The Sellout

by Paul Beatty

“Hominy, it’s four o’clock in the morning. Why aren’t you in bed?” “Same reason you aren’t. It smells like a bum’s asshole outside.”

That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.

“Don’t they got cow rubbers?” “That’s not a bad idea, but cows don’t have hands and, like the Republican Party, any regard for a female’s reproductive rights, so this is a way to control the population.

One night I finally managed to tell an original joke, that in homage to my father had a title, albeit a rather long one: Why All That Abbott and Costello Vaudeville Mess Doesn’t Work in the Black Community Who’s on first? I don’t know, your mama.

Silence can be either protest or consent, but most times it’s fear.