I’ve been chasing Ellison in my young adult years, I realize. Invisible Man is a work that, when I read it in eighth grade, had no bearing on how I lived. The teacher who handed me the book was an accidental mentor.
Mr. Smith came to Manhattan on the 2 train, while I took the D from the other side of Brooklyn. Sometimes, on the IRT platform at 72nd Street, I would see Mr. Smith in the early hours. He was my eighth grade English instructor, so he had to attend the morning meeting. But beyond that, he knew my school’s rituals because he had gone to Collegiate in the 1980s. And from him I learned how to “put on” my manhood in that slow ride from subterranean Brooklyn into the city. Whenever I saw him on the train, he had already shifted into his mode of defense. Although Mr. Smith’s personality was absolutely jovial and sunny, he had an Angry Black veneer suited just for the Manhattan private school environment. His long stunning locks tapered behind his shoulders, and ran down his back, seemingly sagged by his brooding. His gait was stiff, and his impeccably stylish tweed acted as a perfect camouflage by patterning his outer shell in neat lines and cross hatches. Whether it was a brown blazer with suede elbow pads matched with similar brown shoes, or a green collared shirt staggered by an auburn tie, Smitty was dressed for the occasion. He had casual style with an orderly layering. It was the sure embroidery of his hidden torment.
He spoke both lovingly of the place as an academic bastion, and contemptibly about its penchant for elitist bias. As an emigrant from Trinidad, he could also point to me, as the Jamaican-born student, when he wanted to orient himself or my classmates about just how alien an experience Collegiate was to most Americans. Not that he made sure to single me out in lectures, because in fact he made no notice of me that I did not bring upon myself. Instead, he would speak in drastic hyperbole about how spoiled and suckled the white students were, and then speak about his upbringing in both honorable and ashamed tones. I say ashamed because, despite his general pride about being The Other, he was rankled by the implications of admitting a lowly start to bratty rich kids.
Even so, he acted as my academic advisor and severe parental figure for most of my years there. I had little sense of myself (still don’t) during my time at Collegiate School, so when I became familiar with a hobby I enjoyed, I latched on to it immediately. Mr. Smith saw how much I loved to read, and in 8th grade I still had the sense of childish delight when the book fair came to school. I could scarcely afford the loads of books my classmates often carted away, but this circumstance made an astute shopper out of me. I grasped for the classics mostly. I knew that the literary canon was important to my development as a person, but could also serve me in the “suiting up” part of the experience. I already knew something of Richard Wright, because I had read Black Boy in the fifth grade. James Baldwin’s rhetoric chilled me with awe. But one day at the book fair — in the “Featured Authors” section no less — I spotted Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man stacked in paperback columns. After reading the back blurb, I pulled on Smitty’s arm, asking him what he thought of the book (because I was certain he’d read it).
“Ellison was not my favorite read,” he admitted “but it’s a necessary work.”
I wondered what about this Invisible Man made it a necessity. So I read it. I was strangely disappointed. I think Mr. Smith had inadvertently diminished my expectations, and because I leaned on him for examples of both intellectual command and emotional, I put the book down feeling confused. I had no idea what to make of the main character’s brushes with socialism, what to understand from his sexlessness, or of his anonymity. Opening a black novel or any piece of black fiction was a safety exercise to that point. I wanted to enfold myself within the themes of abjection and indigence. There is fine melancholy waiting for a young man in the pages of Langston Hughes, saccharine pain in Hurston and Morrison and perfect futility in Baldwin. Frustration bred fraternity, which then bred love. Ellison had none of this, or none on the surface level. Mr. Smith exhibited the visceral displeasures of an Other life, but I had yet to understand his Ellisonian aspect. There were times when his pointed silence stirred me much more than his sermons about how I should mature fast if I wanted to survive in this world. More telling than Mr. Smith’s reticence though was the underlying masking he was doing all throughout those train rides. He had effectively obscured his humanity and manhood, and ultimately changed something bright and forward in favor of something subtle and composed. As his charge, it pained me to see that, especially because I had no idea what kind of effort it took.
I was focused on being a boy or being an adolescent. I had not found a way to build honest manhood, so I searched in vain for ways to display practiced manhood, measured manhood. Black men have this shared experience of mask-ulinity, where the concealment of anguish and even joy can be a sword against the affronting world and a shield from it. These entries are an attempt to strip down my mask-ulinity for the purpose of establishing manhood. Deception (even the artful kind) can only beget more deception. Inasmuch as the black community has always commended itself for morphing at will, I must remove myself from that to find the essence of what I am. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man does this to great effect, but it crippled him because he lived the masking life all the same. He had gotten to the heart of what (he thought) makes a man, yet he could not live that existence. The fictive challenge met, his life was burdened in the same ways he had unshackled his protagonist. If I’m to learn from his life, it will require my acute attention to the construction of my mask, and the use of it up to this moment. How have I affected other men, younger and older, with my ways? How have I affected women? Does this matter? Just as the subway trains of my New York life emerge from the tunnels of unknown only briefly, so must I find ways to emerge for personal clarity. To live is to be underground. To live is to unknow.
Posted by drewricketts 
