Invisible Man

As soon as he gets back to Mary’s, the protagonist realizes that he can’t turn down Brother Jack’s offer—he’s unemployed with few alternatives, and Mary herself is in need of money. He feels indebted to her and decides to investigate the job offer, calling up Brother Jack right away. Brother Jack insists that they need to meet that night, and whisks the protagonist away in a car with him and several other associates. They go to a party at a luxurious apartment, seemingly attended by people who know about and are involved with the Brotherhood. Jack pulls the protagonist aside and presents him with an offer: The Brotherhood wants him to become a figurehead and orator for the cause of social justice for Black people in New York and will provide housing and a large salary. The protagonist accepts the offer, and he is assigned a new identity: an alias that he’s expected to answer to and adopt as if it were his given name.

The protagonist returns to the party, where a drunk man heckles him by asking him to sing (a reflection of the racial stereotype that Black people were first and foremost entertainers). The protagonist decides that he will craft his new identity according to his own desires while also making his employers think that he’s following their wishes, and returns back to Mary’s with enough money from the organization to pay her for his room and board over the previous months. 

The protagonist wakes up the next morning hungover from the previous night’s party and becomes irate when someone in another apartment keeps hitting the communal steam heating system, creating a loud knocking. He grabs a coin bank that was left in his room by a previous tenant and smashes it against the pipes while yelling at the unseen noise-maker. Mary comes to investigate the noise from the protagonist‘s room, but he lies and says that he wasn’t hitting the pipes; he also doesn’t tell her that he’s broken the coin bank, which is a lurid and stereotypical rendition of a Black man with a shirt on that says Feed Me. He hurries through a quick cup of coffee with Mary, helping her beat back some cockroaches that crawl through a seam in the kitchen linoleum, and then goes out to buy himself some new clothes before getting to touch with Jack to find out where his new lodgings are.

He intends to throw the broken coin bank and money, which he’s tucked into his briefcase, and tries to twice but has the bank returned to him each time. (The first time, he throws it away in a residential garbage can but is spotted by the owner, who makes him remove it, and the second time he drops it on the street but is followed by a man who returns it to him.) Exasperated, he decides to throw it away later. He buys his clothes, gets the address of his new apartment from Jack, and goes there to find a clean, spacious apartment in a White neighborhood. Jack tells him that there’s literature in the apartment for him to read about the Brotherhood’s mission, and to be ready to make a speech that night.

Jack and some other members of the Brotherhood pick up the protagonist that evening and take him to the arena where a rally will be held. Jack tells him that he’ll be speaking last, after several other members. While they’re all waiting to go onstage, the protagonist is nervous about how he’ll be received by the crowd and reflects on the events that have led him to this point. The group goes onstage and the protagonist listens in a daze to the first few speakers. When it’s his turn to speak, he gives an emotional, passionate speech about the dispossession of African Americans and the working classes by those in power. His words receive enthusiastic applause and cheering from the crowd, but afterward he finds that some of the Brotherhood members prefer a more intellectual, “scientific” approach to their message. Jack defends the speech, but tells the protagonist that he will still undergo planned training with a man called Brother Hambro to help hone his craft.