Summary
“Our white is so white you can paint
a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer
to prove it wasn’t white clear through.”
(See Important Quotations Explained)
The narrator arrives at the Liberty Paints plant. A huge
electric sign reads “keep america pure with liberty paints.”
The narrator’s supervisor, Mr. Kimbro, leads him to a long room
filled with buckets of paint. Kimbro demonstrates the job: he opens
buckets filled with a foul, milky brown substance and drips ten
drops of another black chemical into them; then he stirs the buckets
vigorously until the paint becomes glossy white; last, he applies
the paint to small, rectangular wooden boards and waits for them
to dry. If they dry brilliant white, then the job has been done
correctly. Kimbro brags that the Optic White of Liberty Paints is
the purest white that can be found anywhere. He says that it can
cover up almost anything.
When only a little of the black chemical remains,
Kimbro instructs the narrator to go to the tank room to get more.
There, however, the narrator finds seven tanks marked by incomprehensible
codes, leaving him unable to determine which tank contains the right
chemical. He chooses one by scent and continues to mix and paint
the tiles, but the tiles turn out sticky and gray, not hard and
glossy. Kimbro returns and becomes infuriated, scolding the narrator
for putting concentrated remover into the paint and thereby ruining
some seventy-five buckets of paint. Kimbro fills the dropper with
the correct chemical and leaves the narrator to his job. The paint
samples still dry with a vague gray tinge, but Kimbro doesn’t seem
to notice.
Later, the narrator is sent to the furnace room to assist
the engineer, Lucius Brockway. Brockway, who believes that assistants
are always college-educated men who want to usurp his job, declares that
he doesn’t need an assistant but sets the narrator to work anyway.
He instructs the narrator to watch the pressure gauges on the boiler.
Brockway takes pride in his indispensable role in making Optic White
paint, Liberty Paint’s trademark color, since he alone can mix the
base for the paint correctly. The slogan for the color is, “If It’s
Optic White, It’s the Right White.” The slogan reminds the narrator
of an old Southern saying: “If you’re white, you’re right.”
Lunchtime arrives, and the narrator returns
to the locker room to retrieve his lunch, interrupting a union meeting.
Some members accuse him of being a “fink,” or an informer, when they hear
that he is Brockway’s assistant. The men resolve to investigate
the narrator and then allow him to retrieve his lunch. When Brockway
learns about the union meeting, he becomes furious and threatens
to kill the narrator if he doesn’t leave the plant. The narrator
denies belonging to the union. Brockway and the narrator begin pummeling
each other until Brockway loses his dentures while biting the narrator.
Brockway blubbers about the union trying to steal his job. The narrator
notices the boilers hissing, and Brockway shouts for him to turn
the valve in order to lower the pressure. The narrator doesn’t have
the strength to do so, however, and the boiler explodes. The narrator
falls unconscious under a pile of machinery and “stinking goo.”
Analysis
The narrator’s experiences at the Liberty Paints plant
give Ellison the chance to debunk a social and historical myth prevalent
since before the Civil War—that of the North as the land of freedom
for black Americans. The North, it turns out, perpetuates its own
racist social structure, with which the narrator becomes further acquainted
in the second half of the novel. The Liberty Paints plant serves
as an extended metaphor for racial inequality in America. The factory’s
authorities, with their slogans emphasizing concepts of whiteness
and purity, imply the moral superiority of their whiteness. The
inclusion of “Liberty” in the factory’s name emphasizes that the
factory’s leaders’ notions reflect those held by the leaders of America,
a country supposedly founded on “liberty” and equality but in fact,
ironically, advocating more freedom for the individuals it deems
worthiest.
When Brockway boasts that one would have to crack open
a chunk of coal painted with Liberty Paints’ Optic White in order
to determine its black essence, he illustrates how blackness becomes invisible
beneath whiteness at the plant. Mr. Kimbro brags that the paint’s
pure whiteness will cover anything, and indeed it covers the black
chemical used to create it. That this specific shade of white is called
“Optic” equates whiteness with clarity. This label is ironic, however,
because the brilliance of the paint is blinding. Like a mask, the
paint covers and conceals.
