The Sellout

F. K. Me is Me’s dad. He grew up on a farm in Kentucky and moved to a farm in Dickens. He’s part of the psychology department at West Riverside Community College’s, and he conducts a series of cruel psychological experiments on his son. The initialized name connects F. K. Me to B. F. Skinner—a behaviorist who believed that human behavior is modifiable. F. K.’s work on his son reflects his belief in behaviorism, and he tries to force his son to bond with his race. One experiment involves F. K. asking his son questions like, “Prior to declaring independence in 1957, the West African nation of Ghana was comprised of what two colonies?” (30). When Me doesn’t know the answer, F. K. shocks him. Other experiments involve tying his right hand behind his back to make him left-handed, forcing him to work like an enslaved person, and letting a pig nanny him.

Even within the genre of satire, F. K.’s bizarre, harsh attitude toward his son makes him an antagonist. He treats his son not like a human but like a “gangly, absentminded [B]lack lab rat” (26). Me wishes his dad would show compassion toward him and use “the same reassuring tone that he used with his ‘clients,’” (38), but he remains authoritarian and strict.

The “clients” refers to F. K.’s role as a N***** Whisperer, and F. K.’s job as the community therapist makes his character redeemable. F. K., like Me, plays a valuable role in Dickens. He helps people, including his rival Foy Cheshire. Though he created the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, he’s unlike the other intellectuals. He doesn’t capitalize off Black people or exploit them. Even his work with his son precludes commodification. Once Me chooses the white Barbie and Ken over the Black activists, F. K. burns his notes. Though he goes about it disturbingly, F. K. seems committed to the truth and his community.

Foy Cheshire is the antagonist for both F. K. and Me. He calls Me a sellout and then shoots him in the stomach. Initially a close friend of F. K., Foy steals his idea for a Saturday morning cartoon, and the two become rivals, with Foy scheming to take over the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals.

Foy’s character becomes a foil for F. K. Next to Foy’s preening self-promotion, F. K.’s authoritarian tendencies don’t look so bad. He sets aside Foy’s theft of his show and helps him when he becomes poor. Me says, “My father never said anything in public. Never confronted Foy at the meetings, because, as he put it, “our people are in dire need of everything except acrimony”(47). Unlike Foy, F. K. puts the community first.

Foy treats the community as a means to wealth. He exploits them and the general belief that one Black person can speak for all Black people. He doesn’t care about Black people as people but as customers. As he tells Me during the Dickens Five drama, “[W]hite kids aren’t going to buy my books” (202). What Foy wants isn’t to bolster his community or discover truth but to accrue wealth and fame. He represents Amiri Baraka’s idea of “official Negroes” and Cornell West’s concept of “Black faces in high places.” Paul Beatty pairs him with Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, Bill Cosby, and the fictional John McJones. In Beatty’s world, most famous Black people aren’t much help to the Black community, and neither is Foy, though his revised classics help the middle school students start a bonfire on Career Day.

Foy loses his wealth and winds up living in his car. As Me, Hominy, and others watch the suppressed Our Gang films, they realize Foy was a cast member. After viewing the shorts, King Cuz admits, “Now I know why that fool Foy went crazy. I’d go nutty, too, if I had some shit like that on my conscience” (258). Foy, too, experiences hardship, making him somewhat sympathetic or, at the very least, worthy of a bit of pity.

Hominy Jenkins is a former child actor in the Our Gang shorts and an extremely minor adult actor. He is enslaved by Me and is Me’s sidekick. Together they bring back segregation to Dickens, and the racism makes their community a harmonious, enlightened place.

No one kidnaps Hominy and sells him into slavery. Instead, after Me stops him from killing himself, Hominy turns himself into Me’s slave. Slavery is Hominy’s choice—he has agency. Slavery restores Hominy’s identity. He says, “[W]hen Dickens disappeared, I disappeared. I don’t get fan mail anymore. I haven’t had a visitor in ten years, ‘cause don’t nobody know where to find me. I just want to feel relevant” (72). It’s as if Hominy has to serve someone, whether it’s the movie industry, fans, or a faux enslaver.

Hominy’s self-enslavement reinforces the performative symbol behind racism. There is no authority forcing Hominy to be enslaved by Me, and Me tries to free him with fake documents. The enslaved/enslaver relationship becomes a form of playacting, with Me hiring a dominatrix to beat Hominy to replicate the brutality of life as an enslaved person. Even in the realm of performativity, Hominy is not good at his performance of an enslaved person. Me quips, “[M]ostly Hominy’s work consisted of watching me work” (77). The irony is manifold. He insists on being an enslaved person, but he’s not really enslaved, and he doesn’t even try to replicate the grueling work that enslaved people had to execute. His imputed enslaver, Me, does the work.

Hominy’s character also serves as a foil for contemporary norms about race. Blackface doesn’t faze him, and neither do the racist Our Gang shorts. He enjoys them and thinks they represent his best work. What politically-correct culture tries to suppress or erase, Hominy embraces. Near the end, Hominy stops embracing his “role” as an enslaved person. Maintaining the irony of the position, he quits and asks for reparations—another irony. Unlike Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Black slaves never received money for their dispossession and destruction, and the issue of reparations for slavery in the United States remains a fraught issue, which is probably why Beatty turns it into a joke.

Marpessa Delissa Dawson is Me’s romantic interest. He has been in love with her since he was a young person, and they rekindle their relationship even though she’s married. Marpessa is an independent woman and follows her own code. She’d rather drive a bus and be in charge than go to college and get a job that “turns [B]lack women into indispensable, well-paid number threes and fours, but never ones and twos” (114). She is confident and deftly deals with issues on the bus. She hides her affair with Me from her husband. At Hood Day, she tells him, “I just want you to know I’m fucking Bonbon [her nickname for Me]” (217). Marpessa is Me’s foil. While Me is timid and skittish about sex, Marpessa is overtly sexual and seems to boss Me around. She takes control of their sex life together, and she compels Me to pursue comedy. When it comes to their relationship, Marpessa seems to hold most of the power, and Me doesn’t mind.

Marpessa’s explicit sexual characterization—even her name alludes to her sexual appeal—links her character to Foxy Brown (1974), the famous blaxploitation movie (a genre that exploited Black stereotypes) where the eponymous character becomes a sex worker to avenge her boyfriend’s death. Like Foxy, Marpessa is sexual and tough.