Invisible man - Ralph Ellison [202]
Getting up to go, I looked at the wall map and laughed at Columbus. What an India he'd found! I was almost across the hall when I remembered and came back and put on the hat and glasses. I'd need them to carry me through the streets.
I took a cab. Hambro lived in the West Eighties, and once in the vestibule I tucked the hat under my arm and put the glasses in my pocket along with Brother Tarp's leg chain and Clifton's doll. My pocket was getting overloaded.
I was shown into a small, book-lined study by Hambro himself. From another part of the apartment came a child's voice singing Humpty Dumpty, awakening humiliating memories of my first Easter program during which I had stood before the church audience and forgotten the words . . .
"My kid," Hambro said, "filibustering against going to bed. A real sea lawyer, that kid."
The child was singing Hickory Dickory Dock, very fast, as Hambro shut the door. He was saying something about the child and I looked at him with sudden irritation. With Rinehart on my mind, why had I come here?
Hambro was so tall that when he crossed his legs both feet touched the floor. He had been my teacher during my period of indoctrination and now I realized that I shouldn't have come. Hambro's lawyer's mind was too narrowly logical. He'd see Rinehart simply as a criminal, my obsession as a fall into pure mysticism . . . You'd better hope that is the way he'll see it, I thought. Then I decided to ask him about conditions uptown and leave . . .
"Look, Brother Hambro," I said, "what's to be done about my district?"
He looked at me with a dry smile. "Have I become one of those bores who talk too much about their children?"
"Oh, no, it's not that," I said. "I've had a hard day. I'm nervous. With Clifton's death and things in the district so bad, I guess . . ."
"Of course," he said, still smiling, "but why are you worried about the district?"
"Because things are getting out of hand. Ras's men tried to rough me up tonight and our strength is steadily going to hell."
"That's regrettable," he said, "but there's nothing to be done about it that wouldn't upset the larger plan. It's unfortunate, Brother, but your members will have to be sacrificed."
The distant child had stopped singing now, and it was dead quiet. I looked at the angular composure ot his face searching for the sincerity in his words. I could feel some deep change. It was as though my discovery of Rinehart had opened a gulf between us over which, though we sat within touching distance, our voices barely carried and then fell flat, without an echo. I tried to shake it away, but still the distance, so great that neither could grasp the emotional tone of the other, remained.
"Sacrifice?" my voice said. "You say that very easily."
"Just the same, though, all who leave must be considered expendable. The new directives must be followed rigidly."
It sounded unreal, an antiphonal game. "But why?" I said. "Why must the directives be changed in my district when the old methods are needed -- especially now?" Somehow I couldn't get the needed urgency into my words, and beneath it all something about Rinehart bothered me, darted just beneath the surface of my mind; something that had to do with me intimately.
"It's simple, Brother," Hambro was saying. "We are making temporary alliances with other political groups and the interests of one group of brothers must be sacrificed to that ot the whole."
"Why wasn't I told of this?" I said.
"You will be, in time, by the committee -- Sacrifice is necessary now --"
"But shouldn't sacrifice be made willingly by those who know what they are doing? My people don't understand why they're being sacrificed. They don't even know they're being sacrificed -- at least not by us . . ." But what, my mind went on, if they're as willing to be duped by the Brotherhood as by Rinehart?