The Radical Conservatism of Black Rural Literature

n 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). M I T C H U M H U E H L S