In the Sport of Kings, one of the main questions is “How far from your father can you run?” While Allmon Shaughnessy’s father is not present throughout much of his life, the novel continues to show his attempts to rebel against his father’s identities and values. However, as hard as he tries, he is often not able to escape his father’s actions and repeats them.
During Allmon’s early life, since having a white parent was looked down upon in his neighborhood, he would lie to his young friends and say his father was black (195). Allmon’s mother, Marie, claims to love Mike, Allmon’s father, but he only causes her heartbreak by continuously leaving and being a poor father, while also not sending Marie and Allmon support money. Furthermore, the Reverend dislikes Mike and says without sympathy, “You pick up white trash, your hands get dirty” (208). This negatively impacts Allmon and encourages him to not be like his father, even though he loved him at one point.
Allmon continues to be let down, which also leads to this resentment. For example, he says “he waited…for Mike to come…for anybody to save them, but nobody did come, because nobody does” (250). In response to Marie bringing up Mike, Allmon says, “Fuck him” (268), emphasizing Allmon’s outward resentment toward his father and his desire to be different from Mike. To contrast his father not wanting to try to help Marie, he tries to help and save his mother by running and dealing drugs for Aesop. He tells his mother, “We’re gonna get back on our feet. I’m gonna get some cash. Don’t worry about nothing” (272). Additionally, by this point in the novel, Allmon also refers to white people with derogatory terms such as “white dykes” (279) or “white fuck” (281), which is different from his younger years. Mike’s actions caused Allmon to rebel against his father’s identity.
Allmon also has dreams of a better life, unlike his father, and he tries to make it a reality by making the deal with Henry. Allmon says that “[he] wants what [Henry] has” and that “[he] has the rest of [his] life to make [a name]” (321). He tries to make this a reality by making the deal with Henry to stay away from his daughter with a possibility of receiving ten percent of Hellsmouth’s earnings. However, while he tries to be better than his father, he ends up repeating the same action of his father by leaving his son, which causes much of Allmon’s grief in his life. He made a deal with Henry, and in turn, he was not there for Henrietta and his child. Allmon realizes, “He had used [Henrietta] like meat and then left her to rot. I am Mike Shaughnessy’s son after all” (507). While Allmon attempts to have success by rebelling against his father’s actions, he repeats one of the most tragic of them all. Not being able to escape his father further leads him to kill himself.
I agree that Allmon harbors resentment towards his father for abandoning him and his mother. However, his feelings are also mixed. Despite not wanting to admit that Mike is white, Allmon still looks up to his father a great deal as a child; he is always excited to hear his father is visiting, and at one point imitates his actions (197). Even through adolescence a small part of Allmon still hopes that his father will be the solution to his problems, and when his mother dies and he feels more lost than he ever has, the only resolution and hope for the future that he can form in his mind is “I am going to find my father” (286). His feelings about his father are also a reflection of his feelings about white people in general. He understandably holds a lot of anger and bitterness; however, he also often reaches out to try and use white people to achieve success; the initiation of his relationship with Henrietta is an example of this. He wants to be like white people, not through the color of his skin, but through the culture they take for granted: a culture of success and more importantly, of the power to help themselves, while Allmon, a black man, could never save himself or Marie from illness. When he says to Henry, “I want what you got,” it is not only a contrast to his father’s deadbeat lifestyle, as you said, but also because he wants the lifestyle both Henry and his father could far more easily achieve because they were white, and which he feels he can never achieve because “that was always in the script, wasn’t it?...It’s written in black blood on white paper” (530).
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ReplyDeleteI agree with your analysis of Allmon's changing feelings towards his father. I am most interested in how his father's neglect motivates Allmon to do whatever he can to stray away from following the same path. Despite Allmon's hatred of his white father, he is convinced that a relationship with the white Forge family, especially with Henrietta, will be “a little key in his pocket" (324). Allmon pursues this relationship with Henrietta because he knows her whiteness and status will offer him something he will never obtain on his own, but he is determined to invest little in the relationship, evidenced when Henrietta accuses him of never being free with her (348). He viewed her as "a white pebble on a white beach that ran all the way around the world, containing all the oceans she had seen and he hadn't" (349). He cares little for Henrietta, and uses her just like his father does to Marie, but Allmon views it differently than the actions of his father because of the reversion in the roles of race. Allmon holds himself to a higher standard than his father and is so shocked and guilted by the idea of them being the same, that he cannot bear to live anymore. This relationship between guilt and suicide parallels the life of another of Allmon’s forefathers, Scipio, who “found something worse than slavery” when he is responsible for the death of a pregnant woman (305). Allmon faces guilt from both his treatment towards Henrietta, and the realization that he is technically the reason for her death.