Invisible Man: Chapter 20-Epilogue

It was not the words, for they were all the same old slave-borne words; it was as though he'd changed the emotion beneath the words while yet the old longing, resigned, transcendent emotion still sounded above, now deepened by that something for which the theory of Brotherhood had given me no name.

He blew a smoke ring, the blue-gray circle rising up boiling within its own jetting form, hovering for an instant then disintegrating into a weaving strand.

"At any rate, through our very position in the vanguard we must do and say the things necessary to get the greatest number of the people to move toward what is for their own good."

I'd overcome them with yeses, undermine them with grins, I'd agree them to death and destruction.

They were vindicated; the program was correct, events were progressing in their predetermined direction, history was on their side, and Harlem loved them.

For all her exposure to ideology she had no interest in politics and no idea of the schemes that occupied her husband night and day.

And, although I had neither the stature nor the temperament for either role, I was expected either to sing "Old Man River" and just keep rolling along, or to do fancy tricks with my muscles.

There was a pristine incorruptibility about her face now that upset me all the more, for she was neither kidding nor trying to insult me; and I could not tell if it were horror speaking to me out of innocence, or innocence emerging unscathed from the obscene scheme of the evening.

And in the dark windows and on the roofs above I could now discern the forms of women and children.

Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency.