I Am Not Sidney Poitier

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I Am Not Sidney Poitier is a novel by Percival Everrett, published in 2009 by Graywolf Press and in 2020 by Influx Press in the UK.^[1] It follows the main character's, Not Sidney Poitier, tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his wealth. Each adventure mirrors a prominent Sidney Poitier film, like The Defiant Ones or Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and incorporates a significant twist. The novel reflects a Post-black writing style by parodying the traditions of Black literature.

Plot summary[]

Chapter 1: The novel begins with the immaculate conception of Not Sidney Poitier, a boy whose mother, Portia, invests in Turner Broadcasting on the ground floor, and gains quite a lot of money when it becomes successful. Ted Turner comes to visit her, and meets Not Sidney. Portia dies soon after this meeting, and Ted becomes Not Sidney's guardian, giving him free rein over his money and life to avoid the white savior stereotype. Not Sidney grows up in his own home with attendants who work for him, and gets an education from a socialist college student named Betty. Not Sidney is also heavily bullied, and in order to combat this bullying he attempts to learn martial arts. When that fails, he learns how to “fesmerize” people, an ability that is kin to hypnosis, and uses that ability to mess with Ted, Betty, and Ted's wife Jane Fonda. Upon reaching high school age, Not Sidney decides to attend public school. He develops a crush on his teacher, which she notices. She invites him back to her home where she sexually assaults him on two separate occasions, threatening to fail him if he does not allow it. After the second time, she fails him anyway. Not Sidney attempts to report this, but is ridiculed by administration both at his individual school and at the Board of Education. Because of this, he drops out and decides to go on a journey to California.^[2]

Chapter 2: Not Sidney attempts to drive cross-country to California, then is stopped, arrested because he is black, and thrown into prison unlawfully. While being transported to another facility, the bus crashes, and Not Sidney and the prisoner he's chained to, Patrice, escape. He and Patrice head back to Atlanta on foot. After a time, they get into a fight and are interrupted by a young boy named Bobo, who takes them to the house where he lives with his blind older sister, Sis. After being taken into their home, they all plan to jump atop the train headed back to Atlanta the next morning. While they all sleep, Not Sidney has the “Band of Angels” dream, in which he is a slave named Raz-ru and watches a high-yella woman be taken from her high-society life and be bought by his master, who Not Sidney eventually kills.The next day, Sis and Patrice begin a romantic relationship, and begin drinking to celebrate. That night, they and Bobo drink themselves to sleep. When the sun rises, Not Sidney opts to leave them sleeping and ride the train to Atlanta on his own.^[2]

Movies: The Defiant Ones, A Patch of Blue, Band of Angels

Chapter 3: Upon returning from his failed cross country trip, Not Sidney decides that he wants go to college, and sets up a meeting with Gladys Feet, who he essentially bribes with a donation to the school for a place in the upcoming class. He's placed in a room with Morris Chesney, a fraternity brother who attempts to bully and haze Not Sidney and others while they rush the fraternity. To end their ongoing conflict, Not Sidney fesmerizes him into reorienting the fraternity around recycling and leaving him alone. While at Morehouse, he attends classes taught by Percival Everett, goes to his office hours, and enters into a mentor/mentee relationship with him after Everett reveals that he is a fraud. While attending Everett's classes, Not Sidney meets Maggie, a Spelmanite, and they enter into a relationship.^[2]

Chapter 4: Not Sidney goes home with Maggie from Morehouse for Thanksgiving, and finds out her family are a group of black conservatives who are bigoted against black people with darker skin, and that Maggie has brought him home primarily as a tool to upset her parents. While there, Not Sidney experiences a series of microaggressions and is hit on by Agnes, who sleeps with him to upset Maggie. During their sexual encounter, Not Sidney has the “No Way Out” dream, where he is a doctor who loses a white, near unsavable patient and is blamed for his death. Near the end of the visit, Maggie's parents find out about Not Sidney's vast sums of money, and begin to treat him with a near-reverent respect. After recognizing this, Not Sidney calls them out about their colorism and causes a scene at thanksgiving dinner, resulting in him leaving their house and ending things with Maggie.^[2]

Movies: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, No Way Out

Chapter 5: After dropping out of Morehouse, Not Sidney attempts to drive cross-country to California again, and this time his car begins to break down in the small Alabama town of Smuteye. He pulls into the driveway of a small house, for tools to use to fix the car. The nuns living there offer their tools, but ask him to fix their leaking roof in exchange. The sisters become convinced that Not Sidney has been sent by god to help them build their church and tell him he will be building a fence the following day. He goes to sleep, and has the “Uncle Buck and the Preacher” dream, in which he is Buck, the leader of a wagon train of newly freed slaves in the west who are running from a posse of army men who want them to work their land. He steals a horse from a preacher in order to escape, but it backfires and the preacher punches Not Sidney in the face. Upon waking, the sisters tell him again about their conviction that he will build their church, but Not Sidney is not convinced. He uses their tools to fix his car and leaves. Upon stopping at the Smuteye diner to ease his hunger and hearing the waitress and patrons ridicule the sisters, he decides to help them build the church with his vast sums of money. He returns and after some struggles to obtain cash for his check, Not Sidney cashes the check in Montgomery with a clerk named Mr. Scrunchy. On his way back, he witnesses a Klan rally from the safety of his car, and watches the cross burn out before he leaves.^[2]

