The Sellout

Me’s dad, F. K. Me, is a social scientist and raises Me like a lab rat. Instead of food, he receives appetite stimuli; instead of love, he gets preplanned intimacy and calculated commitment. F. K. grew up on a horse ranch in Kentucky and moved to California to teach. He’s the interim dean of the psychology department at West Riverside Community College, and, with his son, he lives on a farm in Dickens, California.

Founded in 1868, Dickens tried to keep out various minorities, including Chinese people, people with red hair, and French people. The town borders a canal, and the founders turned that ten-square-block section into an agriculture zone known as the Farms. While the wagon wheels and fences outside the homes in the Farms give them a pioneer feel, the doors and windows have “more bars […] and padlocks than a prison commissary” (28).

When Me was seven months old, his dad put items around his cradle—toy police cars, beer, and a Richard Nixon campaign button—while firing a gun and yelling for Black people to go back to Africa. The point of the experiment was to make Me afraid of the items. Now, Me can’t watch crime shows on TV, but he listens to the Watergate tapes to fall asleep.

From ages one to four, his dad tied his right hand behind his back so he’d be left-handed. When Me was eight, F. K. duplicated the Kitty Genovese murder by beating his son on a busy intersection. As with Genovese, no one came to Me’s rescue. Unlike Genovese, people helped Me’s dad beat him. After catching him reading a comic, F. K. punishes Me by asking him questions about racial issues and punishing him with electric shocks when he answers wrong.

For another experiment, Me’s dad presented him with two sets of dolls. There were Ken and Malibu Barbie; and there were Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Luther King Jr. After Me chose Ken and Barbie (they had the nicer things), F. K. terminated his experiments on his son and burned the notes.

As a psychologist, F. K. becomes Dickens’s “N***** Whisperer”—that is, he helps Black people under duress. F. K.’s work is how Me witnesses the creation of gangster rap. At 6 o’clock in the morning, F. K. has to help Carl “Kilo G” Garfield, who’s smoking crack and, inspired by the Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, rapping naked on his Toyota truck. The police arrive, but F. K. de-escalates the situation by asking Carl to think about who he is and how he can become that person. Me wishes his dad would speak to him like that: He doesn’t know who he is or how to become himself.

The chapter is three words long: “Westside, n*****! What?”

Home on winter break from his junior year of college, Me takes the horse to meet his dad at Dum Dum Donuts, where Dickens’s think tank, the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, convenes. Enjoying a vanilla shake, Me spots a group of detectives around a dead body in an intersection: The police have shot Me’s dad. Supposedly, while charging the police, F. K. alluded to the specialness of his son. The detective asks Me if he’s special. Me doesn’t know who he is and tells the detective he’s not special.

The death of Me’s father doesn’t make him cry, lambast the police, or condemn the injustices of race and socioeconomic class. His first reaction is to doubt whether his father is dead at all. Maybe F. K. is back to experimenting on his son—trying to teach him a lesson about race and police brutality. Yet Me isn’t tied to his Black identity. For the census, he checks the “some other race” box and writes in “Californian.” What animates Me is not racial identity, but the urge to please his dad.

Me picks up the body of his allegedly dead father and takes it to the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, where Foy Cheshire, an author and TV personality, leads the group. F. K. started the group when he realized that Dickens’s Dum Dum Donut franchise was the only white business not desecrated during inevitable riots. Open 24 hours, police, rioters, and firefighters peacefully get food there. Sensing the communal atmosphere, F. K. turned it into a place to discuss intellectual issues like race and average household net worth.

Foy and F. K. met at the donut shop. At first, Foy was an assistant professor in Urban Studies at the fictional UC Brentwood, working on his first book, Blacktopolis: The Intransigence of African-American Urban Poverty and Baggy Clothes. Foy became famous after stealing F. K.’s idea for a children’s cartoon, The Black Cats ‘n’ Jammin’ Kids. Due to drugs, women, and tax evasion, Foy lost his wealth and needed F. K. to talk him out of trying to die by suicide. F. K. has rarely spoken ill of Foy, but Me thinks Foy is glad F. K. is dead. Now, Foy can take over the think tank.

The members of the think tank want to avenge F. K.’s death, but before the members can take a picture with F. K.’s corpse, Me puts him on the back of his horse and gets him out of there.

Out in the street, a police captain stops him and tells him what happened. Two plainclothes officers were talking to a homeless person at a traffic light. After it went from green to red multiple times, F. K. drove around them while yelling something at them. One officer gave F. K. a ticket and a warning. F. K. told the officer he could give him a ticket or a warning but not both. Upset, the officers took out their guns. Afraid, F. K. ran, so the officers shot him in the back.

