Deathbed Advice

The meaning of “Battle Royal” revolves around a grandfather’s “curse” (3): “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. I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open….Learn it to the younguns,” (2). The grandfather, on his deathbed, tells in a regretful way, the characteristics that he only now realizes were really important to sustain a laudable black identity. To achieve this laudable black identity, an identity that is self-respected and socially respected, the grandfather stipulates that a black man must be duplicitous with a purpose, self-respectful, driven, and smart.

At first the narrator does not understand what his grandfather means, especially since the narrator was proud to be “an example of good conduct–just like [his] grandfather” (3). But after his ordeal at the “entertainment palace” (57) the narrator and the reader learn what the narrator’s grandfather meant through relating the events that occur at the “palace” to each point the grandfather makes in his speech.

The grandfather would argue that Booker T. Washington and “a potential Booker T. Washington,” the narrator, are both traitors to themselves (5). The narrator is a traitor when he allows himself to be “part of the entertainment” (4) as opposed to being an individual and important person; when he persists to “stumble about like a baby or a drunken man” (22); when he “groped about like a blind, cautious crab” (23); or when he “embarrassedly...struggled…for coins” (53) only to feel as though his “back…had been beaten with wires”¬ (59)–as if he were a modern slave being whipped. To be a traitor according to the grandfather is to voluntarily humiliate oneself.

When the grandfather says that he was a “spy in the enemy’s country,” he means that he did things for white people upon their request. The difference between being a traitor and a spy, according to grandfather, is that a spy has only humiliated himself upon a request or demand. By humiliating himself upon a request or demand, he, a spy, is working for the other side. If you are working against your side–yourself–you are by definition, a spy. The narrator is a spy as well as a traitor. As a spy he obeys the “leave that alone!” command from the white audience when he knows full well that it is ridiculous to wear a blindfold when he is fighting (19). When the narrator is commanded to continue fighting with Tatlock, he realizes that the fight should not be “[f]or them,” (30) the white people; sadly this slight recognition is not enough to get him to stop fighting or doing things for “them,” as the story continues. Even when it is time to give his speech, the white people “almost forgot” that the narrator was actually there to give a speech (61). Unsurprisingly the whites in this story are even disrespectful during the narrator’s speech; he narrator even has to fix his voice by swallow the disgusting mix in his mouth: “blood, saliva, and all” to fix his failing voice and get the white people’s attention (68). But the saddest part concerning the narrator’s speech is that the whites do not even listen. They manage to hear one phrase: “social equality,” taboo word for blacks at that time (82), and they hear enough to mindlessly give the narrator “thunderous applause” at the end (95).

The first part of the grandfather’s speech tells what not to do, but the second part of his speech explains what should be done as a black man. The grandfather explains to the narrator that he must learn to live within a white dominated world (“lion’s head”), and to be succeed there he must be upright on the outside, but with a purpose: to promote himself to a social position higher or equal to the social position that the white people have (“overcome ‘em with yeses…”). Although the narrator is humiliated at the “palace,” in the end, he is given a briefcase with “an official looking document inside”–“a scholarship to the state college for Negros” (102).

It is ironic that the black people in the story are treated as subhuman “crabs, snails (23), clown[s], and jack-in-the-box[es] (37), when the white people, who already have achieved a seemingly higher social position are really the ones acting subhuman. Besides using the black boys as entertainment the whites also “choke” them with their cigar smoke, “laugh and howl” (9) at the “magnificent blonde” dancer (7), and cheat the boys “with brass pocket tokens” (103) when they said earlier that the money on the electrified mat was “good hard American cash” (54). This theme of characters with the lower social position having a higher moral fiber than characters who are literally higher in class has been thoroughly explained thanks to Elizabeth and Lady Catherine, so that will be all on that bit.

At the very end of the story, since it is clear now that the “circus” in the dream is the “entertainment palace” and the “clowns” are the black boys, it becomes explicitly clear to the reader, but not the narrator, that the narrator had acted against his grandfather’s advice (105). With the quote, “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” the idea that the white people are trying to keep the narrator busy by sending him to college and giving him something to “Keep [him] Running” instead of actually encouraging him to improve himself and move up the social ladder, becomes clearer. In the very last line the grandfather is laughing in the narrator’s dream. Sadly the grandfather could be laughing that the “overjoyed” narrator for being so proud of a back-handed and insulting gift that limits the narrator to only leading the black community, leading whole communities. The grandfather could also be laughing at the white people who are trying to keep the narrator “running.” This could be humorous now since he knows that the narrator will live the rest of his life through understanding the meaning and through following the pillars in the grandfather’s deathbed advice.
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