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 Americans from charting their own destinies, suggesting that by organizing a legal system that denies blacks justice and equal job opportunities--and by generally ignoring the needs of the black man in their political decisions-white Americans set themselves up as "protective guardians" of Afro-Americans.
             The plot of the novel follows a straight line of action. Berry Hamilton, the hardworking, thrifty black butler who has remained with his employer. 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 sentenc...