The narrator receives a prize from doing an exemplary job during his speech in chapter one. It’s described as “a gleaming calfskin brief case” (Ellison 32). The narrator carries this case along with him throughout his journey to New York, as well as during his time working for the Brotherhood in New York. At the beginning, the briefcase contains a scholarship to college, but the narrator’s grandfather’s voice echoes in his head that in reality the document is merely one more way that white people are keeping the narrator running. This document, however, is not the only artifact found in the narrator’s briefcase. Along his path through life he encounters strange objects, many of them with special meanings, and places them inside his briefcase. These objects represent all the ideas and baggage weighing his thoughts down throughout his travels.
One of the first items he stows away inside his briefcase is a shattered coin bank from Mary Rambo’s house. The bank was designed as an extremely racist and stereotypical black man that one could pull his hand down and the coin on his hand would pop into his mouth. Upon noticing this horrid bank, the narrator is immediately enraged and he wastes little time in taking it and smashing it against the floor. With the money spilled across the floor and the bank in pieces, he hurriedly shoves it all into his briefcase, scared that Mary might see. The fact that it is a bank points to it having significance as a symbol for wealth. The narrator sees it when he’s about to leave to go start his job with the Brotherhood, which just so happens to be a very lucrative job. This shows that the narrator is selling out and it connects him to the bank in the way that he is just another person who wants money. On the other hand, one can look at the bank mainly focusing on the racist aspect of it. The narrator is being weighed down by this obscene object as he heads towards his first day of work with the Brotherhood, which is an organization that claims to be post-race. This raises questions in the reader’s head about whether or not the Brotherhood is really what they claim to be. We quickly learn that despite the Brotherhood claiming to be post-race, they still ask questions regarding the narrator’s eligibility for his job such as “don’t you think he should be a little blacker?” (Ellison 303). The Brotherhood may have good intentions, but their ideas and actions are still clouded and impacted by their longing to be an organization that is remembered for many years to come.
Another object the narrator keeps with him is Brother Tarp’s broken leg chain. Brother Tarp gives it to the narrator and tells the narrator his story of how he escaped from the South, where he was part of a chain gang. He says that he snapped the chain himself. At this point, we’ve seen another leg chain: the one Bledsoe has at the college. The major difference between the two is that Tarp’s is battered and broken whereas the one Bledsoe has is fully intact. The chain Bledsoe has represents how he is still a slave in some ways. He forces himself to suck up to every powerful white person around him in order to get by in life and make money. On the other hand, Brother Tarp seperated himself from slavery and now is working to, or at least he believes he’s working to, craft a post-racial society where discrimination is a thing of the past. The fact that the narrator carries it around with him shows how he is free of slavery. It also shows how he isn’t necessarily free from racism, but he is above it to some extent. His mind has been opened, and this broken leg chain represents his transition from being chained to doing what white people want him to do, to being more inclined towards his grandfather’s approach of making the white people think you’re doing what they want but secretly maintaining your pride and personality.
The latest object the narrator places in his briefcase is the Sambo doll that Clifton was selling. The doll itself is a racist depiction of a black man, and it is seen prancing around before a crowd of people on the street. The narrator later realizes that the doll was actually being controlled by Clifton with thin black strings. Despite one thinking that strings would be quite visible in broad daylight, apparently nobody in the crowd could see the strings, including the narrator. He only notices them afterwards when he is examining the doll. This lack of seeing of the strings shows how people are trained to accept black people being controlled as normal. This especially pertains to the narrator because soon after the collection of this doll, he is bombarded with criticism from the Brotherhood. They blatantly say that he was not hired to think but rather to merely act as a figurehead; however, this doll is not solely a bad symbol. The specific doll the narrator picks up is the one that he spat on and was trampled by the crowd. This shows that despite the narrator being controlled, he denounces the idea of being controlled, and it’s also soon after this that he adopts his grandfather’s way of thinking. The duality of this symbol’s message is also shown upon the narrator’s first glance at it. Whereas he immediately felt ire towards the bank and shattered it, the narrator was first filled with a sense of wonder and puzzlement along with anger when looking at the doll. Overall, the Sambo doll has both positive and negative connotations.
Whether it was starting the first day with the Brotherhood, or the major shift in the narrator’s perspective, these objects that the narrator carries around with him each came along with a major plot element or change when they first appeared. They all have some sort of meaning that weighs down the narrator’s thoughts, and impact his every decision and action throughout the story. For now, are there any objects that the narrator carries around with him either in his briefcase or on his person that I missed? As for the rest of the book, I wonder if the narrator will find a new object with a meaning that is purely positive, unlike the other ones he has found so far. One thought to leave you with, we see the narrator pull out his knife in the prologue, “And in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat” (Ellison 4), so I wonder if the fact that he began carrying a weapon around with him has any meaning?
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