Invisible man - Ralph Ellison [212]
BUT I was never to reach Mary's, and I was over-optimistic about removing the steel cap in the morning. Great invisible waves of time flowed over me, but that morning never came. There was no morning nor light of any kind to awaken me and I slept on and on until finally I was aroused by hunger. Then I was up in the dark and blundering around, feeling rough walls and the coal giving way beneath each step like treacherous sand. I tried to reach above me but found only space, unbroken and impenetrable. Then I tried to find the usual ladder that leads out of such holes, but there was none. I had to have a light, and now on hands and knees, holding tight to my brief case, I searched the coal until I found the folder of matches the men had dropped -- how long ago had that been? -- but there were only three and to save them I started searching for paper to make a torch, feeling about slowly over the coal pile. I needed just one piece of paper to light my way out of the hole, but there was nothing. Next I searched my pockets, finding not even a bill, or an advertising folder, or a Brotherhood leaflet. Why had I destroyed Rinehart's throwaway? Well, there was only one thing to do if I was to make a torch. I'd have to open my brief case. In it were the only papers I had.
I started with my high-school diploma, applying one precious match with a feeling of remote irony, even smiling as I saw the swift but feeble light push back the gloom. I was in a deep basement, full of shapeless objects that extended farther than I could see, and I realized that to light my way out I would have to burn every paper in the brief case. I moved slowly off, toward the darker blackness, lighting my way by these feeble torches. The next to go was Clifton's doll, but it burned so stubbornly that I reached inside the case for something else. Then by the light of the smoke-sputtering doll I opened a folded page. It was the anonymous letter, which burned so quickly that as it flamed I hurriedly unfolded another: It was that slip upon which Jack had written my Brotherhood name. I could still smell Emma's perfume even in the dampness of the cellar. And now seeing the handwriting of the two in the consuming flames I burned my hand and slipped to my knees, staring. The handwriting was the same. I knelt there, stunned, watching the flames consume them. That he, or anyone at that late date, could have named me and set me running with one and the same stroke of the pen was too much. Suddenly I began to scream, getting up in the darkness and plunging wildly about, bumping against walls, scattering coal, and in my anger extinguishing my feeble light.
But still whirling on in the blackness, knocking against the rough walls of a narrow passage, banging my head and cursing, I stumbled down and plunged against some kind of partition and sailed headlong, coughing and sneezing, into another dimensionless room, where I continued to roll about the floor in my outrage. How long this kept up, I do not know. It might have been days, weeks; I lost all sense of time. And everytime I paused to rest, the outrage revived and I went off again. Then, finally, when I could barely move, something seemed to say, "That's enough, don't kill yourself. You've run enough, you're through with them at last," and I collapsed, face forward and lay there beyond the point of exhaustion, too tired to close my eyes. It was a state neither of dreaming nor of waking, but somewhere in between, in which I was caught like Trueblood's jaybird that yellow jackets had paralyzed in every part but his eyes.
But somehow the floor had now turned to sand and the darkness to light, and I lay the prisoner of a group consisting of Jack and old Emerson and Bledsoe and Norton and Ras and the school superintendent and a number of others whom I failed to recognize, but all of whom had run me, who now pressed around me as I lay beside a river of black water, near where an armored bridge arched sharply away to where I could not see. And I was protesting their holding me and they were demanding that I return to them and were annoyed with my refusal.