Invisible man - Ralph Ellison [102]
"Well, whatever it is, I hope it's something that's a credit to the race."
"I hope so," I said.
"Don't hope, make it that way."
I looked at her thinking of what I'd tried to do and of where it had gotten me, seeing her heavy, composed figure before me.
"It's you young folks what's going to make the changes," she said. "Y'all's the ones. You got to lead and you got to fight and move us all on up a little higher. And I tell you something else, it's the one's from the South that's got to do it, them what knows the fire and ain't forgot how it burns. Up here too many forgits. They finds a place for theyselves and forgits the ones on the bottom. Oh, heap of them talks about doing things, but they done really forgot. No, it's you young ones what has to remember and take the lead."
"Yes," I said.
"And you have to take care of yourself, son. Don't let this Harlem git you. I'm in New York but New York ain't in me, understand what I mean? Don't git corrupted."
"I won't. I'll be too busy."
"All right now, you looks to me like you might make something out of yourself, so you be careful."
I got up to go, watching her raise herself out of her chair and come with me to the door.
"You ever decide you want a room somewhere beside Men's House, try me," she said. "The rent's reasonable."
"I'll remember that," I said.
I WAS to remember sooner than I had thought. The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men's House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility. My overalls were causing stares and I knew that I could live there no longer, that that phase of my life was past. The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with Utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community "leaders" without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil-War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed nothing beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; the younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream -- the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah's Ark but who yet were drunk on finance. Yes, and that older group with similar aspirations, the "fundamentalists," the "actors" who sought to achieve the status of brokers through imagination alone, a group of janitors and messengers who spent most of their wages on clothing such as was fashionable among Wall Street brokers, with their Brooks Brothers suits and bowler hats, English umbrellas, black calfskin shoes and yellow gloves; with their orthodox and passionate argument as to what was the correct tie to wear with what shirt, what shade of gray was correct for spats and what would the Prince of Wales wear at a certain seasonal event; should field glasses be slung from the right or from the left shoulder; who never read the financial pages though they purchased the Wall Street Journal religiously and carried it beneath the left elbow, pressed firm against the body and grasped in the left hand -- always manicured and gloved, fair weather or foul -- with an easy precision (Oh, they had style) while the other hand whipped a tightly rolled umbrella back and forth at a calculated angle; with their homburgs and Chesterfields, their polo coats and Tyrolean hats worn strictly as fashion demanded.
I could feel their eyes, saw them all and saw too the time when they would know that my prospects