Free Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

sorry, sir. Shall I turn back?”
    “No, it isn’t much,” he said. “Go on.”
    I drove on, remembering the lean, hungry face of the sleeping man. He was the kind of white man I feared. The brown fields swept out to the horizon. A flock of birds dipped down, circled, swung up and out as though linked by invisible strings. Waves of heat danced above the engine hood. The tires sang over the highway. Finally I overcame my timidity and asked him:
    “Sir, why did you become interested in the school?”
    “I think,” he said, thoughtfully, raising his voice, “it was because I felt even as a young man that your people were somehow closely connected with my destiny. Do you understand?”
    “Not so clearly, sir,” I said, ashamed to admit it.
    “You have studied Emerson, haven’t you?”
    “Emerson, sir?”
    “Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
    I was embarrassed because I hadn’t. “Not yet, sir. We haven’t come to him yet.”
    “No?” he said with a note of surprise. “Well, never mind. I am a New Englander, like Emerson. You must learn about him, for he was important to your people. He had a hand in your destiny. Yes, perhaps that is what I mean. I had a feeling that your people were somehow connected with my destiny. That what happened to you was connected with what would happen to me …”
    I slowed the car, trying to understand. Through the glass I saw him gazing at the long ash of his cigar, holding it delicately in his slender, manicured fingers.
    “Yes, you are my fate, young man. Only you can tell me what it really is. Do you understand?”
    “I
think
I do, sir.”
    “I mean that upon you depends the outcome of the years I have spent in helping your school. That has been my real life’s work, not my banking or my researches, but my firsthand organizing of human life.”
    I saw him now, leaning toward the front seat, speaking with an intensity which had not been there before. It was hard not to turn my eyes from the highway and face him.
    “There is another reason, a reason more important, more passionate and yes, even more sacred than all the others,” he said, no longer seeming to see me, but speaking to himself alone. “Yes, even more sacred than all the others. A girl, my daughter. She was a being more rare, more beautiful, purer, more perfect and more delicate than the wildest dream of a poet. I could never believe her to be my own flesh and blood. Her beauty was a well-spring of purest water-of-life, and to look upon her was to drink and drink and drink again … She was rare, a perfect creation, a work of purest art. A delicate flower that bloomed in the liquid light of the moon. A nature not of this world, a personality like that of some biblical maiden, gracious and queenly. I found it difficult to believe her my own …”
    Suddenly he fumbled in his vest pocket and thrust something over the back of the seat, surprising me.
    “Here, young man, you owe much of your good fortune in attending such a school to her.”
    I looked upon the tinted miniature framed in engraved platinum. I almost dropped it. A young woman of delicate, dreamy features looked up at me. She was very beautiful, I thought at the time, so beautiful that I did not know whether I should express admiration to the extent I felt it or merely act polite. And yet I seemed to remember her, or someone like her, in the past. I know now that it was the flowing costume of soft, flimsy material that made for the effect; today, dressed in one of the smart, well-tailored, angular, sterile, streamlined, engine-turned, air-conditioned modern outfits you see in the women’s magazines, she would appear as ordinary as an expensive piece of machine-tooled jewelry and just as lifeless. Then, however, I shared something of his enthusiasm.
    “She was too pure for life,” he said sadly; “too pure and too good and too beautiful. We were sailing together, touring the world, just she and I, when she became ill in Italy. I thought little of it at the