Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Song of Innocence

1970; University of Iowa; Volume: 1; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.17077/0021-065x.1059

2330-0361

Ralph Ellison,

Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

Mr. Mclntyre was standing there and I didn't recognize him, and then it started happening. I thought one of my bad spells was coming on, the words were com ing out of me so fast that while I could hear them inside me I couldn't connect up with them. It was like in the night when you're in bed and somebody walking along in the middle of the street in the dark lets out one of those oie long, slow winding whoops that's neither a word or a song?you know. . . . And you hear it come sailing over the houses and the trees and on until it's starting to die away like a train's whistle when it's moving way yonder, out in the west, and then somebody else hears it falling away in a far street and he lets out a whoop be cause he can't help but keep it going and you hear it floating back out of the shadows and the dark while you lie there listening to both of them walking and listening and whooping and whooping and walking and listening with neither one knowing what those whoops are saying or who they're saying it to. But you know that they've got to be saying something because all that lonesome rising and falling of sound like singing has you by the short hair and dragging you out into the ole calcified night of loneliness toward the unsayable meaning of man kind's outrageous condition in this world (See, there they go again! Pay them no mind, Mr. Mclntyre, they on their own. I try, I try awfully hard but they won't behave). . . . So I roll over on the pallet and listen to those whoops rising and falling and dying and you try to understand what they're saying and even though you will never in this world quite make it before sleep comes down, you know just the same that it means beyond anything the straight words could ever say. You're here and they're there and there and you're still here and they're moving on and the sound and the meaning's passing out there back and forth in the night. So you fall asleep and the sound falls off the soft edge of your mind into the depths of all you can't hold or understand, or see or be, and they keep walking