Running in the Wrong Direction

Ralph Ellison’s story “Battle Royal” raises many questions regarding race. But perhaps the greatest question this story evokes is that of what African Americans should and should not do after they gained their freedom from slavery. Ellison examines this question by using the story’s narrator as an example of what African Americans should not do, and his grandfather’s dying words as an example of what they should do (of course supporting these “bookends” of the story with details and examples throughout it).

Towards the end of the story, the narrator has a dream in which he opens the briefcase he was awarded after the battle royal and finds a gold stamp that reads, “To Whom It May Concern,… Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.” His dream concludes with his grandfather’s “laughter ringing in [his] ears.” Therefore, the essential question of the story is: what does “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” mean?

The narrator visualizes himself “as a potential Booker T. Washington,” a prominent black leader in the late 1800s and early 1900s who urged African Americans to conform to white culture and follow the orders of the white man rather than oppose them. He believed that black Americans could attain assimilation into white culture in this manner. Throughout Ellison’s story, it is obvious that the narrator shares the same views as Washington and is blind to their foolishness.

So when he reads the words “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running” in his dream, it is understood that this message means that as long African Americans such as the narrator will continue to oblige the southern white culture, the white society should encourage these individuals since they are only helping themselves.

The narrator’s willingness to oblige this southern white culture is apparent throughout the entire story. It is first apparent in the battle royal itself, for this battle is nothing more than entertainment for the white men in the form of the black men senselessly (and literally blindly) beating each other for extremely meager pay. It is also apparent in the narrator’s speech. To the white men, it is nothing more than another form of entertainment as they laugh at and mock the narrator’s use of large words (since they believe an educated black man to be a freak show such as one would see in a circus). This same acceptance of the southern white men’s culture is evident in the nude dancer who is gawked at and tossed around “as college boys are tossed at a hazing” by the same white men that find circus-like entertainment in the black men’s suffering.

Therefore, ultimately when the white men give the narrator the briefcase and scholarship, they are not helping him attend college in the proper manner, they are obliging their own wants in two ways. Firstly, they are creating another show by sending a black boy to college (which they find comical and ironic). And secondly, they are only helping themselves, for they are “helping” their own “Booker T. Washington” get an education, because he will not fight them as his grandfather had hoped, he will only carry out their will. (521)