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Apparently I touched a nerve. Foy shook his head, pointed to his book, then lumbered back inside. As the glass doors opened, I could hear King Cuz, the nation’s wealthiest black man, and two legendary Negro ministers plenipotentiary rapping the lyrics to NWA’s “Fuck tha Police” at the top of their lungs. Before placing Tom Soarer in the saddlebag, I read the inscription, which I found vaguely threatening.

To the Sellout,

Like father, like son …

Foy Cheshire

Fuck him. I galloped home. Drove the horse hard down Guthrie Boulevard, inventing some inner-city dressage along the way as I ignored the traffic cop and ran the horse through a series of figure eights by dashing in and out of the orange construction barrels in the shut-down center lane. On Chariton Drive, I latched onto a tiring skateboarder and, with one hand on the reins, pulled her along like a long board cabriolet from Airdrome to Sawyer, whipping her into a sharp turn onto Burnside. I don’t know what I expected from trying to restore Dickens to a glory that never existed. Even if Dickens were to one day be officially recognized, there’d be no fanfare or fireworks. No one would ever bother to erect a statue of me in the park or name an elementary school after me. There’d be none of the head rush Jean Baptiste Point du Sable and William Overton must’ve felt when they planted their flags in Chicago and Portland. After all, it wouldn’t be like I founded or discovered anything. I was just brushing the dirt off an artifact that had never really been buried, so when I arrived home to Hominy, he excitedly unsaddled my horse. Eager to show me some newly disambiguated entry in an online encyclopedia written by some anonymous scholar:

Dickens is an unincorporated city in southwest Los Angeles County. Used to be all black, now there’s hella Mexicans. Once known as the murder capital of the world, shit ain’t as bad as it used to be, but don’t trip.

Yes, if Dickens ever became a real place again, in all likelihood Hominy’s wide smile would be all the reward I’d ever receive.

Twenty

Keep this under your hat, but over the next few months the resegregation of Dickens was kind of fun. Unlike Hominy, I’ve never had a real job, and even though it didn’t pay, driving around town with Hominy as the African-American Igor to my evil social scientist was sort of empowering, even though we were mocking the notion of being powerless. Monday through Friday at exactly one o’clock he’d be out front standing next to the truck.

“Hominy, you ready to segregate?”

“Yes, master.”

We started small, Hominy’s local fame and adoration proving invaluable. He’d soft-shoe his way inside, bust out an insanely intricate song-and-dance routine from old Chitlin’ Circuit days that would’ve made the Nicholas Brothers, Honi Coles, and Buck and Bubbles green with blackface envy:

’Cause my hair is curly

Just because my teeth are pearly

Just because I always wear a smile

Like to dress up in the latest style

Cause I’m glad I’m livin’

I take these troubles all with a smile

Just because my color’s shady

Makes no difference, maybe

Why they call me “Shine”

Then, as if it were part of the act, he’d stick a COLORED ONLY sign in the storefront window of a restaurant or beauty shop. No one ever took them down, at least not in front of us; he’d worked too hard for it.

* * *

Sometimes in homage to my father, if Hominy was on his lunch break or asleep in the truck, I’d enter wearing Dad’s white lab coat and carrying a clipboard. I’d hand the owner my card and explain that I was with the Federal Department of Racial Injustice, and was conducting a monthlong study on the effects of “racial segregation on the normative behaviors of the racially segregated.” I’d offer them a flat fifty-dollar fee and three signs to choose from: BLACK, ASIAN, AND LATINO ONLY; LATINO, ASIAN, AND BLACK ONLY; and NO WHITES ALLOWED. I was surprised how many small-business people offered to pay me to display the NO WHITES ALLOWED sign. And like most social experiments, I never did the promised follow-up, but after the month was up, it wasn’t unusual to get calls from the proprietors asking Dr. Bonbon if they could keep the signs in the windows because they made their clientele feel special. “The customers love it. It’s like they belong to a private club that’s public!”

It didn’t take long to convince the manager of the Meralta, the only movie theater in town, that he could cut his complaints in half if he designated floor seating as WHITE AND NON-TALKERS ONLY, while reserving the balcony for BLACKS, LATINOS, AND THE HEARING IMPAIRED. We didn’t always ask permission; with paint and brush we changed the opening hours of the Wanda Coleman Public Library from “Sun — Tue: Closed, Wed — Sat: 10–5:30” to “Sun — Tue: Whites Only, Wed — Sat: Colored Only.” As word started to spread of the success Charisma was having at Chaff Middle School, every now and then an organization would seek me out for a little personalized segregation. In looking to reduce the youth crime rate in the neighborhood, the local chapter of Un Millar de Muchachos Mexicanos (o Los Emes) wanted to do something other than midnight basketball. “Something a little more conducive to the Mexican and Native American stature,” a sporting endeavor that didn’t require a lot of space where the kids could compete on equal footing. Name-dropping the hoop success of Eduardo Nájera, Tahnee Robinson, Earl Watson, Shoni Schimmel, and Orlando Méndez-Valdez did nothing to dissuade them.

The meeting was brief, consisting of two questions on my part.

First: “Do you have any money?”

“We just got a $100,000 grant from Wish Upon a Star.”

Second: “I thought they only did things for dying kids?”

“Exactly.”

During the height of the government enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, some segregated townships filled in their municipal pools rather than let nonwhite kids share in the perverse joy of peeing in the water. But in an inspired act of reverse segregation, we used the money to hire a lifeguard who posed as a homeless person and built a “Whites Only” swimming pool surrounded by a chain-link fence that the kids loved to hop, so they could play Marco Polo and hold their collective breaths underwater whenever they spotted a patrol car passing by.

When Charisma felt that her students needed a counterbalance to the onslaught of disingenuous pride and niche marketing that took place during Black History and Hispanic Heritage Months, I came up with the one-off idea for Whitey Week. Contrary to the appellation, Whitey Week was actually a thirty-minute celebration of the wonders and contributions of the mysterious Caucasian race to the world of leisure. A moment of respite for children forced to participate in classroom reenactments of stories of migrant labor, illegal immigration, and the Middle Passage. Weary and stuffed from being force-fed the falsehood that when one of your kind makes it, it means that you’ve all made it. It took about two days to convert the long-out-of-business brushless car wash on Robertson Boulevard into a tunnel of whiteness. We altered the signs so that the children of Dickens could line up and choose from several race wash options:

Regular Whiteness:

Benefit of the Doubt

Higher Life Expectancy

Lower Insurance Premiums

Deluxe Whiteness:

Regular Whiteness Plus