Betrayal

     In chapter 20 the narrator returns to Harlem. Everything seems changed when he gets back. He doesn't really know what happened and everyone seems indifferent to him. In some sense he seems betrayed. Others seem betrayed as well by him. Even more people feel betrayed by the Brotherhood as a whole. Upon returning to Harlem, the narrator is initially in a good mood, but as soon as he starts realizing all of what has happened, his mood slowly declines throughout his time there. 

    One of the first things that sets the narrator off, is that he can't find Brother Maceo. He was one of his closest co-workers. He asks Barrelhouse where he has been, and he says that he hasn't seen him in a long time. This surprises the narrator, and at the same time, he is met with the reality that the people the narrator thought he had been representing felt betrayed by him as well. MacAdams said in the bar, "'I hear he got the white fever and left...'" (425). His politics seemed to have lost a lot of popularity. He is devastated by what he learns.

    After leaving the bar, the narrator realizes what has happened to the Brotherhood. "I walked through the dark block over to Seventh and started down; things were beginning to look serious. Along the way I saw not a single sign of Brotherhood activity." (427). He begins to feel betrayed by the brotherhood. Why had they stopped all of the progress they had made in Harlem? The narrator had worked so hard to try to build a strong community. Now much of it was lost. They laid off so many people supporting the cause and left them alone. It showed the narrator how little the Brotherhood actually cared about the equality. 

   What effected the narrator the most though, was that the people he trusted most had left without telling him. He waited all day for Brother Tarp, yet he never arrived at the office. Finally, at 3 am, he decides to go to his room where he finds that it is completely abandoned. Though the narrator was surprised by this, Brother Clifton betrayed the narrator the most, because he had left the Brotherhood to sell dolls that were supporting ideals that went against what they had been working for the whole time. The sambo dolls Tod Clifton was selling are in a way, ironic of what he was doing himself. Sambo is an idea of a lazy slave who is loyal to their master and does what pleases them. Clifton is pleasing the white crowd with his performance of the doll. He is lazy because it is an easy way to make money, but he is betraying the Brotherhood by spreading awareness of opposing ideas.

    

Comments

  1. MitchellSunday, October 24, 2021 at 10:33:00 AM PDT

    The narrator does initially experience Clifton's disappearance and reappearance as a midtown seller of racist dolls as a "betrayal," much as Brother Jack and the committee do, and his first reaction (before the shooting) is to reaffirm his own allegiance to the Brotherhood--he sees Clifton as having "plunged outside history," and he wants to get back "in." But after the shooting, his views start to change, and he ponders serious questions about how Clifton's life and death will be defined--doesn't the murder of an unarmed black man by police matter more "politically" than the fact that he was selling these dolls? The narrator also starts to ponder the real possibility that Clifton abandoned the Brotherhood because he believed that the narrator had "abandoned" or "betrayed" the organization--he doesn't know what the committee has told Clifton about his own reassignment downtown, and he realizes that Clifton might have been disillusioned by his *own* perceived betrayal. (The narrator is starting to realize just how much this organization is pulling the strings, figured conveniently in the marionette doll.)

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