Eloquence and Invisible Man

College Literature, Fall 2005 by Hanlon, Christopher

Take, for example, the character Peter Wheatstraw, the riffing and gregarious blues man whom the protagonist meets earlier in the narrative, as the latter is on his way to keeping his appointment with Emerson. At this point in the narrative, Ellison's protagonist has placed his confidence in the plan of action supplied to him by Bledsoe, a plan of action that is founded on his letters of introduction and that hence masks an elaborate deception. The blues man appears at this juncture as a walking personification of the protagonist's (actual, though yet to be ascertained) situation: when the protagonist first sees Wheatstraw, the latter is pushing a cart filled with a stack of abandoned plans, blueprints that represent designs for nearly every conceivable building project-from cities to country clubs-but which never came to fruition. As Wheatstraw remarks, "I guess somebody done changed their plans" (Ellison 1981, 175).

Part of the comedy here hovers over the absurd mystery of Wheatstraw's plans-what, after all, does he plan on doing with the hundreds of rolls of paper, of which he explains he has "a coupla loads"? But though he cannot fully realize it, Wheatstraw's remarks also offer a commentary on the protagonist's de facto situation as someone whose long-nurtured plans are about to disintegrate. "Folks is always changing their plans,"Wheatstraw comments, to which the protagonist responds, "Yes, that's right [. . .] but that's a mistake. You have to stick to the plan." To this,Wheatstraw appears "suddenly grave" before stating, "You kinda young, daddy-o" (Ellison 1981, 175). As someone who knows by first-hand experience that "this Harlem ain't nothing but a bear's den," Wheatstraw also presumably understands, better than the young protagonist, how early plans have a way of falling through, a lesson the protagonist will learn only too soon once he discovers the damaging statements contained in his letters of introduction. Wheatstraw s message of resilience is an Emersonian message, redressing the false confidence we tend to place in designs that may or may not turn out as we had initially hoped. Emerson's answer to this misplacement of confidence is to insist that the self-reliant individual "has not one chance, but a hundred chances"; his response to the fragility of human "plans" is to ridicule the common wisdom according to which "If the finest young genius studies at one of our colleges and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards [...] he is right in being disheartened and in complaining the rest of his life" (1983, 275). Wheatstraw s ironic distance toward the protagonist's faith in "the plan," however, does not issue directly from a self-consciously Emersonian philosophy of self-reliance, but rather from Wheatstraw s status as a "blues man" whose primary mode of communication draws a source of strength from what W. E. B. Du Bois recognized as the "half-despised" African American tradition of musical wordplay and improvisation. Wheatstraw embodies what Ellison described as the fundamental impulse proper to the blues, "an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness," "not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a neartragic, near comic lyricism" (1964, 78). Explaining that "All it takes to get along in this man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit," Wheatstraw performs these necessary qualities for survival-and simultaneously claims them as his own-through a spiel of spoken performance: "man, I was bawn with all three. In fact, I'maseventhsonofaseventhsonbawnwithacauloverbotheyesandraisedonblackcatbones-highjohntheconqueorandgreasygreens-" (1981, 176)5