Music

As the Invisible Man and Mr. Norton were on their way to Jim Trueblood’s house, The Invisible Man began to recall the time in his life where he met Trueblood. He thought that Trueblood was “a good singer” and remembered how “he was brought up along with the members of a country quartet to sing what the officials called 'their primitive spirituals”' (47). He recalled being “embarrassed by the earthy harmonies they sang”, and how he “dared not to laugh at the crude, high, plaintively animal sounds Jim Trueblood made” (47). Ellison describes Trueblood’s singing in this way to show how the white men saw him as primitive, crude, and even animalistic. This led both the officials and the Invisible man to develop hatred towards the “peasants”, or black belt people. The officials were not familiar with the style of singing, and were unable to relate that to themselves in any way. What the officials were unable to understand, and the Invisible man could only figure out after his pre-invisible days, was that they actually feared the “peasants”. They were afraid of the push pull relationship that they were involved in, where the school was trying to “pull them up”, and the “peasants” were pulling them down (47).