In this installment of MPR series The Bookshelf, Lou Bellamy, founder and artistic director of St. Paul's Penumbra Theatre, talks about Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," a novel featuring an unnamed black narrator whose race makes him "invisible" to others.
Lou Bellamy first read “Invisible Man” in graduate school when he was in his twenties. As a young, African American man carving out his identity in the world, Bellamy said he felt a connection to the main character and the ideas about race and identity that the book explores.
The Bookshelf series asks notable Minnesotans to tell us about a book that has been meaningful in their lives.
Transcripts
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SPEAKER 1: The idea of finding power and strength in invisibility was so intriguing to me because this character understands that what most people would take as a negative, he can turn into a positive. If he can see while all others around him can't, oh, my heavens, that's power.
SPEAKER 2: Could you do us a favor and read a little bit from that book?
SPEAKER 1: This is from the prologue. "I am an invisible man. No, I'm not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe, nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination. Indeed, everything and anything except me."
SPEAKER 2: What do you feel like when you read that?
SPEAKER 1: Well, I really do believe that we are, much more than we would prefer to believe, a reflection of the way people treat us and look at us and see us. We don't know that we're pretty, ugly, fat, skinny. We haven't a clue what that means. It's the kind of feedback we get from people outside of ourselves, people that we care very much about. Sometimes people have an effect on you that you care very little about.
This is much the way I perceive my life, you know? I have felt myself to be invisible, that I am whatever it is people sort of view me as. An actor. I've had people react to me like the character I've just played. I'm treated like a father, like a teacher, like a boss, like an employee.
And those things are only part of who I am. So I understand that quite deeply. And you want to just shout sometimes, you're only seeing this part. This little, bitty part. And so I really do understand that.
I understand it as a Black male, especially. I remember getting on an elevator at the university. It was late. I was leaving a rehearsal. And this girl was getting on the elevator with me. And I saw on her face the fear as I stepped onto that elevator, and it just broke my heart. I just-- I said, "honey, look--" which, I probably shouldn't have said "honey." [LAUGHS]
But I said, look, look. I'm a teacher. And I took out my wallet and showed her. I said, "I'm not going to hurt you." But she saw this man, a Black man, getting on the elevator with her, and it was such a threat that it really just had her shaking. And I just felt so sorry for her.
And again, you see, that's that perception, again, that defines you in a certain sort of way. And I think that the interaction between that and how one perceives oneself to be is-- I don't know. Maybe that's what life is, is somehow negotiating that dissonance between your perception and the world's perception of who you are.