Read The Sellout for Free Online

attaching a set of electrodes to my temples. The wires led to a sinister-looking console filled with buttons, dials, and old-fashioned voltage gauges.
    “You will ask the boy in the mirror a series of questions about his supposed nigger history from the sheet on the table. If he gets the question wrong or fails to answer in ten seconds, you will press the red button, delivering an electric shock that will increase in intensity with each wrong answer.”
    I knew better than to beg for mercy, for mercy would be a rant about getting what I deserved for reading the one comic book I ever owned. Batman #203, Spectacular Secrets of the Batcave Revealed , a moldy, dog-eared back issue someone had thrown into the farmyard and I brought inside and nursed back to readability like a wounded piece of literature. It was the first thing I had ever read from the outside world, and when I whipped it out during a break in my homeschooling, my father confiscated it. From then on, whenever I didn’t know something or had a bad day in the neighborhood, he’d wave the comic’s half-torn cover in my face. “See, if you weren’t wasting your life reading this bullshit, you’d realize Batman ain’t coming to save your ass or your people!”
    I read the first question.
    “Prior to declaring independence in 1957, the West African nation of Ghana was comprised of what two colonies?”
    I didn’t know the answer. I cocked my ears for the roar of the rocket-propelled Batmobile screeching around the corner, but could only hear my father’s stopwatch ticking down the seconds. I gritted my teeth, placed my finger over the red button, and waited for the time limit to expire.
    “The answer is Togoland and the Gold Coast.”
    Obediently, as my father predicted, I pressed the button. The needles on the dial and my spine both straightened, while I watched myself in the mirror jitterbug violently for a second or two.
    Jesus.
    “How many volts was that?” I asked, my hands shaking uncontrollably.
    “The subject will ask only the questions that are listed on the sheet,” my dad said coldly, reaching past me to turn a black dial a few clicks to the right, so that the indicator now rested on XXX. “Now, please read the next question.”
    I began to suffer from a blurring of vision I suspected was psychosomatic, but nonetheless everything was as out of focus as a five-dollar bootleg video on a swap-meet flat screen, and to read the next question I had to hold the quivering paper to my nose.
    “Of the 23,000 eighth-grade students who took the entrance exam for admission into Stuyvesant High, New York’s most elite public high school, how many African-Americans scored high enough to qualify for admission?”
    When I finished reading, my nose began to bleed, red droplets of blood trickling from my left nostril and plopping onto the table in perfect one-second intervals. Eschewing his stopwatch, my father started the countdown. I glanced suspiciously at him. The question was too topical. Obviously he’d been reading The New York Times at breakfast. Prepping for the day’s experiment by looking for racial fodder over a bowl of Rice Krispies. Flipping from page to page with a speed and rage that caused the paper’s sharp corners to snap, crackle, and pop in the morning air.
    What would Batman do if he rushed into the kitchen right then and saw a father electrocuting his son for the good of science? Why, he’d open up his utility belt and bust out some of those tear-gas pellets, and while my dad was choking on the fumes, he’d finish asphyxiating him, assuming there was enough bat rope to tie around his fat-ass hot-dog neck; then he’d burn out his eyeballs with the laser torch, use the miniature camera to take some pictures for bat-posterity, then steal Pop’s classic, only-driven-on-trips-to-white-neighborhoods sky-blue Karmann Ghia convertible with the skeleton keys, and we’d bone the fuck out. That’s what Batman would’ve done. But me,