The Sports of the Gods
The Sport of the Gods, Dunbar's final novel, presents a far more critical and disturbing portrait of black America. The work centers on butler Berry Hamilton and his family. After Berry is wrongly charged with theft by his white employers, he is sentenced to ten years of prison labor. His remaining family--wife, son, and daughter--consequently find themselves targets of abuse in their southern community, and after being robbed by the local police they head north to Harlem. There they encounter further hardship and strife: the son becomes embroiled in the city's seamy nightlife and succumbs to alcoholism and crime; the naive daughter is exploited by fellow blacks and begins a questionable dancing career; and the mother, convinced that her husband's prison sentence has negated their marriage, weds an abusive profligate. A happy resolution is achieved only after Berry's accuser confesses, while dying, that his charge was fabricated, whereupon Berry is released from prison. He then travels north and finds his family in disarray. But the cruel second husband is then, conveniently, murdered, and the parental Hamiltons are reunited in matrimony.The novel reveals Dunbar's genuine effort to show the forces that prevented black American
The most important such breakthrough was his final novel The Sport of the Gods, published in the May 190l issue of Lippincott's. The only of his four novels to focus on African Americans, it is his most bitter, pessimistic view of race in America, and its urgently prophetic vision overturns the agrarian and plantation assumptions that long fed his conciliatory southern fictionalizing. In this novel, crucially, it is the northward lure of New York City during the Great Migration that breaks Dixie's romantic and ideological hold. Quite simply, by including a northern perspective, Dunbar had to confront grim social realities that drove thousands north. Yet ironically, his view was more complex than preferring a racially progressive North to a backwards South. In addition to the new anti-agrarianism of this novel, Dunbar showed as deep disillusionment with the nascent ghetto culture he had observed in his New York experiences. In effect, the urban North and agrarian South subvert each other's regional ideology. In his defense, it can be said this novel shows considerable imaginative growth beyond earlier desires to exploit the "quaint" and "capital" exotica of the South. It also is rhetorically true to the northern or national stance in which he was raised and viewed the South. In The Sport of the Gods, setting North and South side by side in mutually disqualifying perspectives, Dunbar achieved his most important ideological breakthrough.
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Approximate Word count = 4228
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page double spaced)
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