Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison

So now I suppose that the medicine is taking him over again, Hickman thought. The needle has reached through his flesh into his mind. Those hypos into the vein then. The way he looks at me, still wanting to talk and his eyes dulling. But the hopeful thing is that he's fighting to live, to stay alive. Regardless of what it will all have to mean if he does, he still wants to live. So my task is simply to help him to keep on fighting, to keep on wanting to live. What else is there, other than what a minister always tries to do to help? Comfort and consolation-no, not just that, because there's still the mystery to be understood. Reverse the time. Lord, but I'm tired. cramped in muscle and confused in mind. Maybe I ought to go out and stretch my legs, get a little fresh air in my lungs. No, you can't risk it because it would be just like him to come to while I'm out and if he did, what would be the next move? Forget it; you've waited all this long time so you can afford to sit still and wait awhile longer-tired or no tired. Those hypos. He's sleeping hard, quiet in his body if not in his mind. Hypos. I sure hope so, because the time has come when everything has to be understood and I mean to be here to try.

Just look at him, Hickman, there he is: Bliss at last. Out of all the time and racked and tiered-up circumstance, out of all the pomp and power-seeking-there's ole Bliss. It makes you wonder all over again just what kind of being man really is; makes you puzzle over the difference between who he is and what he does. But how do you separate it? Body and soul are all mixed together and yet are something different just the same. One grows in the way it's destined to grow, flesh and bone, blood and nerves, skin and hair, from the beginning; while the other twists and turns and hides and seeks and makes up itself as it grows and moves along. So there he is and for whatever the world knows him to be, somehow he's still Bliss. It's like hearing a firecracker go off at a parade and you look up and see the great and bejeweled king of the Mardi Gras, sitting high on his throne in all his shiny majesty, and he starts to shake and cough and there, before your eyes, a little ole boy looks out from behind his mask. Well, the child is father and somewhere back there in the past, back behind little Bliss's face, this twitching, wounded man was waiting. No point of dreaming about it either. I was in the picture and a lot of other folks too, and we made a plan, or at least we dreamed a dream and worked for it but the world was simply too big for us and the dream got out of hand. So we held on to what we saw, us old ones, and finally it brought us here.