Paul Lawrence Dunbar Reconsidered

Jabari Asim discusses Shelley Fisher Fishkin and David Bradley's new anthology of Paul Lawrence Dunbar's writings in today's Washington Post Book World:

The last section of the book is devoted to The Sport of the Gods , which seldom packs the punch of Dunbar's best short fiction. It is mostly of interest because it is the only Dunbar novel to feature a largely black cast, not at all surprising when one considers his determination to "be with the age." The plot revolves around the Hamiltons, a black family that flees the South after its patriarch is falsely accused of theft and sentenced to 10 years of hard labor. Without Berry, the head of their household, the Hamiltons fall prey to vice, lust and violence up north in New York.

With the exception of a pair of supporting players, the characters in The Sport of the Gods seldom rise above mere types employed in the service of the author's larger design. This is consistent with Dunbar's approach to storytelling. He wrote to his wife, Alice, "I believe that characters in fiction should be what men and women are in real life -- the embodiment of a principle or idea. . . . Every character who moves across the pages of a story is, to my mind, . . . only an idea." The prevailing idea here echoes themes that Dunbar addressed with some passion in essays such as "The Hapless Southern Negro" and "The Negroes of the Tenderloin." In the latter he cast his sensitive gaze on the development of dysfunctional black ghettoes and concluded, "The gist of the whole trouble lies in the flocking of ignorant and irresponsible Negroes to the great city," an influx that "continues and increases year after year." Joe, Berry's headstrong young son, who comes to no good, symbolizes the futile migration that Dunbar lamented. Chronicling Joe's sordid ordeal, Dunbar's omniscient narrator mentions "the pernicious influence of the city on untrained negroes" and predicts that "the stream of young negro life would continue to flow up from the South, dashing itself against the hard necessities of the city and breaking like waves against a rock."

It is tempting to regard Dunbar's implausibly tidy ending as a bit of wishful thinking. Fishkin and Bradley remind us that Dunbar was dying of tuberculosis as he wrote the novel. Better, perhaps, to read the story's conclusion as evidence that he had not lost faith in his brethren, despite the many opportunities for cynicism and despair with which his short life had presented him. At times he did feel obligated to offer such reassurances. "I do not write as a malicious croaker," he asserted in one essay, "but as one deeply interested in the development of the best that is in the negro."