Paul Beatty - The Sellout

The rain fell harder. The drops, big and warm, kicked up small clouds of dust as they pelted the hard, dry pavement. In the middle of the schoolyard the janitorial staff was hurriedly unloading a Dumpster. They tossed the broken wooden desks, cracked blackboards, and shards of a termite-ridden handball wall into a big pile, then stuffed the crevices with newspaper. Normally Career Day ended with a giant marshmallow roast. The skies were getting even darker. I had the feeling the kids would be disappointed. In the growing wetness the teachers, save for the crybaby staring into the flat basketball as if his world had come to an end, and other careerists tried to round up the kids, snatching them off the broken-down swings, rusted-out monkey bar and jungle gym sets, while Nestor galloped around the frightened herd, steering them away from the gates. Marpessa had started the bus, and Charisma climbed out just as the calf started to recover from the shock. I looked for my assistant, Sheila Clark, but she was too busy holding up the pair of bloody testicles by their stringy entrails, dangling them in the air and slamming them into one other like a pair of twenty-five-cent vending machine clacker balls to be of any use.

As I slipped the animal into a headlock, turning on my back and digging my boot heels into his crotch to keep him from kicking me in the face, Marpessa U-turned the bus around and headed out the side gate and onto Shenandoah Street without so much as a goodbye wave. Fuck her. Charisma stood over me smiling, reading the hurt in my eyes.

“You two were so meant for each other.”

“Do me a favor? In my bag there’s some antiseptic and a little jar of goop that says Fliegenschutz. ” Assistant Principal Molina did what she’s always done since she was a little girl: she got her hands dirty, spraying the writhing animal with disinfectant and slathering on the sticky Fliegenschutz over the gaping wound where his testicles used to be.

When she finished, the white teacher, his face streaked with tears, tapped his boss on the shoulder, and like a television cop handing in his badge and gun, he solemnly removed the shiny new Teach for America button fastened to his sweater vest, placed it in Charisma’s palm, and walked off into the squall.

“What was that about?”

“When we were on the bus, your skinny farmhand, Sheila here, stood up, pointed to the PRIORITY SEATING FOR WHITES sign, and told young Mr. Edmunds he could have her seat. And that idiot takes her up on her offer, sits down, realizes what he’s done, and fucking loses it.”

“Wait, the signs are still up?”

“You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“You talk a lot of shit about the hood, but you don’t know what’s going on in the hood. Ever since you put those signs up, Marpessa’s bus has been the safest place in the city. She’d forgotten all about them, too, until her shift supervisor pointed out she hadn’t had an incident report since Hominy’s birthday party. But then she started thinking about it. How people were treating each other with respect. Saying hello when they got on, thank you when they got off. There’s no gang fighting. Crip, Blood, or cholo, they press the Stop Request button one time and one fucking time only. You know where the kids go do their homework? Not home, not the library, but the bus. That’s how safe it is.”

“Crime is cyclical.”

“It’s the signs. People grouse at first, but the racism takes them back. Makes them humble. Makes them realize how far we’ve come and, more important, how far we have to go. On that bus it’s like the specter of segregation has brought Dickens together.”

“What about that crybaby teacher?”

“Mr. Edmunds is a good math specialist, but obviously he can’t teach the kids anything about themselves, so fuck him.”

More or less healed, the calf scrambled to its feet. Sheila, his little emasculator, leaned teasingly in his face, holding his testes from her earlobes like costume jewelry. One last goodbye sniff of his manhood and he ambled off to commiserate with the ball-less tetherball poles that stood bent and useless next to the cafeteria. Charisma rubbed her tired eyes. “Now, if I get these little motherfuckers to behave in school like they do on the bus, we’d be on to something.”

Led by Nestor Lopez, who was ten lengths ahead of the pack, galloping in for his reward money, Sheila’s classmates were being shepherded over the concrete plains, marched through the drizzle and past the rows of thatch tarpaper-roofed bungalows, windows glassed with newsprint and colored construction paper. Buildings in such disrepair they made the one-room African schoolhouses on late-night television fundraisers damn near look like college lecture halls in comparison. It was a modern-day Trail of Tears. The kids were circled around the mound of broken school furniture. Their excitement undeterred despite the crackle of the raindrops on the giant bags of marshmallows and the steadily darkening pile of wood and damp newsprint. Behind them was the school’s auditorium, the roof of which had collapsed in the Northridge quake of ’94 and had never been rebuilt. Charisma ran her hand down the length of Nestor’s Rose Parade saddle bells. The jingle-jangle made the kids smile. Just then Sheila Clark, tearfully rubbing her shoulder, ran up. “Ms. Molina, that white boy stole one of my balls!” she wailed, pointing at the chubby Latino kid, three shades darker than her, vainly trying to superball the testis against the wet ground. Charisma gently stroked Sheila’s braided head, soothing her feelings. That was a new one on me. Black kids referring to their Latino peers as white. When I was their age, back when we used to scream “Not it!” before games of Kick the Can and Red Light, Green Light, back before the violence, the poverty, and the infighting had reduced our indigenous land rights from all of Dickens to isolated city blocks of gang turf, everyone in Dickens, regardless of race, was black and you determined someone’s degree of blackness not by skin color or hair texture but by whether they said “For all intents and purposes” or “For all intensive purposes.” Marpessa used to say that despite the fall of straight black hair that cascaded down to her butt and her horchata complexion, she didn’t know Charisma wasn’t black until the day Charisma’s mother stopped by to pick her up from school. Her walk and talk so different from her daughter’s. Stunned, she turned to her best friend. “You Mexican?” Thinking her homegirl was tripping, Charisma blanched, about to exclaim, “I ain’t Mexican,” when, as if seeing her for the first time, she took a good look at her own mother in the after-school context of the surrounding black faces and rhythms, and was like “Oh fuck, I am Mexican! ¡Hijo de puta! ” That was a long time ago.

Before lighting the bonfire, Assistant Principal Molina addressed her troops. It was obvious in the seriousness in her face and the tone of her voice that she was a general at the end of her rope. Resigned to the fate that the black and brown troops she was sending out into the world didn’t have much of a chance. Cada día de carreras profesionales yo pienso la misma cosa. De estos doscientos cincuenta niños, ¿cuántos terminarán la escuela secundaria? ¿Cuarenta pinche por ciento? Órale, y de esos cien con suerte, ¿cuántos irán a la universidad? ¿ Online, junior, clown college, o lo que sea ? About five, más o menos. ¿Y cuántos graduarán? Two, maybe. Qué lástima. Estamos chingados.

And although like most black males raised in Los Angeles, I’m bilingual only to the extent that I can sexually harass women of all ethnicities in their native languages, I understood the gist of the message. Those kids were fucked.