The Sellout (26 page)

“At least McJones cares.”

“Come on, he cares about black people like a seven-footer cares about basketball. He has to care because what else would he be good at.”

Knowing I was never coming back to the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, Foy gave me the same sorrowful look the missionaries must’ve given the jungle heathen. A look that said, It doesn’t matter if you’re too stupid to understand God’s love. He loves you regardless, just hand over the women, the distance runners, and the natural resources.

“You’re not worried about that all-white school?”

“Naw, white kids need learnin’, too.”

“But white kids aren’t going to buy my books. Speaking of which—” Foy handed me a copy of
Tom Soarer
, then signed it without me asking him to.

“Foy, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“I know it’s probably urban myth, but is it true that you own the really racist
Little Rascals
movies? Because if you do, I can make you an offer.”

Apparently I touched a nerve. Foy shook his head, pointed to his book, then lumbered back inside. As the glass doors opened, I could hear King Cuz, the nation’s wealthiest black man, and two legendary Negro ministers plenipotentiary rapping the lyrics to NWA’s “Fuck tha Police” at the top of their lungs. Before placing
Tom Soarer
in the saddlebag, I read the inscription, which I found vaguely threatening.

To the Sellout,
Like father, like son …
Foy Cheshire

Fuck him. I galloped home. Drove the horse hard down Guthrie Boulevard, inventing some inner-city dressage along the way as I ignored the traffic cop and ran the horse through a series of figure eights by dashing in and out of the orange construction barrels in the shut-down center lane. On Chariton Drive, I latched onto a tiring skateboarder and, with one hand on the reins, pulled her along like a long board cabriolet from Airdrome to Sawyer, whipping her into a sharp turn onto Burnside. I don’t know what I expected from trying to restore Dickens to a glory that never existed. Even if Dickens were to one day be officially recognized, there’d be no fanfare or fireworks. No one would ever bother to erect a statue of me in the park or name an elementary school after me. There’d be none of the head rush Jean Baptiste Point du Sable and William Overton must’ve felt when they planted their flags in Chicago and Portland. After all, it wouldn’t be like I founded or discovered anything. I was just brushing the dirt off an artifact that had never really been buried, so when I arrived home to Hominy, he excitedly unsaddled my horse. Eager to show me some newly disambiguated entry in an online encyclopedia written by some anonymous scholar:

Dickens is an unincorporated city in southwest Los Angeles County. Used to be all black, now there’s hella Mexicans. Once known as the murder capital of the world, shit ain’t as bad as it used to be, but don’t trip.

Yes, if Dickens ever became a real place again, in all likelihood Hominy’s wide smile would be all the reward I’d ever receive.

Twenty

Keep this under your hat, but over the next few months the resegregation of Dickens was kind of fun. Unlike Hominy, I’ve never had a real job, and even though it didn’t pay, driving around town with Hominy as the African-American Igor to my evil social scientist was sort of empowering, even though we were mocking the notion of being powerless. Monday through Friday at exactly one o’clock he’d be out front standing next to the truck.

“Hominy, you ready to segregate?”

“Yes, master.”

We started small, Hominy’s local fame and adoration proving invaluable. He’d soft-shoe his way inside, bust out an insanely intricate song-and-dance routine from old Chitlin’ Circuit days that would’ve made the Nicholas Brothers, Honi Coles, and Buck and Bubbles green with blackface envy:

’Cause my hair is curly

Just because my teeth are pearly

Just because I always wear a smile

Like to dress up in the latest style

’
Cause I’m glad I’m livin’

I take these troubles all with a smile

Just because my color’s shady

Makes no difference, maybe

Why they call me “Shine”

Then, as if it were part of the act, he’d stick a
COLORED ONLY
sign in the storefront window of a restaurant or beauty shop. No one ever took them down, at least not in front of us; he’d worked too hard for it.

