You Can Play the Game, But...

One of our Friday poetry readings that I remember quite vividly (despite the fact that we’ve only had a few so far), is the reading of “A Poem for Players” by Al Young, which Jenna so expertly read and delved into. The gist of the poem is saying, “you can do whatever you want, just not as yourself”. You can be a famous baseball player, a blues musician, a lawyer, even, but you have to “play the game”. What is this game? The answer to that is quite complicated, and it’s a notion that the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man wrestles with constantly. Constantly trying to find his place, his vocation, the naive young high school graduate spends twenty years on the run before succumbing to his “invisibility”. How this came about is pretty much the plot of the novel, but the idea of “playing the game” or expectations being blown away is a constant theme. 

In the very first chapter, we see the narrator attempting to “play the game”, and being derailed in doing so. He goes to this “battle royale” with hopes of reading a grand speech he wrote, and he ends up becoming this brutally grotesque form of entertainment alongside a bunch of other young black men. They are forced to fight each other, have coins thrown on an electric carpet to fish for, and are intimidated by a stark naked white woman. By the end, he’s finally allowed to give his speech, and no one really takes him seriously, but he doesn’t seem to care; sure it wasn’t what he was expecting, but all he had his eyes set on the whole time was giving his speech. This correlates with the line, “Finally they’ll let you play / politics if you don’t get in the way / the way some of us did and had to be / iced by conspiracy, international mystery” (Young 30-33). While the boys in the battle royale weren’t necessarily “iced”, and the narrator wasn’t necessarily involved in politics, there was still this bizarre ritual they were thrown into against their will, and they were almost expected to act as if it were completely normal. At least the narrator did - he just did as he was told so I could give his precious speech. 

In one of the most peculiar chapters of this already-quite-surreal novel is chapter three, when the narrator is driving Mr. Norton around and stop by Golden Day to find some whiskey to aid Mr. Norton’s condition. After chaos ensues, one of the calmer veterans takes the narrator and Norton into a separate room to assess Norton’s condition, and ends up giving a lengthy speech in which he feeds some brutal truth to the narrator and berates Mr. Norton for his support of a black college. He says to Norton, “he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. (...) He registers his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn’t digest it. Already he is - well, bless my soul! Behold! A walking zombie! Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity.” (94). 

A couple chapters later, the president of the college, Dr. Bledsoe, removes his mask of perfection and humbleness to give a similar speech about reality. In chapter six, Bledsoe berates the narrator for his actions towards Norton, and he ends up going on an intense tangent about power and race and the true meaning of the college. He jeers about his power over the “system”, saying “‘You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist - can’t you see that? The white folk tell everybody what to think - except men like me.’” (143). But then his mode shifts as he talks about the tribulations that lead him to this “secret power” - playing the part. “‘I mean it, son,’ he said. ‘I had to be strong and purposeful to get where I am. I had to wait and plan and lick around… Yes, I had to act the *n-word*!’” (...) “‘I don’t even insist that it was worth it, but now I’m here and I mean to stay - after you win the game, you take the prize and you keep it, protect it; there’s nothing else to do.’” (143). Later, Bledsoe continues by distinguishing what he had to give up to “win the game” - his dignity. “‘I know all about that too; ole doc’s been ‘buked and scorned and all that. (...) But you’ll get over it; it’s foolish and expensive and a lot of dead weight. You let the white folk worry about pride and dignity - you learn where you are and get yourself power, influence, contacts with powerful and influential people - then stay in the dark and use it!’” (144-145). 

The vet’s speech is quite polarizing for the narrator, Norton, and the majority of readers, and Bledsoe’s speech literally knocks the air out of the narrator and causes him to stumble out of the office vomiting and delirious. At this point in the novel, the narrator is still quite young and naive, and hasn’t really come to grapple with what it means for him to be “invisible”; he’s still under the impression that he can keep driving Mr. Norton around and work for Dr. Bledsoe and graduate with honors and eventually become Bledsoe’s assistant, perhaps. He doesn’t know that there are limits to his abilities and consciousness, as said in the lines, “but you gots to remember that / that’s all there is” (Young 18-19), which come after describing many common tropes in “white” theater and music, or the black pioneers that most white people idolized at the time, all of whom weren’t “too black”. Bledsoe speaks of playing the role leading him to a sort of power, but all without any dignity.

A lot of what we’ve read in Invisible Man is a reflection of the narrator coming to grips with the message of “A Poem for Players”. At the end of chapter one, the narrator has a peculiar dream in which his grandfather is helping bestow his award upon him, and on the note it says, “keep this *n-word*-boy running”. That’s become a common theme throughout the book - the narrator going somewhere he thinks will bring him his purpose or some sort of success, and at the end of the day, he’s back out running, as none of these vocations seem to hold what he can reasonably do. I remember learning in Race, Class, Gender about the “Fight of the Century”, a boxing match which occurred on March 8, 1971 in which two prominent black boxers, Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, fought. Frazier ended up winning, and later gave a lighthearted speech on his victory in South Carolina - in a stage house that held a Confederate flag. To whites at the time, Frazier was playing his role in appeasing whites and not rocking the boat, something Ali was known to do. All of this reflects on the penultimate line of Young’s poem, “They’ll let you play anybody but you, / that’s pretty much what they will do” (Young 34-35). 

Works Cited:

Young, Al. "A Poem for Players." The Oxford Anthology of African-American

     Poetry, edited by Arnold Rampersad, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp.

     118-19.

*sources not marked “Young” are from Invisible Man