The narrator wakes early in the morning to the sound of people throughout the building banging on the steam pipes. Angry at the racket, he looks around for something with which to bang on the pipes. He finds a cast-iron bank shaped like a grinning Negro and is shocked that Mary would have such an insulting thing in her apartment. He using the degrading representation to bang on the pipes until the bank breaks apart. He feels bad for breaking it despite its ugliness, so he hides it in the briefcase he still carries and plans to throw it away after he leaves.
The noise wakes Mary as well and he is forced to give her the money face-to-face. He tells her that he got it by playing the numbers for the first time, beginner's luck. He doesn't tell her that he's moving out.
When he leaves, he tries to throw away the bank wrapped in newspaper, but when he puts it in a trash can in front of a row of houses, the woman who lives there yells after him to come back and get it. She makes a scene, so he retrieves the broken bank from the trash can and then tries to drop it on the ground at a crosswalk. A few minutes later a man brings it back to him telling him that he dropped it. When the narrator denies it, the man holding the bank thinks that he's holding the evidence for some crime. The narrator puts the newspaper-wrapped bank back in the briefcase and keeps walking. He goes to buy himself a new suit and then calls Brother Jack for his instructions. Brother Jack gives him directions to his new apartment in the middle of a white, Irish neighborhood, and at his new apartment he spends the day reading the Communist literature left there for him in preparation for a rally that night.