The Sports of the Gods

As The Sport of the Gods begins, the narrator comments:

Fiction has said so much in regret of the old

days when there were plantations and overseers

and masters and slaves, that it was good

to come upon such a household as Berry Hamilton's,

if for no other reason than that it afforded

a relief from the monotony of tiresome

iteration. Yet ironically, his view was more complex than preferring a racially progressive North to a backwards South. They have been deceived by the glare and glitter of the city streets. Maurice Oakley, "through thick and thin," is wrongly accused of stealing money from Maurice's weak and dissipated younger brother, Francis. Although no evidence supports the charge against him and Berry consistently proclaims his innocence, he is given a ten-year sentence at hard labor, and his wife, Fannie, and two children, Joe and Kitty, are ostracized by both blacks and whites. Berry Hamilton, the hardworking, thrifty black butler who has remained with his employer. As his name implies, Skaggs is an unappealing mouthpiece. Baker concludes that "Skaggs's 'theory,' his fictive, indeed virtually mythic, mode of confronting reality," fulfills the goals implied by the first line of The Sport of the Gods: a plantation tradition's "monotony of tiresome iteration" is transcended by the reporter's "clear, interesting, and strong" story.

In The Sport of the Gods, the North, then, is not a trigger for simplistic, nostalgic southern formula fiction. Joe confronts biting comments when seeking employment in black barbershops, given his previous work in barbering whites and his pride that he "never yet shaved a black chin or put shears to what he termed `naps"' (66). The southern code of honor reveals itself as a fraudulent facade.