“A Revelation or a More Efficient Blinding?”

The anonymous narrator of Invisible Man never specifies the state he grows up in—all we know is that it’s deep in the Jim Crow South—and he never names “the state college for Negroes” to which he wins a scholarship. Ellison himself grew up in racially segregated Oklahoma City and attended Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama, a historically black college that was founded by the famous educator and former slave Booker T. Washington. As I mentioned in class, the young narrator models his graduation speech closely on Washington’s ideas of pragmatism and accommodationism. The narrator tells us that he “visualized [himself] as a potential Booker T. Washington” in those “pre-invisible days” (18), and he quotes “the great leader and educator” at the start of his speech: “‘To those of my race who depend upon bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the southern white man, who is his next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded’” (30).

Ellison undermines Washington’s message of “humility as the essence of progress” considerably, by having the narrator endure humilation and degradation in the battle royal leading up to his speech, and even during the speech itself. His “fervor” as he quotes Washington prevents him from noticing “that the men were still talking and laughing until my dry mouth, filling up with blood from the cut, almost strangled me” (30). Washington’s faith in the essential goodness and generosity of southern whites is treated with irony throughout this chapter, as the narrator’s humility spills over into humiliation.

The “progress” with which his humility is rewarded, at the conclusion of this harrowing, nightmarish episode, takes the form of a scholarship to a school that resembles Washington’s Tuskegee in a number of general—and specific—respects. The most specific, perhaps, comes in the form of a statue the narrator describes near the start of chapter 2: "[I]n my mind’s eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave” (36). Readers may note a conspicuous resemblance to a famous statue of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee:

The sculptor’s intent is easy to read, and indeed the gesture is “breathtaking”: education is freedom, knowledge is power. The promise of Emancipation depends on the education and literacy of the newly freed population of the South. Washington is justly revered to this day as an eloquent spokesman for the liberational potential of education, and his own life story is a powerful testament to his ideas. The sculpture’s inscription captures these ideals beautifully (although what the narrator means by the “cold Father symbol” is evident, too):

But just as the narrator’s laughing grandfather undermines his pride in his “triumph” at the battle royal in his unnerving dream (thereby undermining the narrator’s naïve faith in the Washingtonian principles he so earnestly espouses before an audience that seems anything but “friendly”), here again Ellison’s underground narrator throws a wrench of irony into this apparently straightforwardly allegorical statue: “I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly into place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding. And as I gaze, there is a rustle of wings and I see a flock of starlings flighting before me and, when I look again, the bronze face, whose empty eyes look upon a world I have never seen, runs with liquid chalk” (36). I love how this simple insight complicates the straightforward interpretation of the statue’s meaning: indeed, we can see it either as a veil being raised or lowered. And look again: the eyes do appear empty, dead, smeared with weathering and (it’s easy to imagine) birdcrap. (Bronze is not the ideal medium for capturing the spark of life in a human eyeball.) 

And it’s not as if the narrator’s education will simply either enlighten him or leave him as he was (we can agree that he sure needs some veils raised at this point in his life). Ellison suggests, provocatively, that education can have a blinding effect. What do you see, in chapter 2, as the narrator-as-collegian serves as a chauffeur (just like Bigger Thomas!), driving a rich white philanthropist around and trying to show him only the face of the college and the “community” that the higher-ups have approved for public consumption? Does he seem enlightened, or blinded? Is the veil being lifted, or lowered into place?