Summary: Chapter 12
The narrator leaves the subway and collapses on the street.
Several people help to carry him to the home of a kind black woman
named Mary. When he wakes, she asks him why he came to New York
City from the South. He replies that he wanted to be an educator.
She cautions against the city’s corrupting influence—she, too, came from
the South—and says, “I’m in New York, but New York ain’t in me.”
The narrator gets up to leave, and Mary tells him that he should
come back if he ever wants to rent a room somewhere besides the
Men’s House, adding that she offers a fair rent.
The narrator’s white overalls draw hostile stares at the
Men’s House. He knows that he can no longer live there. He scorns
the ideals of older advocates of racial progress still mired in
their dreams of black business empires; he pities those who still
believe in the post–Civil War dreams of freedom within segregation.
He mocks those who work insignificant jobs but don expensive clothing
and affect the manners of courtly Southern congressmen, hoping to
cover up their low social status.
As he heads for the elevator, the narrator sees a laughing
man whom he mistakes for Dr. Bledsoe. He promptly empties a spittoon on
the man’s head but then discovers that his victim is a prominent Baptist
preacher. He escapes before anyone can catch him. He later persuades
an amused porter to retrieve his belongings from inside the building
and learns that the Men’s House has banned him for ninety-nine years
and a day. The narrator takes a room at Mary’s apartment. He bristles
with irritation at her constant expectation that he will take up
some leadership role in the black community. Yet she never criticizes
him when he fails to do so, or when he cannot pay for food or rent.
The narrator begins to feel the desire for activism anyhow; within
himself he feels a “spot of black anger.” His old urge to give speeches
returns as winter settles over New York.
Summary: Chapter 13
The narrator encounters a street vendor selling baked
yams and experiences a sudden nostalgia for the South. He buys three
to eat as he walks down the street, feeling totally free. He imagines
his classmates’ shock at seeing him with these emblems of Southern
culture. He scorns them for distancing themselves from all of the
things that they in fact like: yams, chitterlings, and boiled hog’s
maws. He comes upon a crowd of people gathered to watch as an eviction takes
place. The crowd regards this act of dispossession as a common occurrence. White
men drag household furnishings out of an apartment and lug one chair
out the door with an old black woman still sitting in it. Looking
at the contents of the old woman’s and her husband’s lives scattered
roughly across the pavement, the narrator identifies acutely with
the couple. He becomes angry and spontaneously delivers a rousing
speech that incites the crowd to resistance. The crowd then carries
the couple’s belongings back into the building.
The police arrive, and the narrator flees. He thinks that
he has successfully escaped when he hears a voice behind him: “That
was a masterful bit of persuasion, brother.” The voice belongs to
a white man, who claims he is a friend. He takes the narrator to
a coffeehouse and tries to persuade him to become a paid spokesperson
for his political organization’s Harlem branch. The narrator turns
him down; the man tells him that his name is Brother Jack and gives
him a phone number to call should he change his mind.
Summary: Chapter 14
The narrator changes his mind as soon as he returns to
Mary’s home, realizing that she has been housing and feeding him
for free since his compensation check from the factory ran out weeks
earlier. He calls the number that Jack gave him and agrees to meet
him on Lenox Avenue. A car pulls up with Jack and several other
men inside. They drive to a hotel called the Chthonian, where a
cocktail party seems to be taking place. Jack introduces the narrator
to his mistress, Emma, who whispers not quite softly enough to Jack,
“But don’t you think he should be a little blacker?”
