Three Days Before the Shooting by Ralph Ellison

LOOKING DOWN THE CORRIDOR toward Bates, I wondered what would have happened had I tried to describe what I'd seen and observed in Jessie Rockmore's house to Tolliver. He probably would have rushed me upstairs to join McMillen-whom I can't believe to be a murderer-and LeeWillie Minifees. And now I asked myself if it was not one more cryptic foreshadowing of more chaos to come, with the old Negro in his coffin chair–judgment bench but one more arrow pointing to the bringing low of a powerful senator.

But there was no time for further speculation, for now the elevator opened and a young nurse hurried past me and entered the Senator's room. Then, hardly had the door closed than one of the men carrying a machine gun came out and hurried down the corridor to speak with Bates and then disappeared around the corner. All this occurred swiftly, without a stir from old Hickman. But now, as the nurse came out again, she spoke to him and he seemed immediately alert. I could see him smile and nod his head and the nurse hurrying down the corridor where the guard had disappeared. My nerves tightened as I watched him, his eyes closed again, and I fought down an impulse to ask if she'd given him some word of the Senator's condition. And where was Tolliver, I wondered, and would he remember his promise to alert me to any new development? I got up and walked back and forth before the bench, waiting. I thought of Miss Duval, my mother, Laura, of the Holy Family as sepia-tinted Negroes. What a mishmash of images! What a nutty blend of values! The world had become a Mr. Badbar of nutty contradictions. . I was starving, my gut growling.