rinehart becomes even more multiplicitous when his familiar nickname "'Bliss'" is added to the catalog of the Invisible Man's mistaken identities.
More layers of identity -- as opposed to clarification -- are suggested on 495, where Rinehart is specifically identified by a bill handed out outside of his "'Holy Way Station'" as "'Rev. B.P. Rinehart, Spiritual Technologist'" (495). This promotional bill suggests that his power is not limited to Harlem but extends throughout "Way Stations in New Orleans, the home of mystery, / Birmingham, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and L.A." The Invisible Man is thus invited to bring his problems to God through Rinehart the middle-man and to join the Holy Way Station "'in the NEW REVELATION of the / OLD TIME RELIGION'" (495). He briefly enters the Harlem Way Station on 496-498 where he is led to reflect that the world is actually an enormous realm full of possibility where one man could
"be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend? Could he be both rind and heart? What is real anyway?" (498).
Rinehart symbolically embodies the possibilities that the vet told Invisible Man about back on 156: "'the world is possibility if only you'll discover it.'"
"He was a broad man, a man of parts who got around. Rinehart the rounder. It was true as I was true. His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries. A vast seething, hot world of fluidity, and Rine the rascal was at home. Perhaps only Rine the rascal was at home in it. It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie (498)...All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility. And sitting there trembling I caught a brief glimpse of the possibilities posed by Rinehart's multiple personalities and turned away. It was too vast and confusing to contemplate" (499).
While the Brotherhood (and particularly Hambro) keep counciling him on "'Sacrifice'" he comes to realize that the Brotherhood and their ideology are "all a swindle, an obscene swindle!" (507) He decides to "accept" the world in all of its possibility and vows now to "explore it, rine and heart...I didn't know what my grandfather had meant, but I was ready to test his advice" (508).
"They were forcing me to Rinehart methods, so bring on the scientists" (512).
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