The Sellout

by Paul Beatty

said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn’t quite as comfortable as it looks.

Work keys jangling like sleigh bells, the Court officers march into the chambers like a two-by-two wagonless team of crew-cut Clydesdales harnessed together by a love of God and country.

“any wack rapper whose signature tune is ‘Me So Horny’ has no rights the white man, or any other B-boy worth his suede Pumas, was bound to respect.”

Hamp kneads my shoulder, a reminder not to sweat the nappy-headed magistrate or the republic for which he stands.

like Jerry Lewis dropped Dean Martin, Max Baer dropped Schmeling, Third Bass dropped science, and Sammy Davis, Jr., dropped Judaism all together.

causing his chair to squeak louder and louder with each transfer of his restless body weight from one flabby diabetic butt cheek to the other.

He stands up like he wants to fight. A wad of spit hocked from the deepest regions of his Yale Law School education chambered on the tip of his tongue. The Chief Justice calls out his name, and the black Justice catches himself and plops back into his chair. Swallowing his saliva, if not his pride. “Racial segregation? Slavery? Why you bitch-made motherfucker, I know goddamn well your parents raised you better than that! So let’s get this hanging party started!”

Had me and Pops founded Jamestown instead of the Pilgrims, the Indians would have looked at our wilted, meandering, labyrinthlike rows of maize and kumquats and said, “Today’s corn planting seminar is canceled, because you niggers ain’t going to make it.”

Forty acres and a fool.

Instead, he swore up and down I was nannied and mammied by a sow named Suzy Q and was the loser in a sibling “piglet versus niglet” rivalry to a porcine genius named Savoir Faire.

People eat the shit you shovel them. And sometimes, when I pull up to the drive-thru window on horseback or return the disbelieving stares of a convertible carload of out-of-town vatos pointing at the black vaquero grazing his livestock in the trash-strewn fields underneath the power lines that stretch Eiffel Tower–like alongside West Greenleaf Boulevard, I think about all the lines of ad infinitum bullshit my father shoveled down my throat, until his dreams became my dreams. Sometimes, while I’m sharpening the plowshare and shearing the

sheep, I feel like every moment of my life isn’t mine but one of his “déjà vus.” No, I don’t miss my father. I just regret that I never had the nerve to ask him if it was really true that I’d spent the sensorimotor and preoperational stages of my life with one hand tied behind my back. Talk about starting life off with a handicap. Fuck being black. Try learning to crawl, ride a tricycle, cover both eyes while playing peek-a-boo, and constructing a meaningful theory of mind, all with one hand.

Monologue?

I met interesting people and tried to convince them that no matter how much heroin and R. Kelly they had in their systems, they absolutely could not fly.

During the height of the government enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, some segregated townships filled in their municipal pools rather than let nonwhite kids share in the perverse joy of peeing in the water.

Black people pop. “Pop” being Hollywood slang for having a dynamic camera presence, for being almost too photogenic. Hominy says it’s why they rarely shoot black and white buddy movies anymore; the bigger stars get washed out. Tony Curtis. Nick Nolte. Ethan Hawke does a film with some African-American and it becomes a screen test to see who’s really the Invisible Man. And has there ever been

buddy movie featuring a black woman and anyone? The only ones with the cinematic magnetism to hang were Gene Wilder and Spanky McFarland. Anyone else—Tommy Lee Jones, Mark Wahlberg, Tim Robbins—is just hanging on to the mane of a runaway horse.

At first the audience laughed. But when Hominy didn’t crack a smile, the guy stared back at him with a doltish wide-eyed look of bewilderment not seen since the days of great buffoons like Stepin Fetchit and George W. Bush, the first coon president.

“It’s illegal to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?” “It is.” “Well, I’ve whispered ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.”

An early rap quintet of puerile white poseurs known as Young Black Teenagers asserted that ‘Blackness is a state of mind.’