Previous
Marpessa Delissa Dawson
Foy Cheshire is an academic, “fading TV personality,” and the cofounder of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals. He is extraordinarily vain, and although his work centers around black people, he seems more interested in becoming rich and famous than fighting for racial equality. Furthermore, he explicitly tries to avoid confronting stereotypes and racism directly—thus taking the opposite approach to the narrator and the narrator’s father—by rewriting classic literature to remove any racial slurs or references to slavery. Foy stole the narrator’s father’s ideas and pretended they were his own, yet still called on the narrator’s father when he had a mental health crisis years later. Foy dislikes the narrator, who he calls “the sellout.” He believes that the narrator is on “the wrong side” because he embraces segregation, yet refuses to understand that the narrator is only doing this in an effort to bring back Dickens. At the end of the novel, Foy has another crisis and threatens to shoot himself, before ultimately shooting the narrator. He escapes prison time on grounds of insanity.
Foy Cheshire Quotes in The Sellout
The The Sellout quotes below are all either spoken by Foy Cheshire or refer to Foy Cheshire. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 7
Quotes
Those pompous Dum Dum niggers wanted to ban the word, disinvent the watermelon, snorting in the morning, washing your dick in the sink, and the eternal shame of having pubic hair the color and texture of unground pepper. That's the difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity. We want someone like Foy Cheshire to present our case to the world with a set of instructions that the jury will disregard centuries of ridicule and stereotype and pretend the woebegone niggers in front of you are starting from scratch.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Closure
Quotes
“Why are you waving the flag?” I asked him. “Why now? I’ve never seen you wave it before.” He said that he felt like the country, the United States of America, had finally paid off its debts. “And what about the Native Americans? What about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, the poor, the forests, the water, the air, the fucking California condor? When do they collect?” I asked him.
He just shook his head at me. Said something to the effect that my father would be ashamed of me and that I'd never understand. And he's right. I never will.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Sellout LitChart as a printable PDF.
Foy Cheshire Quotes in The Sellout
The The Sellout quotes below are all either spoken by Foy Cheshire or refer to Foy Cheshire. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 7
Quotes
Those pompous Dum Dum niggers wanted to ban the word, disinvent the watermelon, snorting in the morning, washing your dick in the sink, and the eternal shame of having pubic hair the color and texture of unground pepper. That's the difference between most oppressed peoples of the world and American blacks. They vow never to forget, and we want everything expunged from our record, sealed and filed away for eternity. We want someone like Foy Cheshire to present our case to the world with a set of instructions that the jury will disregard centuries of ridicule and stereotype and pretend the woebegone niggers in front of you are starting from scratch.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Closure
Quotes
“Why are you waving the flag?” I asked him. “Why now? I’ve never seen you wave it before.” He said that he felt like the country, the United States of America, had finally paid off its debts. “And what about the Native Americans? What about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans, the poor, the forests, the water, the air, the fucking California condor? When do they collect?” I asked him.
He just shook his head at me. Said something to the effect that my father would be ashamed of me and that I'd never understand. And he's right. I never will.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
