When the narrator makes it to Harlem he can hear gunshots, shouts, and breaking glass all around him. A bullet grazes his head as police chase men who are running down the street with a safe. Some of the looters help him up and take him along with them as they loot a hardware store and then burn their tenement building. Although he knows that he should go to the district office, he helps the men start the blaze and some woman recognizes him as a leader from the Brotherhood. He runs away but stops short in his flight when he sees seven white women hanging nude from lampposts. The realization that they're mannequins doesn't really ease his mind. As he stands there shaking off the shock of the mannequins in the darkness Ras, dressed as a tribal chieftain, approaches with a mob following him. Ras, on a horse, recognizes the narrator and hurls a spear at him. When the spear misses the young man, Ras tells his henchmen to hang the narrator.
The young man tries to convince the crowd that although he has been used to trick them, Ras has as well because if they follow Ras' lead, they'll be mowed down by police as a lawless bunch. The crowd doesn't listen to him and he has to fight his way out of the mob with Ras' spear and his briefcase. The narrator escapes and finds himself running to Mary's apartment, but he doesn't make it there. Some men ask him what's in his briefcase and as he's trying to get away, he falls into an uncovered manhole. The men put the cover on the hole and leave him there with a book of matches. He sleeps there as Harlem erupts above his head, and when he wakes, he can't find his way out of the hole because there is no ladder to the street above. While he's down there he dreams that all the people who have betrayed him are standing around him laughing. In his dream they castrate him and tell him that his illusions are gone. When he wakes again he decides that he's done with all of them. He can't return to where or what he was before, so he decides to just stay underground.
