's short story
is a serious indictment of those who sought to play 'the white man's game'
in the misguided belief that such conduct would somehow ingratiate oneself into the white man's
good graces. Ellison's story is all about the degradations to which blacks were routinely
subjected at the hands of whites, and about that misguided belief against which the story's
narrator's father had been warned by his dying grandfather. On his deathbed, the grandfather had
warned the narrator's father:
"Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but
our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever
since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's
mouth."
What the grandfather was saying was that
any attempt at placating whites through attempts at assimilation into white culture would not
only fail, but would further degrade the spirit of the blacks who feigned such...
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