The captain wants the body for evidence—to hold the officers accountable. Me tells the officers no one has ever charged a member of the Los Angeles Police Department with murder, so he’ll keep the body and bury him in the backyard. The captain blows a whistle and clears away the police and protesters so Me can pass. Due to F. K.’s death, Me receives a $2 million settlement. He can make his dad’s dream come true and own the farm on 205 Bernard Avenue.

Me thinks about his mom, Laurel Lescook, a former Jet magazine Beauty of the Week and a present paralegal. She doesn’t remember meeting F. K., but she recalls him sending her marriage proposals, disturbing poems, and pictures of his penis.

Me remembers how his dad would brag about his young son’s work ethic. He’d invited people to watch Me pick fruit and cotton while playing Paul Robeson songs. Instead of daycare and playdates, Me was nannied by a pig named Suzy Q. His rival was a genius pig, Savoir Faire, who beat him in games. When it was time to kill Savoir Faire, Me wasn’t sad.

F. K. liked to say, “People eat the shit you shovel them” (53), and Me thinks his dad gave him a lot of crap to eat. Me doesn’t miss his dad, but he wishes he had confronted him about his experiments and wonders whether they were as extreme as he remembers.

Dickens is gone, its borders erased by gentrification. The physical space of the city remains, but it is no longer officially designated as a separate city from the surrounding city of Los Angeles.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Me becomes a whisperer—though he lacks the confident voice of his father. He aids a mom dangling a baby over a second-floor balcony, he helps a battered transgender woman, and he assists abused women who listen to Nina Simone. Aside from whispering, Me works on the farm. Having earned a degree in agriculture at UC Riverside, he grows and sells fruit and marijuana.

The disappearance of Dickens hurts Hominy Jenkins. He’s a child actor and a member of the Little Rascals, a fictional group of mischievous young people from the Our Gang shorts of the early 20th century. His character was informed by racist stereotypes, and Hominy has internalized those stereotypes until they have become inseparable from his adult personality. As the murder capital of the world, Dickens saw few tourists, but when tourists did come, it was to see Hominy and watch Our Gang clips with him. He served them Hi-C and watermelon, told them stories, and exclaimed his catchword, “Yowza!” After Our Gang, Hominy grew up and had bitesize parts, like Stable Boy, Bus Boy, and Bell Boy, in various films.

As teens, Marpessa Delissa Dawson and Me hung out at Hominy’s house, and Me fell in love with the outspoken Marpessa, who probably thought of him as a safe, harmless boy. Me feels indebted to Hominy for providing him a space to get to know Marpessa, and he saves Hominy from a suicide attempt—a self-lynching—in his memorabilia room. When Dickens went away, Hominy went away—no one can locate him now. Hominy tells Me he’s an enslaved person who’s also an actor. Since Me saved his life, Me can own him for life. Hominy asks Me to beat him, and Me acquiesces until three sheriff deputies pull him away. Hominy also wants Me to bring back both Dickens and the systemic racism the segregated town represented.

Owning an enslaved person isn’t easy, and the relationship between Me and Hominy doesn’t mimic any idealized image of plantation life. There’s no singing in the fields or big dinners in the house. Sometimes, Me makes Hominy pretend to be a racist lawn jockey or a footstool. Mostly, Hominy watches Me work. Me tries to free Hominy. He has his lawyer, Hampton, create a contract to emancipate him, but Hominy scorns freedom. Me wants Hominy to find a therapist. Instead of beating him, he takes him to a dominatrix. Mistress Dorothy beats him while demanding intel about the Union Army. She charges Me $5 for every racist epithet she directs at Hominy.

On the way back from a session with Mistress Dorothy, Me and Hominy are stuck in traffic on the notoriously congested 110 freeway. Me lists the members of Little Rascals who died terribly and thinks there might be a curse on the cast. He considers pushing Hominy out of the car, but they’re barely moving. Instead, Hominy gets out of the car directs traffic, separating the drivers by race. Alone in the car, Me turns on the Dodgers baseball game on the radio. Me and his dad used to go to Dodgers games in the summer. They sat in the bleachers, ate hot dogs, drank soda, and cursed the team for its losing record. Me misses both his dad and the turn off the freeway into Dickens—as Dickens no longer officially exists, its exit sign has been taken down.

At home, Me makes a new sign for Dickens and installs it on the freeway. Me asks Hominy what he likes more: Getting whipped or seeing the sign? Hominy says the whip is good on the back, but the sign feels great in his heart. At home, Me takes out The Thomas Guide to Los Angeles County and outlines Dickens as best he can remember.