As someone who seems to be somewhat tone-deaf to contemporary irony (I may be the only person who never understood what was so hilarious about Seinfeld), I have to take Navi’s word for it that this reads as satirical and ironic to me, it’s straight-out grisly fact, unlike the wacky turns in Beatty’s novel. Writer/reader/blogger Navidad Thelamour recommended it as follow-up to Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. This was not at all the book I expected it to be. If the world went to hell in a handbasket tomorrow, does it make sense to you that it would all come down to this stupid little pool ?
He didn’t even know he was why the world was turned upside down, even as it flipped him on his head. He didn’t know he’d turn the world upside down. How does a child understand race? How does an eight-year-old understand racism when it’s part of his everyday life? How does he put together that 1) he tans easily but has wavy hair, 2) Mom is very tan and has curly hair, 3) Dad is white, and, and compute, What am I? in a world where “a person” just isn’t a good enough answer.Īll Huey wanted was to go for a swim on a hot summer evening in Georgia, as he’d done in prior years. Now, come to find out, she’d had a crisis of conscience, albeit it too late to do me any good. Ironically, she once recast herself as the person she needed to be to help me at a vulnerable moment in our lives, and now here I was doing pretty much the exact same thing. It was a time that she hardly cared to recall but that I remembered vividly.
It came so easily to me precisely because I’d pulled that page right out of Mom’s old playbook. So I’d cast it off, and after having done so, I joined in on the fun. But in point of fact, it was the subject of considerable derision. To be sure, I might have felt differently if the identity presently being forced on me conferred even a hint of admiration from my peers. Everything was negotiable, and infinitely so. I explained that the very notion of an immutable identity was a foreign concept to me.
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