Misreading a Scene from Ellison’s “Invisible Man”
It’s great to hear about people who can re-read fiction books in their collection on a regular basis. To me this means that my life is so stabilized and time is so well managed that allocations can be made for refined solitude. Sadly, my solitude is not refined these days.
So, in my brutish moments of reflection, I depend on memories of books read decades ago. My memory is not perfect—but it can be revealing and instructive when mistakes are made. One notable mistake is my memory of this scene—let’s call it the “cartman” scene—from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man:
“What is all that you have there?” I said, pointing to the rolls of blue paper stacked in the cart.
“Blueprints, man. Here I got ’bout a hundred pounds of blueprints and I couldn’t build nothing!”
“What are they blueprints for?” I said.
“Damn if I know—everything. Cities, towns, country clubs. Some just buildings and houses. I got damn near enough to build me a house if I could live in a paper house like they do in Japan. I guess somebody done changed their plans,” he added with a laugh. “I asked the man why they getting rid of all this stuff and he said they get in so every once in a while they have to throw ’em out to make place for the new plans…”
See, I recalled this scene as a Black man hauling a cart of his blueprints. I would often joke quite seriously to people that were it not for the revolution of the personal computer, I would be pushing around a shopping cart. You see, kids, in the old days, computers were tucked away in ivory towers encircled by a de facto system of white supremacy that even to this day finds it hard for us to rub two words together: African intellect. Yes, it would be “insane” to waste precious white-time letting “a negro” learn how to use a computer, draw blueprints, you get the idea… This “insanity” can actually drive many Black victims (yes, I used the v-word) insane… And no, you really can’t do much about this, except watch… or maybe file a restraining order…
So, anyway, I assumed that Ralph Ellison was trying to communicate even more tragedy by suggesting to us readers that a man a great as, say, Paul Williams, could be reduced to pushing around a shopping cart, singing old country songs to himself. And then we should ask why such men with proven powers and great potential are so utterly rejected and broken.
There are several reasons why my bias would alter in this way. I could think of my father, who was an aircraft mechanic but could have been a commercial airline pilot. He kept his pilot’s license current for years and was even a flight instructor. After Ice Cube, we tend to forget that Compton has an airport. But, closer still, is the father of my homeboy, R/Kain Blaze:
Somewhere over 15 years ago, me and my homeboy drove past a huge building next to Highway 101 (near Hollywood) Interstate 10 (near Culver City) and he said something like, “my father built that”—then he explained that his father was an architect and then (typically) never talked about it again. Cleary, I have not forgotten about this… unless of course my memory has failed again…