all humankind, those who had come to hear Ma
Rainey sing “natchally bowed dey heads an’ cried”
as they return to their river settlements, black bot-
tom cornrows, and lumber camps. Tears, tangible
evidence of their experienced catharsis, replace the
superficial laughter with which they had entered
the music hall.
This perspective extends rather than merely
reflects the meaning of the black experience, the
blues, and black folk culture in general. It further
confirms Gates and West’s claim that Brown “was
the first major intellectual to discern and defend a
democratic mode of the tragicomic” (121) through
the blues. Significantly, however, if, as Stuckey
points out, Brown speaks of tragedy, “he also holds
out the ultimate hope of triumph” (12). This is the
theme of one of Brown’s signature poems “Strong
Man,” in which, after chronicling the atrocities
heaped upon blacks in American society, Brown’s
speaker sings this refrain: “The strong men keep
a-comin’ on / The strong men git stronger.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Sterling A. The Collected Poems of Sterling
Brown (selected by Michael Harper). With an in-
troduction by Sterling Stuckey. Evanston, Ill.: Tri-
Quarterly Books, 1989.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Cornel West. The Afri-
can American Century. How Black Americans Have
Shaped Our Country, 119–121. New York: The
Free Press, 2000.
Wilfred D. Samuels
Sport of the Gods, The
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1902)
Although he is best known for his poetry, particu-
larly his dialect poetry, and for his six collections
of short fiction, PAU L LAURENCE DUNBAR authored
four novels: The Uncalled (1898), The Love of
Landry (1900), The Fanatics (1901), and The Sport
of the Gods (1902). Dunbar’s first two novels are
primarily about whites and do not treat race as a
theme; however, The Sport of the Gods is consid-
ered by many scholars the first African-American
protest novel and the first novel about black life
in Harlem.
Dunbar sets out in The Sport of the Gods to
debunk and critique the well-established planta-
tion tradition created by such white southern local
colorists as Thomas Page and Thomas Dixon.
Even during the post-Reconstruction period, as
he illustrates through his main characters, a form
of master/slave relationship was maintained by
southern gentility that, on the surface, appeared
complementary and congenial. Dunbar’s Hamil-
ton family is a middle-class black family who enjoy
a comfortable lifestyle as a result of their employ-
ment by the Oakleys, to whom they have remained
loyal for more than 20 years after the Civil War. In
the tradition of the Faithful Friday, Berry Hamil-
ton continues to serve as Maurice Oakley’s butler,
while his wife, Fannie, continues the tradition of
the MAMMY by serving in the role of the family’s
housekeeper. Their children, Joe and Kitty, also
provide domestic services for whites. Like Uncle
Tom and Aunt Chloe of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854), who live on the master’s
property, the Hamiltons occupy a neat little cot-
tage—“a bower of peace and comfort” (19)—in
the Oakleys’ backyard.
After a total of 40 years of faithful service,
Berry Hamilton, despite his innocence, is accused
of, found guilty, and imprisoned for theft when a
large sum of money is missing from the Oakley
home. Disgraced by Berry’s imprisonment, evicted
by the employers to whom they have committed
their entire lives, unable to gain meaningful em-
ployment, and shunned even by the members of
the black community, Mrs. Hamilton, Kit, and Joe
migrate north to New York: “They had heard of
New York as a place vague and far away, a city that
like Heaven, to them had existed in faith alone”
(68). New York is anything but the expected para-
dise. The Banner Club, “an institution for the
lower education of Negro youth,” as the Hamil-
ton children find out, symbolizes the reality of
New York life; it is “a social cesspool, generating
a poisonous miasma and reeking with the stench
of decayed and rotten moralities” (94–95). The
city proves to be “cruel and cold and unfeeling”Sport of the Gods, The 477