*   *   *

Sometimes in homage to my father, if Hominy was on his lunch break or asleep in the truck, I’d enter wearing Dad’s white lab coat and carrying a clipboard. I’d hand the owner my card and explain that I was with the Federal Department of Racial Injustice, and was conducting a monthlong study on the effects of “racial segregation on the normative behaviors of the racially segregated.” I’d offer them a flat fifty-dollar fee and three signs to choose from:
BLACK, ASIAN, AND LATINO ONLY; LATINO, ASIAN, AND BLACK ONLY
; and
NO WHITES ALLOWED.
I was surprised how many small-business people offered to pay me to display the
NO WHITES ALLOWED
sign. And like most social experiments, I never did the promised follow-up, but after the month was up, it wasn’t unusual to get calls from the proprietors asking Dr. Bonbon if they could keep the signs in the windows because they made their clientele feel special. “The customers love it. It’s like they belong to a private club that’s public!”

It didn’t take long to convince the manager of the Meralta, the only movie theater in town, that he could cut his complaints in half if he designated floor seating as
WHITE AND NON-TALKERS ONLY,
while reserving the balcony for
BLACKS, LATINOS, AND THE HEARING IMPAIRED.
We didn’t always ask permission; with paint and brush we changed the opening hours of the Wanda Coleman Public Library from “Sun–Tue: Closed, Wed–Sat: 10–5:30” to “Sun–Tue: Whites Only, Wed–Sat: Colored Only.” As word started to spread of the success Charisma was having at Chaff Middle School, every now and then an organization would seek me out for a little personalized segregation. In looking to reduce the youth crime rate in the neighborhood, the local chapter of Un Millar de Muchachos Mexicanos (
o
Los Emes) wanted to do something other than midnight basketball. “Something a little more conducive to the Mexican and Native American stature,” a sporting endeavor that didn’t require a lot of space where the kids could compete on equal footing. Name-dropping the hoop success of Eduardo Nájera, Tahnee Robinson, Earl Watson, Shoni Schimmel, and Orlando Méndez-Valdez did nothing to dissuade them.

The meeting was brief, consisting of two questions on my part.

First: “Do you have any money?”

“We just got a $100,000 grant from Wish Upon a Star.”

Second: “I thought they only did things for dying kids?”

“Exactly.”

During the height of the government enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, some segregated townships filled in their municipal pools rather than let nonwhite kids share in the perverse joy of peeing in the water. But in an inspired act of reverse segregation, we used the money to hire a lifeguard who posed as a homeless person and built a “Whites Only” swimming pool surrounded by a chain-link fence that the kids loved to hop, so they could play Marco Polo and hold their collective breaths underwater whenever they spotted a patrol car passing by.

When Charisma felt that her students needed a counterbalance to the onslaught of disingenuous pride and niche marketing that took place during Black History and Hispanic Heritage Months, I came up with the one-off idea for Whitey Week. Contrary to the appellation, Whitey Week was actually a thirty-minute celebration of the wonders and contributions of the mysterious Caucasian race to the world of leisure. A moment of respite for children forced to participate in classroom reenactments of stories of migrant labor, illegal immigration, and the Middle Passage. Weary and stuffed from being force-fed the falsehood that when one of your kind makes it, it means that you’ve all made it. It took about two days to convert the long-out-of-business brushless car wash on Robertson Boulevard into a tunnel of whiteness. We altered the signs so that the children of Dickens could line up and choose from several race wash options:

To the whitest music we could think of (Madonna, The Clash, and Hootie & the Blowfish), the kids, dressed in bathing suits and cutoffs, danced and laughed in the hot water and suds. Ignoring the amber siren light, they ran under the waterfall of the not-so Hot Carnauba Wax. We handed them candy and soda pop and let them stand in front of the drying blast of the hot-air blowers for as long as they wanted. Reminding them that having a warm wind blowing in your face was what it felt like to be white and rich. That life for the fortunate few was like being in the front seat of a convertible twenty-four hours a day.

