Three Days Before the Shooting ... (197 page)

Important Note//Hickman and contingent arrive in Washington, attracting attention by their number and dress and the fact that they arrive in a chartered plane and are obviously in a hurry and on a mission of some kind. There would be an advantage in plunging the reader immediately into the mind of Hickman since the issues motivating their arrival could be presented directly and in the fragmented details in which they’d be presented in his mind. Janey’s warning letter would play a part in this, as would his memories of Bliss and his regret and bewilderment over what the boy had become. The other advantage would lie in the opportunity to play upon the tension implicit in the unsuccessful quest as it builds from home to frustration through its cycles of purpose, passion, through partial perception to a realignment of purpose leading to other degrees of passion to different orders of perception-frustration. The assumption here is that McIntyre would be eliminated along with the forms of irony his consciousness provides. // What must be considered here is the advantage of approaching the group from outside, which would prepare the reader for the mystery of experience, background and purpose that the group embodies. They must retain their strangeness—So perhaps the best strategy is to proceed as begun but with earlier shift to the dramatic mode centered in Hickman’s point of view. Concentrate on scene. (140/2)

Note // Hickman // He is intelligent but untrained in theology. Skilled with words, he reads and mixes his diction as required by his audience. He is also an artist in the deeper sense and [h]as actually been a jazz musician. He has been a ladies’ man, but this ceased when he became a preacher. Devout and serious, he
is unable to forget his old, profane way of speaking and of thinking of experience. Vernacular term[s] and phrases bloom in his mind even as he corrects them with more pious formulations. In other words he is of mixed culture and frequently formulates the sacred in profane terms—at least within his mind. Orally he checks himself. // He has been a great gambler and although never a drunkard, he has known the uses of alcohol. // Dramatize the matter of culture variations that are possible for one of his background. He is of a unique combination that has gone unaccounted for by sociology. He is without formal training but of keen intelligence, an intelligence which he hides behind his personal and group idiom. He has his own unique way of looking at the U.S. and is much concerned with the
meaning
of history. There is mysticism involved in his hope for the boy, and an attempt to transcend the hopelessness of racism. After the horrors connected with or coincidental with his coming into possession of the child, he reverts to religion and in his despair begins to grope toward a plan. This involves bringing up the child in love and dedication in the hope that properly raised and trained the child’s color and features, his inner substance and his appearance would make it possible for him to enter into the wider affairs of the nation and work toward the betterment of his people and the moral health of the nation. (140/3)

Bliss realizes political and social weakness of Hickman and other Negroes when he’s taken from his coffin, and this becomes mixed with his yearning for a mother—whom he now identifies with the red headed woman who tried to snatch him from his coffin. Which was a symbol of resurrection in drama of redemption that Hickman has structured around it. But he goes seeking for life among whites, using the agency of racism to punish Negroes for being weak, and to achieve power of his own. As with many politicians politics is a drama in which he plays a role that doesn’t necessarily jibe with his own feelings. Nevertheless he feels humiliated by a fate that threw him among Negroes and deprived him of the satisfaction of knowing whether he is a Negro by blood or only by culture and upbringing. He tells himself that he hates Negroes but can’t deny his love for Hickman. Resents this too. // He is a man who sees the weakness in the way societal hierarchy has dealt with race and it is through the chink that he enters white society and exploits it. (140/6)

From 1956 Note Book // Blisses’ purpose (immediate) is to get money to carry him further west. Secondarily and psychologically, it is to manipulate possibility and identities of the townspeople and to take revenge upon his own life. And to play! He is the artist as child in this. // So the script, scenario, plot—must: 1) tie in with the larger plot, 2) must present the large writ small and in a variation, 3) it must provide townspeople opportunity to lose old identities for something less good and, 4) it must lead to chaos and to birth of Severen. (141/4)

Bliss Proteus Rhinehart returned to his part very much as a man to his mother or a dog to his vomit, and that’s no lie. The thing just happened that way and here he was, flickering before the eye like the film of a cinema camera gone wild. (140/6)

Bliss must sense that Hickman is coming. This is to occur in flashback when he reviews his sensations before the shooting. He hadn’t thought of Hickman for some time now, and eliminated him from his consciousness. But now, as his mind was distracted by some of the problems of the day, the figure of the big man strayed across the field of his consciousness, leaving him uneasy. He had contained guilt for a long time, had become disciplined to the task; power required it and it was human even manly to sustain the pain which arose through necessary action. (140/7)

Sunraider is not killed because he abandoned Severen’s mother, nor because of his overt political acts, but because he betrayed his past and thus provided Severen the deepest intellectual-emotional motives for murder. He’s murdered by way of proving that Severen was free of acceptance of whiteness which was source of Blisses confusion. (139/2)

One way of getting Wilhite more involved is to have him tell Hickman what Hickman knows deep within his own mind but refuses to acknowledge: that the Senator is beyond saving, and that the group knows this. They go along because they love Hickman and because there simply has to be something on which they can pin their earthly hopes. // Consider the idea, if introduced in Hickman’s consciousness, should not be presented there in isolated completion; rather, it should be introduced with the
voices
of others who are central to the plot. It must battle with them, try to convince, anticipate or foreshadow. It should sound with the ideas of the others, and thus it should contain some impression of Wilhite, Bliss become the Senator, Janey, Severen, and certain of the members from the old days. It should also argue with McIntyre—which suggests that he will have come in contact with McIntyre
before
the shooting. If this is done, then the significant incidents will take on a richer meaning, and will themselves become parts of an intricate dialogue. Rockmore will himself have something significant to say about Hickman’s idea—which it refutes. Nor is there any reason why McIntyre’s dream sequence should be separate from central dialogue. In fact it is a dialogue which issues from McIntyre’s involvement in Hickman’s idea-quest. // But Severen remains the problem. Is he as assassin to be left out of it? Impossible. It is he who puts the whole idea to crucial testing. Therefore we must render his consciousness on the brink of the Senate incident. He must be
aware of Hickman in Washington and Hickman must be aware that he is somewhere at large. But they will have met earlier. (140/3)