Paul Beatty - The Sellout

“To Whom It May Concern,” the contract read. “With this deed I hereby emancipate, manumit, set free, permanently discharge, and dismiss my slave Hominy Jenkins, who’s been in my service for the past three weeks. Said Hominy is of medium build, complexion, and intelligence. To all who read this, Hominy Jenkins is now a free man of color. Witness my hand on this day, October 17th, the year of 1838.” The ruse didn’t work. Hominy simply pulled down his pants, shit on my geraniums, and wiped his ass with his freedom, then handed it back to me.

“Medium intelligence?” he asked, raising a gray eyebrow. “One, I know what year it is. Two, true freedom is having the right to be a slave.” He hiked up his pants and slipped into his Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer plantationese. “I know taint nobody forcin’ me, but dis here one slave you ain’t never gwine be rid of. Freedom can kiss my postbellum black ass.”

Slavery must have been profitable as hell for anybody to deal with all the mental anguish, but sometimes after a hot day of dehorning the goats and stringing barbed-wire fences, I’d be kicking back on the porch, watching the dusk scatter the smog red and heavy across the downtown sky, and Hominy would come outside with a pitcher of cold lemonade. There’d be something so satisfying about watching the condensation form and drip down the sides of the Tupperware as he slowly filled my glass, plop by painstaking ice cube plop, then fanned the horseflies and the heat from my face. In the cool air and ambient car stereo Tupac, I felt a refreshing hint of the dominion the landed Confederacy must have felt. Shit, if Hominy had always been so cooperative, I’d have fired on Fort Sumter, too.

On Thursdays, accidentally on purpose, Hominy would spill the refill in my lap. Sending me a not-so-subtle message, like a dog scratching at the screen door, that it was time for some action.

“Hominy.”

“Yes, massa?” he’d say hopefully. Rubbing his hindquarters in preparation.

“Did you choose a counselor?”

“I looked on the Internet, and the therapists are all white. Standing in the forest or in front of a bookshelf, promising career and sexual fulfillment, and healthy relationships. How come you never see photos of them with their overachieving kids or fucking their partners to satisfaction? Where’s the proof in the pudding?”

The wet patch on my pants would spread over my lap and toward my knees. “Okay, get in the truck,” I’d say.

Oddly, Hominy didn’t seem to mind that all the dominatrices at Sticks and Stones, the BDSM club on the Westside I contracted to dole out my punishments for me, were white women. The Bastille room was his favorite torture chamber. There, naked save for a Union Civil War cap, Mistress Dorothy, a pale brunette whose pouty Maybelline red lips put Scarlett O’Hara’s sneer to shame, strapped him to the wheel and whipped him silly. She’d clamp some contraption about his genitals and demand intel about Union Army troop movements and armament strength. Afterward Miss Dorothy would stick her head in the truck cab, plant a kiss on Hominy’s cheek, and hand me the receipt. At two hundred bucks an hour plus “racial incidentals,” the shit started to add up. The first five “coons,” “jigaboos,” “tar babies,” and “Sambos” were free. After that, it was three dollars an epithet. And “nigger,” in any of its varied forms, derivations, and pronunciations, was ten bucks a pop. Nonnegotiable. But after these sessions Hominy looked so happy it was almost worth it. Yet Hominy’s happiness wasn’t mine, it wasn’t the city’s, but I couldn’t think of a way of restoring Dickens until one unusually warm spring evening returning home from Sticks and Stones.

Hominy and I found ourselves stuck on the 110 freeway, impatiently weaving from lane to lane. We were making good progress until we hit the stretch between the 405 and 105 interchanges and traffic began to slow. My father had a theory that poor people are the best drivers because they can’t afford to carry car insurance and have to drive like they live, defensively. We were caught up in a slog of uninsured rust-bucket jalopies and compacts, all doing exactly fifty-five miles per hour, their trash bag windshields flapping in the wind. Hominy was beginning to come down from his masochistic high, the memories, if not the pain, of his session already beginning to fade away exit by exit. He poked at a bruise on his arm and asked himself where it came from. I snatched a joint from the glove compartment and offered him a medicinal hit.

“You know who was a pothead?” he said, refusing the doobage. “Little Scotty Beckett.”

Scotty was a big-eyed Rascal who used to run with Spanky. Wore a floppy knit sweater and his baseball cap to the side, but the white boy was all punim and no pathos and he didn’t last long. “Oh yeah? What about Spanky? Did he do drugs?”

“Spanky didn’t do shit but fuck bitches. That’s what Spanky did.”

I rolled down the window. We still weren’t moving very fast, and the stench of marijuana smoke hung guiltily in the air. The myth is that the Little Rascals, like a production of Macbeth , are cursed, that they all died horribly premature deaths.

GANG MEMBER

AGE

CAUSE OF DEATH

Alfalfa

42

Shot thirty times in the face (once for each freckle) in an argument over money

Buckwheat

49

Heart attack

Wheezer

19

Army training plane crash

Darla Hood

47

According to Hominy, he fucked her to death. In reality — hepatitis

Chubsy-Ubsy

21

Had something heavy on his heart. Unrequited love for Miss Crabtree and 300 lbs. of fat on a 5-foot frame

Froggy

16

Hit by truck

Pete the Pup

7

Swallowed alarm clock

Hominy squirmed in his seat, picking at the still-puffy red welts on his back, wondering why he was bleeding. Shit, maybe I was supposed to let him die. Maybe I should’ve just pushed him out of the car and onto the oily cracked asphalt of the Harbor Freeway. But what good would it do? Traffic came to a complete halt. A Jaguar, one of those ugly American-made models, was overturned in the fast lane. Its turtlenecked passenger unhurt, leaning against the median fence and reading a hardback novel you see only at airport bookstores. The rear-ended Honda sedan, with both its back end and its driver flattened and smoking, lay in the middle lane waiting to be carried to the junk- and graveyards, respectively. Jaguar model names sound like rockets: XJ — S, XJ8, E — Type. Hondas sound like cars designed by pacifists and humanitarian diplomats. The Accord, Civic, Insight. Hominy got out of the car to untangle the snarl. Waving his arms like the crazy man he was, he separated the cars by color, not that of the respective paint jobs, but by the hue of the motorists. “If you black, get back! White, to the right. Brown, go around. Yellow, follow the whites and let it mellow. Red, full speed ahead! Mulattos, full throttle!” If he couldn’t categorize by sight, he asked the drivers what color they were. “Chicano? What color is that? You just can’t make up a race, motherfucker. Puto? I got your puto right here, pendejo ! You pick a lane, nigger, and stay in it! Get in where you fit in!”

With cops and flares arrived, and the traffic finally flowing freely, Hominy climbed back into the truck, dusting off his hands like he’d done something. “That’s how you do shit. Sunshine Sammy taught me that. He used to say, ‘Time waits on no man, but niggers wait on anybody with a twenty-five cent tip.’”

“Who the fuck is Sunshine Sammy?”

“Don’t you worry about who Sunshine Sammy is. You new niggers got black presidents and golfers. I got Sunshine Sammy. The original Little Rascal, and by original I mean the very first one. And let me tell you, when Sunshine Sammy rescued the gang from an impossible predicament, now that was nonpartisan leadership.”