It wasn’t necessarily a case of saving the best for last, but as Hood Day approached, Hominy and I had managed to install some form of segregation in nearly every section and public facility in Dickens except for the Martin Luther “Killer” King, Jr., Hospital, which is paradoxically located in Polynesian Gardens. Polynesian Gardens, aka P.G., being a majority-Latino neighborhood that carried a rumored reputation for being hostile toward African-Americans. In fact, local legend had it that the injuries black Dickensians suffered while driving through P.G. to the hospital were often more severe than the afflictions that had caused them to seek medical attention in the first place. Between the police and the gangs, navigating the streets of any neighborhood in L.A. County, especially any section not familiar with you, can be dangerous. You just never know when you’re going to get rolled up on for being or wearing the wrong color. I’d never had any problems in Polynesian Gardens, but if I were to be honest, I never went there at night. And the evening before our planned action on the hospital, there’d been a shoot-out between Varrio Polynesian Gardens and Barrio Polynesian Gardens, two gangs with a longstanding blood feud over spelling and pronunciation. So to ensure Hominy and I got in and out with our asses intact, I attached two small purple-and-gold Lakers pennants to the front fenders of my pickup truck and, for good measure, flew a giant Iwo Jima–sized, 1987 Championship Lakers flag from the roof. Everybody, and I mean everybody in Los Angeles, loves the Lakers. And driving down Centennial Avenue, even behind slow-moving lowriders that refused to go faster than ten miles an hour, the Lakers flags billowed majestically in the night wind, giving the pickup truck an ambassadorial vibe that allowed us to cruise through with a temporary diplomatic immunity.

The director of Martin Luther “Killer” King, Jr., Hospital, Dr. Wilberforce Mingo, was an old friend of my father’s and had given me permission to segregate the place when I explained to him that it’d been me who painted the borderlines, put up the exit sign, and conceived the Wheaton Academy. He leaned back in his chair and said that for two pounds of cherries I could segregate his hospital in any way I saw fit. And under the cover of “no one gives a fuck” darkness, Hominy and I painted the words
The Bessie Smith Trauma Center
in thick, drippy, blood-red horror-movie-poster letters on what was until then a nameless glass-door emergency entrance to King Hospital. Then we drilled a plain black-and-white metal placard into the middlemost concrete pillar. It read,
WHITE-OWNED AMBULANCE UNITS ONLY.

I can’t say I did this without trepidation. The hospital was the one large-scale place I’d segregated where there was a decent likelihood that outsiders would see my work. Scared to proceed inside, I asked Hominy to hand me one of the fresh carrots I’d picked the night before.

“What’s up, Doc?” I teased, nibbling on the carrot tip.

“You know, massa, Bugs Bunny wasn’t nothing but Br’er Rabbit with a better agent.”

“Did the fox ever catch Br’er Rabbit, because I’m pretty sure the white boys going to catch us after this one.”

Hominy straightened the Sunshine Sammy Construction sign on the side of the truck, then grabbed the paint cans and two brushes from the back.

“Massa, if any white people do come through here and see this shit, they going to think what they always think, These niggers crazy, and carry on about they business.”

A few years ago, before the Internet, before the hip-hop, the spoken-word poetry, the Kara Walker silhouettes, I’d have been inclined to agree with him. But being black ain’t what it used to be. The black experience used to come with lots of bullshit, but at least there was some fucking privacy. Our slang and debased fashion sense didn’t cross over until years after the fact. We even had our own set of top-secret sex techniques. A Negro kama sutra that got passed down on the playground, the stoop, and by drunken parents intentionally leaving the door open just a crack so “the little niggers might learn something.” But the Internet proliferation of black pornography has given anybody with a twenty-five-dollar-a-month membership pass, or a lack of regard for intellectual property rights, access to our once-idiosyncratic sexual techniques. And now, not just white women, but women of all creeds, colors, and sexual orientations, have to suffer through their partners humping them at a mile a minute and yelling, “Who owns the pussy?” every two strokes. And even though they’ve never fully appreciated Basquiat, Kathleen Battle, and Patrick Ewing—and still haven’t discovered
Killer of Sheep
, Lee Morgan, talcum powder, Fran Ross, or Johnny Otis—these days mainstream America’s nose is all up in our business, and I knew eventually I was fucking going to jail.