Dancing Dolls

“A grinning doll of orange and black tissue paper with thin flat cardboard disks forming its head and feet and which some mysterious mechanism was causing to move up and down in a loose-jointed, shoulder-shaking, infuriatingly sensuous motion, a dance that was completely detached from the black, mask-like face. It’s no jumping-jack, but what, I thought, seeing the doll throwing itself about with the fierce defiance of someone performing a degrading act in public, dancing as though it received a perverse pleasure from its motions. And beneath the chuckles of the crowd I could hear the swishing of its ruffled paper, while the same out-of-the-corner-of-the-mouth voice continued to spiel.” (Page 326)
The narrator is in Harlem buying some new shoes when he sees a crowd of people. He approaches them and he sees that they are watching a man show of his dancing black dolls. These dolls are stereotypical because they dance in odd ways when the string is pulled. The narrator finds this very degrading and he wants to destroy the dolls. The person that is selling these dolls is a person from the brotherhood named Tod Clifton. The brotherhood’s own people are selling them out. This stereotype really enrages the narrator. He sees one of the dolls in the street but he doesn’t step on it. He picks it up and wonders why his brotherhood friend was doing this. It could probably have been that he wanted money. Would you degrade your own race to make a few extra dollars?