Invisible man

            When I reached the door the chairman called, "Just a minute, brother, we want you to understand that this is nothing against you personally. What you see here is the results of certain conditions here at the plant. We want you to know that we are only trying to protect ourselves. Some day we hope to have you as a member in good standing."

            From here and there came a half-hearted applause that quickly died. I swallowed and stared unseeing, the words spurting to me from a red, misty distance.

            "Okay, brothers," the voice said, "let him pass."

            I stumbled through the bright sunlight of the yard, past the office workers chatting on the grass, back to Building No. 2, to the basement. I stood on the stairs, feeling as though my bowels had been flooded with acid.

            Why hadn't I simply left, I thought with anguish. And since I had remained, why hadn't I said something, defended myself? Suddenly I snatched the wrapper off a sandwich and tore it violently with my teeth, hardly tasting the dry lumps that squeezed past my constricted throat when I swallowed. Dropping the remainder back into the bag, I held onto the handrail, my legs shaking as though I had just escaped a great danger. Finally, it went away and I pushed open the metal door.

            "What kept you so long?" Brockway snapped from where he sat on a wheelbarrow. He had been drinking from a white mug now cupped in his grimy hands.

            I looked at him abstractedly, seeing how the light caught on his wrinkled forehead, his snowy hair. "I said, what kept you so long!" What had he to do with it, I thought, looking at him through a kind of mist, knowing that I disliked him and that I was very tired.

            "I say . . ." he began, and I heard my voice come quiet from my tensed throat as I noticed by the clock that I had been gone only twenty minutes. "I ran into a union meeting --"

            "Union!" I heard his white cup shatter against the floor as he uncrossed his legs, rising. "I knowed you belonged to that bunch of troublemaking foreigners! I knowed it! Git out!" he screamed. "Git out of my basement!"

            He started toward me as in a dream, trembling like the needle of one of the gauges as he pointed toward the stairs, his voice shrieking. I stared; something seemed to have gone wrong, my reflexes were jammed.

            "But what's the matter?" I stammered, my voice low and my mind understanding and yet failing exactly to understand. "What's wrong?"

            "You heard me. Git out!"

            "But I don't understand . . ."

            "Shut up and git!"

            "But, Mr. Brockway," I cried, fighting to hold something that was giving way.

            "You two-bit, trouble-making union louse!"

            "Look, man," I cried, urgently now, "I don't belong to any union."

            "If you don't git outta here, you low-down skunk," he said, looking wildly about the floor, "I'm liable to kill you. The Lord being my witness, I'LL KILL YOU!"

            It was incredible, things were speeding up. "You'll do what?" I stammered.

            "I'LL KILL YOU, THAT'S WHAT!"

            He had said it again and something fell away from me, and I seemed to be telling myself in a rush: You were trained to accept the foolishness of such old men as this, even when you thought them clowns and fools; you were trained to pretend that you respected them and acknowledged in them the same quality of authority and power in your world as the whites before whom they bowed and scraped and feared and loved and imitated, and you were even trained to accept it when, angered or spiteful, or drunk with power, they came at you with a stick or strap or cane and you made no effort to strike back, but only to escape unmarked. But this was too much . . . he was not grandfather or uncle or father, nor preacher or teacher. Something uncoiled in my stomach and I was moving toward him, shouting, more at a black blur that irritated my eyes than at a clearly denned human face, "YOU'LL KILL WHO?"

            "YOU, THAT'S WHO!"

            "Listen here, you old fool, don't talk about killing me! Give me a chance to explain. I don't belong to anything -- Go on, pick it up! Go on!" I yelled, seeing his eyes fasten upon a twisted iron bar. "You're old enough to be my grandfather, but if you touch that bar, I swear I'll make you eat it!"

            "I done tole you, GIT OUTTA MY BASEMENT! You impudent son'bitch," he screamed.