Paul Beatty - The Sellout

Three in the afternoon, Mormons at my pad

Need new croaker sacks and feelin’ bad

Promising salvation to a nigger like me

Brigham Young must be stupid and high on PCP

If Stevie had a Latin motto, it’d be Cogito, ergo Boogieum. I think, therefore I jam.

* * *

“How come Marpessa’s bus is parked here?” I asked him.

“Nigger, how come you here?” he barked back.

“I wanted to leave this for your sister.” I showed him the photo of the satsuma tree, which he snatched from my hand. I wanted to ask him if he’d received all the fruit I’d sent him over the years: the papayas, kiwis, apples, and blueberries, but I could tell from the suppleness of his skin, the whiteness of his eyes, the sheen in his ponytail, and the relaxed way he leaned on my shoulder that he had.

“She told me about you leaving these pictures.”

“Is she mad?”

Stevie shrugged and continued to stare at the Polaroid. “The bus here because they lost Rosa Parks’s bus.”

“Who lost Rosa Parks’s bus?”

“White people. Who the fuck else? Supposedly, every February when schoolkids visit the Rosa Parks Museum, or wherever the fuck the bus is at, the bus they tell the kids is the birthplace of the civil rights movement is a phony. Just some old Birmingham city bus they found in some junkyard. That’s what my sister says, anyway.”

“I don’t know.”

Cuz took two deep swallows of gin. “What you mean, ‘You don’t know’? You think that after Rosa Parks bitch-slapped white America, some white rednecks going to go out of their way to save the original bus? That’d be like the Celtics hanging Magic Johnson’s jersey in the rafters of the Boston Garden. No fucking way.

“Anyway, she thinks what you did with the bus, with the stickers and shit, is special. That it makes niggers think. In her way, she’s proud of you.”

“Really?”

I looked at the bus. Tried to see it in a different light. As something more than forty sheet-metal feet of trivial rights iconography dripping transmission fluid onto the driveway. Tried to picture it hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian, a tour guide pointing up to it and saying, “This is the very bus from which Hominy Jenkins, the last Little Rascal, asserted that the rights of African-Americans were neither God-given nor constitutional, but immaterial.”

Stevie held the photo under his nose, took a deep breath, and asked, “When these oranges going to be ready?”

I wanted to point to the greenish-orange balls and brag about how I’d figured out that if I covered the ground around the tree with white waterproof sheeting, not only would I be able to keep moisture from seeping into the soil, the whiteness would reflect the sunlight back into the tree and improve the color of the fruit. But all I could manage was “Soon. They’ll be ripe soon.”

Stevie took one last sniff of the picture, and then passed it under King Cuz’s cavernous nostrils.

“Smell that citrus, nigger? That’s what freedom smells like.”

Then he grabbed me by the shoulders. “And what’s this I hear about black Chinese restaurants?”

It was the smell that brung ’em. At about six in the morning, I found the first boy curled up in my driveway, breathing heavily, pressing his nose under the gate like a horny dog. He looked happy. He wasn’t in the way, so I left him alone and went to milk the cows. Los Angeles, for whatever reason, is chock-full of autistic children and I thought he was one of the afflicted. But later in the day he had company. By noontime, nearly every child on the block had crammed into my front yard. They spent the last day of summer vacation playing Uno on the grass and trying to see who could hit the softest. They plucked needles from the cacti and stuck each other in the behind, they popped my rose petals and scratched their names into the driveway with rock salt. Even the Lopez kids, Lori, Dori, Jerry, and Charlie, who lived next door and had two pristine acres of backyard and a decent-sized pool to play in, were circled around little brother Billy, laughing hysterically as he noshed on a peanut butter sandwich. Then a little girl I didn’t recognize staggered over to the elm tree and drowned a column of ants in vomit.

“Okay, what the fuck?”

“The Stank,” Billy said, after swallowing a mouthful of a peanut butter — and judging from what appeared to be bug legs on his tongue — and flies sandwich. I didn’t smell anything, so Billy dragged me out into the street. It wasn’t hard to see why the young girl retched; the stench was overwhelming. The Stank had rolled in overnight and settled over the neighborhood like some celestial flatulence. Jesus. But why hadn’t I noticed it earlier? I stood in the middle of Bernard Avenue, the kids beckoning me over, waving frantically like World War I soldiers urging a wounded comrade out of the mustard gas and back into the relative safety of the trenches. As soon as I reached the curb, it hit me, the refreshing pungency of citrus. No wonder the kids refused to stray from my property, the satsuma tree was perfuming the grounds like some ten-foot-tall air freshener.

Billy yanked my pant leg. “When those oranges going to be ready?”

I wanted to tell him tomorrow, but I was too busy pushing the little girl aside so I could throw up on the elm, gagging not from the smell but because Billy had two red fly eyes stuck in his teeth.

The next morning, the first day of school, the neighbor kids and their parents were gathered at the driveway gate. The youngsters, shiny and clean in brand-new school clothes, pawed at the wooden fence, trying to catch glimpses of the farm animals through the wooden slats. The adults, some still in their pajamas, yawned, looked at their watches, and adjusted their bathrobe belts as they placed milk money — twenty-five cents for a pint of my unpasteurized — in their children’s hands. I sympathized with the parents, because after being up all night in the lingering remnants of the Stank, building an imaginary all-white school, I was tired, too.

It’s hard to determine when satsumas are ripe. Color isn’t a very good indicator. Neither is rind texture. Smell is good, but the best way to tell is simply to taste them. However, I trust the refractometer more than my taste buds.

“What’s the reading, massa?”

“Sixteen point eight.”

“Is that good?”

I tossed Hominy an orange. When satsumas are ready to eat, the skin is so supple, they damn near peel themselves. He popped a wedge into his satchel mouth and pretended to faint dead away in a pratfall so well executed the rooster stopped crowing for fear the old man was dead.

“Oh shit.”

The kids thought he was hurt. I did, too, until he flashed a wide “Yes sir, boss. Dat’s good eatin’!” smile as bright and warm as the rising sun. He stood up in sections, then soft-shoed and somersaulted his way to the fence, showing that there was some of both the old vaudevillian and the stunt coon still left in him. “I sees white people!” he exclaimed in faux horror.

“Let them in, Hominy.”

Hominy opened the gate partway, as if he were peering through a Chitlin’ Circuit curtain: “A little black boy is in the kitchen watching his mother fry up some chicken. Seeing the flour, he dabs some on his face. ‘Look at me, Ma,’ he says, ‘I’m white!’ ‘What’d you say?’ says his mama, and the boy says, ‘Look at me, I’m white!’ WHAP! His mama slaps the shit out of him. ‘Don’t you ever say that!’ she says, then tells him to go tell his father what he said to her. Crying hard as Niagara Falls, the boy goes up to his father. ‘What’s wrong, son?’ ‘M-M-Mommy sl-sl-slapped me!’ ‘Why she do that, son?’ his father asks. ‘B-b-because I–I said I was w-w-white.’ ‘What?’ BLAAAAM! His father slaps him even harder than his mama did. ‘Now go tell your grandmother what you said! She’ll teach you!’ So the boy’s crying and shaking and all confused. He approaches his grandmother. ‘Why, baby, what’s wrong?’ she asks. And the boy says, ‘Th-th-they sl-slapped me.’ ‘Why, baby — why they’d do that?’ He tells her his story and when he gets to the end, PIE-YOW! His grandmamma slaps him so hard she almost knocks him down. ‘Don’t you ever say that,’ she says. ‘Now what did you learn?’ The boy starts rubbing his cheek and says, ‘I learned that I’ve been white for only ten minutes and I hate you niggers already!’”