Paul Beatty - The Sellout

I stepped to him. My arms raised and my hands open. Foy pressed the gun barrel even deeper into his misshapen Afro, holding himself hostage. Suicide by cop or cop-out, I didn’t much care, but I was glad he’d finally stopped singing.

“Foy,” I said, sounding surprisingly like my father, “you have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? and How may I become myself?”

I waited for the expected “I do and do for you niggers, and this is the thanks I get” diatribe about how no one was buying his books. How even though he was the producer, director, editor, caterer, and star of a television talk show that’s been syndicated on two continents and brought a droll homogenized and romanticized version of black intellectual thought into tens of homes in over six countries, nothing has changed about how the world sees us, much less how we see ourselves. How he was directly responsible for getting a black man elected president and nothing changed. How last week a nigger won $75,000 on Teen Jeopardy and nothing changed. How in fact things have gotten worse. And how you can tell things are getting worse. Because “poverty” has disappeared from the vernacular and our consciousness. Because there’s white boys working at the car wash. Because the women in porn are better-looking than ever and it’s the handsome gay men who are “straight for pay.” Because famous actors do commercials extolling the virtues of the phone companies and the United States Army. You know how you can tell shit is fucked up? Because someone thinks it’s still 1950 and sees fit to reintroduce segregation to the American ethos. That someone wouldn’t be you, would it, Sellout? Putting up signs? Erecting fake schools like the ghetto was some sort of phony Paris complete with railway stations, Arc de Triomphes, and Eiffel Towers built during World War I to fool the German bombers. Like the Germans, who, in turn, in the next war, built fake stores, theaters, and parks in Theresienstadt to dupe the Red Cross into believing that no atrocities were taking place, when the entire war was a series of fucking atrocities — one bullet, one illegal detention, one sterilization, one atom bomb at a time. You can’t fool me. I’m not the Luftwaffe or the Red Cross. I didn’t grow up in this hellhole … Like father, like son …

* * *

When it’s your blood running through your fingers, the amount can only be described as “copious.” But writhing in the gutter, clutching at my innards, I began to feel something akin to closure. I never heard the shot, but for the first time in my life I had something in common with my father — we’d both been shot in the gut by gutless motherfuckers. And there was a certain satisfaction in that. I felt as if I’d finally paid my debt to him and his fucked-up notions of blackness and childhood. Daddy never believed in closure. He said it was a false psychological concept. Something invented by therapists to assuage white Western guilt. In all his years of study and practice, he’d never heard a patient of color talk of needing “closure.” They needed revenge. They needed distance. Forgiveness and a good lawyer maybe, but never closure. He said people mistake suicide, murder, lap band surgery, interracial marriage, and overtipping for closure, when in reality what they’ve achieved is erasure.

The problem with closure is that once you have a taste of it, you want it in every little aspect of your life. Especially when you’re bleeding to death, and your slave, who is in full rebellion, is screaming, “Give me back my Little Rascals movies, motherfucker!” and pummeling your assailant with such knobby-knuckled fury that it takes half the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department to pull him off, while you attempt to stanch the bleeding with a waterlogged copy of Vibe magazine someone has left in the gutter, you don’t have time to let anything slide. Kanye West has announced, “I am rap!” Jay-Z thinks he’s Picasso. And life is fucking fleeting.

“The ambulance will be here soon.”

Things had finally settled down. Hominy, who couldn’t stop crying, had taken off his T-shirt, rolled it into a pillow, and cradled my head in his lap. A sheriff’s deputy squatted over me, poking gently at my wound with the butt end of her flashlight. “That was a fucking brave thing you did, Nigger Whisperer. Can I get you anything in the meantime?”

“Closure.”

“I don’t think you’ll need stitches. It doesn’t look like a belly shot; it’s more like you’ve been hit in the love handle. It’s superficial, really.”

Anyone who’s ever described a bullet wound as being superficial has never been shot. But I wasn’t about to let a little lack of empathy get in the way of total closure.

“It’s illegal to yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, right?”

“It is.”

“Well, I’ve whispered ‘Racism’ in a post-racial world.”

I told her about my efforts to restore Dickens and how I thought building the school would give the town a sense of identity. She patted me sympathetically on the shoulder and raised her supervisor on the radio, and while we waited for the ambulance, the three of us haggled about the severity of the crime. The county reluctant to cite me with anything more than vandalism of state property and me trying to convince them that even if crime had gone down in the neighborhood since the Wheaton Academy went up, what I did was still a violation of the First Amendment, the Civil Rights Code, and, unless there’s been an armistice in the War on Poverty, at least four articles of the Geneva Convention.

The paramedics arrived. Once I’d been stabilized with gauze and a few kind words, the EMTs went through the standard assessment protocol.

“Next of kin?”

As I lay, not exactly dying but close enough, I thought about Marpessa. Who, if the position of the sun high in the gorgeous blue sky was any indication, was at the far end of this very same street taking her lunch break. Her bus parked facing the ocean. Her bare feet on the dashboard, nose buried in Camus, listening to the Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place.”

“I have a girlfriend, but she’s married.”

“What about this guy?” she asked, pointing a ballpoint pen at a shirtless Hominy, standing just off to the side, giving his statement to a sheriff’s deputy, who was writing in a notepad and shaking her head incredulously. “Is he family?”

“Family?” Hominy, overhearing the paramedic and somewhat insulted, wiped down his wrinkly underarms with his T-shirt and came over to see how I was doing. “Why I is something closer than family.”

“He says he’s his slave,” the deputy chimed in, reading from her notes. “Been working for him, according to this crazy fucker, the last four hundred years.”

The EMT nodded, running her powdered rubber-gloved hands down the length of Hominy’s saggy-skinned back.

“How did you get these welts?”

“I was whupped. How else a no-account, shiftless nigger like me going to get whip marks on his back?”

Having handcuffed me to the stretcher board, the sheriff’s deputies knew they finally had something to charge me with, though we still couldn’t agree on the crime as they carried me through the crowd and to the ambulance.

“Human trafficking?”

“Nah, he’s never been bought or sold. What about involuntary servitude?”

“Maybe, but it’s not like you’re forcing him to work.”

“It’s not like he’s working.”

“Did you really whip him?”

“Not directly. I pay some people … It’s a long story.”

One of the EMTs had to tie her shoes. They set me down on a wooden bus stop bench while she adjusted her laces. From the seat-back a photo of a familiar face comforted me with a soothing smile and a red power tie.