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where Sun-raider rests uneasily in critical condition. But McIntyre is also a failed novelist. And although his narrative begins focused keenly on the assassination, it is soon apparent that Ellison intends him to be an important character in his own right as well as a witness to and commentator on the life and times of the Senator and the nation. For example, McIntyre interrupts his account of the assassination and its aftermath with excursions and reveries into his own life, including his affair in the 1930s with a Negro girl, whose mother unleashes her fury on him when he comes to tell her he wants to marry her pregnant daughter and be a true father to their child. Book I also puts Hickman squarely into McIntyre’s path as a presence in his own right and as a black preacher who explodes the white reporter’s assumptions about racial boundaries and the Senator’s history.
    This volume presents Book I in its totality as a draft much less polished and revised than the more finished drafts that survive of Book II and “Bliss’s Birth.” Chapters 4 and 5 of the version published here are Ellison’s drafts of “Cadillac Flambé” and “It Always Breaks Out,” episodes he published separately during his lifetime and which are included in Part III as they appeared in print, in the case of “It Always Breaks Out” considerably revised from the version in Book I.

PROLOGUE
    T HREE DAYS BEFORE THE shooting, a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator. They were quite elderly: old ladies dressed in little white caps and white uniforms made of surplus nylon parachute material, the men dressed in neat but old-fashioned black suits and wearing wide-brimmed, deep-crowned panama hats which, in the Senator’s walnut-paneled reception room now, they held with a grave ceremonial air. Solemn, uncommunicative, and quietly insistent, they were led by a huge, distinguished-looking old fellow who on the day of the chaotic event was to prove himself, his age notwithstanding, an extraordinarily powerful man. Tall and broad and of an easy dignity, this was the Reverend A. Z. Hickman—“better known,” as one of the old ladies proudly informed the Senator’s secretary, “as God’s Trombone.”
    This, however, was about all they were willing to explain. Forty-four in number, the women with their fans and satchels and picnic baskets, and the men carrying new blue airline take-on bags, they listened intently while Reverend Hickman did their talking.
    “Ma’am,” Hickman said, his voice deep and resonant as he nodded toward the door of the Senator’s private office, “you just tell the Senator that Hickman has arrived. When he hears who’s out here he’ll know that it’s important and want to see us.”
    “But I’ve told you that the Senator isn’t available,” the secretary said. “Just what is your business? Who are you, anyway? Are you his constituents?”
    “Constituents?” Suddenly the old man smiled. “No, miss,” he said, “the Senator doesn’t even have anybody like us in his state. We’re from down where we’re among the counted but not among the heard.”
    “Then why are you coming here?” she said. “What is your business?”
    “He’ll tell you, ma’am,” Hickman said. “He’ll know who we are; all you have to do is tell him that we have arrived ….”
    The secretary, a young Mississippian, sighed. Obviously, these were Southern Negroes of a type she had heard of all her life—and old ones; yet, instead of being already in the herdlike movement toward the door, which she expected, they were calmly waiting, as though she hadn’t said a word. And now she had a suspicion that, for all their staring eyes, she actually didn’t exist to them. They just stood there, now looking oddly like a delegation of Asians who had lost their interpreter along the way, and who were trying to tell her something, which she had no interest in