Abstract
In a classic scene of a green young man's initiation into the urban underworld, the narrator of James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an ExColored Man finds himself in a gaming house within hours of arriving in New York City, and not long after that, becomes fully ensnared in the rites of the craps table. Whether it was my companion's suggestion or some latent daredevil strain in my blood which suddenly sprang into activity I do not know; but with a thrill of excitement which went through my whole body I threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table and said in a trembling voice: 'I fate you.' To fate means to challenge the dice thrower in the hopes of seizing control of the game, and the Ex-Colored Man's daring is swiftly rewarded. companion and all my friends shouted to me to follow up my luck. The fever was on me. I seized the dice. My hands were so hot that the bits of bone felt like pieces of ice. I shouted as loudly as I could: 'Shoot it all!' but the blood was tingling so about my ears that I could not hear my own voice. I was soon 'fated.' I threw the dice-seven-I had won. 'Shoot it all!' I cried again.1 Where Johnson sees depravity (with this taste of victory as a gateway, his protagonist falls into a year-long downward spiral of gambling away his meager income), Jackson Lears sees far more exalted. To Lears, the impulse to shoot it all, to taunt fate with one's last dollar, connects gambling to the spiritual yearning for grace. In Something for Nothing, he overturns the conventional wisdom on gambling as vice in order to suss out the laudable challenge that it poses to a society fueled largely by profit and productivity. To Lears, the salient characteristic of the gambler is his blithe indifference to material gain. The gambler may seek for nothing, but both of those terms turn out to be more complex than first they appear. The is money itself, for the gambler's insouciance comes from his willingness to reduce money to mere counters in a game (pp. 8, 327). And the something is far more than money-that is nothing less than
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