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 …

…al freedoms clearly repel Dunbar's moralistic, agrarianist, mid-western mind. On the other hand, the personalities, speech, and expressive styles in the cabarets are no mere regional exotica. Instinctively, Dunbar seems attracted here to new and vital expressive voices previously unrepresented in American literature. In The Sport of the Gods, precisely because Dunbar has tried to free himself from earlier ideological assumptions, those voices no longer represent a subjugated knowledge hidden completely behind the racial veil.