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Dunbar’s Colorist Ambivalence in the Sport of the Gods 205 we must contend with the resentment of darker-skinned blacks who accepted some of the worst myths about mixed-race individuals, who, in turn, were as racist as the whites they chose to emulate as they sought to sever their ties to the darker masses. But while many European values were worthwhile on paper, in reality too many were only figments of a white imagination. This is the milieu of which Dunbar was a part, and his last novel carefully notes the connection between a skewed set of values and the reality of those values as shared by both whites and blacks in the twin images of Joe Hamilton and Francis Oakley. Albeit on a higher level than Joe, Francis Oakley—the typical southern gentleman of southern legend—goes against the code of honor by “allowing” the hapless Berry to take the blame for stealing his missing money. When Berry falls under suspicion, Francis half-heartedly defends him: “I would trust Hamilton anywhere . . . and with anything.”53 However, his brother, firmly believing in the old southern code of manly honor, and thinking his brother, in defending Berry, exhibits the best of southern chivalry toward the downtrodden, quickly reveals the lie at the heart of goodwill between white masters and their dutiful black servants: That’s noble of you, Frank, and I would have done the same, but we must rememberthatwearenotintheolddaysnow .Thenegroesarebecominglessfaithfuland less contented, and more’s the pity, and a deal more ambitious, although I have never had any unfaithfulness on the part of Hamilton to complain of before. . . . The old negro knew nothing of the value of money. When he stole, he stole hams and bacon and chickens. These were his immediate necessities and the things he valued.54 A year after Berry is incarcerated, Maurice Oakley receives a letter from Francis, who supposedly is away in Paris, studying art. “First, now, it might be a notice that Frank had received the badge of the Legion of Honor,”55 but the fateful letter does not involve “honor.” The expected code of southern honor, argues W. J. Cash, “is a fundamentally narrow and incomplete one. . . . These ideas, representing the highest product of aristocracy, and constituting perhaps its only real justification in the modern world, are only imperfectly adumbrated or are missing altogether.”56 The idea of “noblesse oblige and chivalry”57 professed in legend and in the countless fantasies of idealized southern men is a myth stripped of its validity by Dunbar as a stricken Oakley finally reads his brother’s confession: “You will remember that I begged you to be easy on your servant. You thought it was only my kindness of heart. It was not; I had a deeper reason. I knew where the 206 DOLORES V. SISCO money had gone and dared not tell.” Francis’s “deeper reason,” like the predicament Joe Hamilton finds himself in with Hattie, is that he has been spending his money on a woman he cannot honorably marry: “Perhaps I would have been successful had I not met her, perhaps not.”58 It is implied that this woman whom Francis cannot give up is most likely a prostitute: When a man does not marry a woman, he must keep her better than he would a wife. It costs. All that you gave me went to make her happy. . . . I would have asked you for more, and you would have given it; but that strange, ridiculous something which we misname Southern honor, that honor which strains at a gnat and swallows a camel, withheld me, and I preferred to do worse. So I lied to you.59 Finally, Francis vows that he will be no more: “Do not plead with me, do not forgive me, do not seek to find me, for from this time I shall be as one who has perished from the earth; I shall be no more.”60 The confession triggers a stroke as Maurice Oakley realizes the blow to the code of southern manhood, but as his wife asks, “What of Berry?” the elder Oakley succinctly demonstrates one of the realities of the code as it is practiced: the defense of family must come first. “What of Berry? . . . What is Berry to Frank? What is that nigger to my brother? What are his sufferings to the honor of my family and name?”61 Maurice Oakley ends his life as a gibbering madman as his feverish brain tries...

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