e at hard labor, and his wife, Fannie, and two children, Joe and Kitty, are ostracized by both blacks and whites. Unable to find employment, dispossessed by the Oakleys, and robbed of $500 by the police, the Hamiltons are forced to migrate north. In New York, instead of improving economically and socially, they experience physical, mental, and moral decay. The city is "cruel and cold and unfeeling," and corrupt. It is an environment that forces its people to prey upon each other. Nowhere are the characters free agents. Joe is quickly corrupted by the night life, and later he becomes an alcoholic and a murderer. Insincere blacks succeed in spoiling Kitty's character and enticing her onto the vaudeville stage as a dancer and singer. Meanwhile, Fannie is led to believe that Berry's prison sentence automatically grants her a divorce; consequently, she is duped into marrying a man who beats her and reduces her to abject poverty.
             In the meantime, in the South, Maurice Oakley has been visited by troubles which weaken him physically and mentally. His brother Francis confesses that he invented the story of the theft and that Berry is innocent. Upon his release from prison after serving five of the ten years (four years of which Maurice Oakley knew of Berry's innocence), Berry travels to New York and discovers his family ripped apart and totally debased by the grim "sport of the gods." Following the murder of Fannie's "husband," Berry remarries her, and they return to Virginia.
             Unlike some of Dunbar's short stories that describe scenes of happy black people on southern plantations, The Sport of the Gods becomes social criticism in its exposure of blacks as prey to a white racist society. Maurice Oakley, the genteel southern white liberal, espouses the negative racial attitude that blacks as a race are incapable of intellectual and moral advancement. As a social critic, Dunbar condemns racial injustice and stereotyping, a...