The Radical Conservatism of Black Rural Literature

Black land matters.

Leah Penniman, Farming While Black

In 2015, Picador published Paul Beatty's The Sellout, a very funny novel about a black man in Los Angeles who achieves the liberal goals of the civil rights movement (racial justice, equality, and freedom) through distinctly illiberal means (reinstituting segregation in his community). A crucial component of this project―lifting up by selling out―involves the protagonist's embrace of a rural, agricultural lifestyle in the middle of an urban metropolis. That is, he is marked as a race traitor at least in part because, as he readily acknowledges, his commitment to farming appears to endorse Booker T. Washington's infamous call to previously enslaved blacks and their progeny: "Cast down your bucket where you are" (The Sellout 35). When Washington used that phrase in his famous Atlanta Compromise speech of 1895, "where you are" was often the very farms and fields of a Southern agrarian economy predicated on centuries of slavery. But such compromise doesn't bother the Sellout, who rides on horseback down city streets, profits from the two crops that have the most "cultural relevance" to him ("watermelon and weed" [62]), and uses horticultural logic to justify racial segregation: "I'm a farmer: we segregate in an effort to give every tree, every plant, every poor Mexican, every poor nigger, a chance for equal access to sunlight and water; we make sure every living organism has room to breathe" (214).

The Sellout's depiction of rural black life is provocatively hyperbolic and over the top. The apple tree that grows near the plot of land where the Sellout buries his dead father, for example, produces apples that taste like "mentholated cigarettes, liver and onions, and cheap fucking rum"―his father's favorites (213). Beatty's exaggerations, however, aren't ridiculous. In fact, a real-life version of the Sellout's rural oasis still exists in the Richland Farms district of Compton, California. As recently as the 1950s, Compton had a distinctly rural feel compared with the rest of Los Angeles (Surls), and in the 1980s, when Mayisha Akbar relocated to Compton, she was still able to buy a ranch with enough space for a large garden and several horses, just like the Sellout (Thompson-Hernandez 59–60). In 1988, in an effort to provide local kids an after-school alternative to gangs, Akbar founded the Compton Jr. Posse, a youth equestrian program that she ran out of her home until 2019, when she "passed the reins" to Randy Hook, a former Posse youth and founding member of the Compton Cowboys, "a collective of lifelong friends on a mission to uplift their community through horseback and farming lifestyle" (Compton Cowboys).¹ Never mind that rural life was the site of centuries of violent oppression for black people in the United States; or that Compton, home of N.W.A. and Kendrick Lamar, most typically appears in the mainstream media as a locus of poverty and gang violence. Akbar, the Compton Jr. Posse, and the Compton Cowboys take that history and resignify it in life-affirming and community-enhancing ways.

That is what Beatty's work does, too. The Sellout does not satirize a nostalgic connection between black people and the land the way Trey Ellis did more than two decades earlier in Platitudes (1988).² Rather, it speculatively imagines new forms of black life beyond the norms of liberal democracy. To be sure, within the norms of liberal democracy, the Sellout's agricultural segregationist project is at the very least "problematic"―a term the Sellout describes as a "code word black thinkers use to characterize anything or anybody that makes them feel uncomfortable, impotent, and painfully aware that they don't have the answers to questions and assholes like me" (98)―and more than likely criminal, a clear violation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. For those characters who hew to the liberal values linked to the history of black civil rights, the Sellout is an abomination; he is the "long red slide" in Chutes and Ladders that "takes you from square sixty...