Movies: Lilies of the Field, Uncle Buck and the Preacher

Chapter 6: He returns to the sisters with the money, but finds they have hired a suspicious architect who clearly plans to abscond with the money. Because of his suspicions, Not Sidney only gives them a portion of the money, then goes to the diner only to be arrested for a murder he did not commit. He calls Ted Turner and Percival Everett for help, and they come down to rescue him. After being freed from prison, he finds that the person who was murdered looked exactly like him, and wonders if that was the real Sidney Poitier. A massive tornado starts to form as he returns to the nun's house, he sees Scrunchy and Sister Iranaeus shoveling his money into a bag. They run, and Not Sidney moves to apprehend them, but when Not Sidney finds them, they were both dead after the truck hit a pole. Not Sidney gets his money back, and decides to resume his trip to California by air.^[2]

Movies: They Call Me Mr. Tibbs!, In the Heat of the Night

Chapter 7: Not Sidney flies to San Francisco, where he is met with press and a limousine, and is whisked away to an award show. He has truly become Sidney Poitier, and wins an award for a performance of his. In his acceptance speech, he references the fact that they are strangers to him, and dedicates the award to his mom, whose grave he has left unmarked. The words that end the book, his speech, and will stand on his mother's grave are: I Am Not Myself Today.^[2]

Major characters[]

The following main characters^[2] are listed in order of appearance:

• Not Sidney Poitier, the protagonist
• Portia Poitier, Not Sidney's mother
• Ted Turner, head of Turner Broadcasting and Not Sidney's de facto guardian
• Betty, Not Sidney's socialist teacher and mentor
• Podgy Patel, Not Sidney's accountant
• Miss Hancock, Not Sidney's high school teacher who sexually assaults him
• Patrice, a racist convict who is chained to Not Sidney when the prison bus crashes
• Sis, a racist blind girl Not Sidney and Patrice run into
• Bobo, Sis’ little brother
• Mrs. Feet, an admissions officer from Morehouse who is attracted to Not Sidney and bribes him
• Percival Everett, a fraudulent Morehouse professor who takes a shine to Sidney and enters into a mentoring relationship with him
• Maggie Larkin, Not Sidney's first girlfriend
• Agnes Larkin, Maggie's sister
• The Larkins, Maggie's conservative parents
• Violet, their maid
• Sister Iranaeus, the lead nun at the house where Not Sidney's car breaks down
• Thornton Scrunchy, a scam artist who conspires to steal the funds for the church
• The Chief, the racist chief of police in Smuteye who arrests Not Sidney and Everett

Themes[]

Identity crisis[]

I Am Not Sidney Poitier exhibits in many exaggerated moments the identity crisis associated with racial performances. In the novel, Not Sidney can never find his true self because Everett designed him to be a caricature of Sidney Poitier. He was constantly forced into a mold that eluded him; creating as Christian Schmidt states in his essay The Parody of Postblackness...  “a mere negation of self,” because as he continues “without Sidney, Not Sidney would not exist.” Though Everett paints an abstract picture by creating a character that opposes its own DNA, he cleverly links Not Sidney to actual Sidney Poitier movies to highlight the expectations associated with performances. Michael Buening, an editor from PopMatters, attaches this idea to the confusion many black men feel during situations in which they can't escape the expectations that come with their skin. From this Buening concludes that Everett's parodied trope characterizes the experience of life for black men as a journey of immense searching.

Post-Blackness / Parody of black literature[]

In the novel, Everett engages with several aspects of traditional black literature through parody: “Playfully engaging the fiction of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and intertextually invoking his own literary oeuvre, Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier signifies upon the history of African American literature and can fruitfully be read as a parody of it. Following Hutcheon, I use parody not in the narrow sense of “ridiculing imitation” (A Theory 5) but as a term to describe “complex forms of ‘trans-contextualization’ and inversion”. This approach is characteristic of many "Post-black" authors. These authors create worlds in which race may or may not be a player, but does not totally control or define the story. By doing so, these authors are bucking the expectations and constraints of "Black literature", and establishing that black authors are capable of creating stories that are not entirely about navigating the concept of race.

Critical reception[]

I Am Not Sidney Poitier received a warm reception among its few reviewers and won two awards; the Believer Book Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Everett's supporters lauded his absurdist comedic approach in creating a character that "negates" everything he's intended to represent. An essay by assistant professor Christian Schmidt, from the University of Bayreuth defines the novel as a "meta parody that thematizes the very difference between original and copy even if the sign that marks this difference is as crude and banal as the simple 'not' of its protagonists name." This attribute of the novel along with its experimental and fractured lens of Not Sidney, create the "coded discourse" necessary for parody to thrive. Critics like Schmidt recognized Everett's emphasis on parody and noted instances like his 2009 Fuck were discredited by many "intratextual critiques". I Am Not Sidney Poitier has been classified as a part of "Post-black literature" where black novels parody/respond to the genre of Black literature. These authors write worlds that are entirely dependent on the text itself, and as such do not address the racism outside of it.^[3]

NPR called the story a "delicious comedy of miscommunications" and "one of the funniest, most original stories to be published in years."^[4]

Publishers Weekly's review lauded Everett as "a novelist at the height of his narrative and satirical powers" and the novel as "smart and without a trace of pretentiousness".^[5]

Kirkus Reviews said about the book: "The author had some fun; the reader will too."^[6]

References[]