The Sellout: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

After Dickens was erased, the person who needed the narrator most was an elderly man named Hominy Jenkins. Back in the day, the narrator’s father had sent his son to take care of Hominy during the many times he recklessly tried to commit suicide. Hominy is the last surviving member of the Little Rascals, and is an actor whose career never took off like he hoped. When the narrator was young, he and his lifelong friend Marpessa would go to watch The Little Rascals at Hominy’s house. The narrator has been in love with Marpessa since these days. Although he didn’t realize it as a child, the narrator now knows that Hominy is both “angry” and “crazy.”

Hominy’s entire acting career consists of shots of him getting covered in white substances (eggs, paint, pancake flour) or being electrocuted. In one such electrocution scene he says: “Yowza! I done discobered electbicidy,” which was “the longest line of his career.” After the other neighborhood kids stopped coming to the Little Rascals viewings, Marpessa stayed, even though she was 15. Eventually, however, she became more interested in boys and stopped coming. The first breast the narrator ever saw belonged to one of his father’s teaching assistants, who he found naked on his own bed after she had had sex with his father. The narrator muses that “Freudian hermeneutics doesn’t apply to Dickens.”

One night, the narrator hears Marpessa say the name “Hominy” in his dreams. He wakes and runs to Hominy’s door, where he finds a note saying “I’z in de back,” which is his “memorabilia room.” The narrator finds Hominy naked and hanging from the neck. Hardly breathing, Hominy requests: “Cut my penis off and stuff it into my mouth.” He is holding a can of kerosene and a lighter, which the narrator confiscates. He then cuts down “the self-lynching drama queen.” While caring for Hominy’s wounds, the narrator reads his biography, which includes his roles as “Messenger Boy, Bell Boy, Bus Boy, Pin Boy, Pool Boy, House Boy, Box Boy, Copy Boy, and Delivery Boy.”

The narrator asks: “Why, Hominy?” Calling the narrator “massa,” Hominy replies that he wanted to “feel relevant.” The narrator tells Hominy that he’s not a slave and that he is not Hominy’s master, but Hominy replies that sometimes it’s better to just accept that he is “a slave who just also happens to be an actor.” The narrator laments that Hominy is now completely crazy, choosing to take literally the cliché: “I owe you my life, I’ll be your slave.” However, Hominy makes the narrator promise that he will never institutionalize him.

 Hominy says he wants to thank the narrator for saving his life, and then he asks that the narrator beat him. The narrator asks if he cannot do something else, and Hominy asks him to “bring back Dickens.” In a dissociative episode, the narrator beats Hominy, an act that traumatizes him for life. Afterward, Hominy advises the narrator that his efforts to reinvigorate Dickens have thus far been misguided. In a similar way to the problem of not being able to see the forest for the trees, the narrator “ain’t seeing the plantation for the niggers.”