Black Buck

Darren wakes up to find a white woman he doesn’t recognize in bed with him and cavalierly asks her to leave. Chauncey drives him into work, and Darren stops by the Starbucks. Nicole and Carlos have left, and Brian is now a black-apron-wearing manager. Brian has been able to address his Tourette’s behavioral tics through therapy; following Darren’s advice, he has given up the idea of going into sales and devoted himself to working at Starbucks. Darren regrets that he has discouraged Brian and invites him to his apartment for a sales lesson. Brian just doodles while Darren lectures about sales principles and expresses his inability to learn the material, so Darren devises a hands-on lesson that he thinks will use Brian’s people skills: Try to sell subscriptions to the fictional Blackface magazine. Brian returns from this experiment empty handed and with a bloodied face but feels he has learned the benefit of selling by phone rather than in person.

Darren takes Brian to a hipster bar for another lesson in sales: He has to talk to a woman and get her phone number. Brian lacks confidence about his clothes and appearance and doesn’t feel up to the challenge. Darren reminds him that his hoodie-and-jeans outfit is the same as what the other bar patrons are wearing and tells him that he must stop thinking of himself as “disgusting” just because he has acne. He gives Brian a self-confidence-boosting speech about the possibilities he has as a Black man today that were unavailable to prior generations and reflects that Mr. Rawlings would have said something similar. Brian successfully gets the woman’s number and gets a boost of confidence.

Rhett summons a hungover Darren to the 24-hour diner Cafeteria for a 7:00am breakfast meeting, during which he promotes Darren to director of sales now that Clyde is gone. Barry continues to pressure Darren to find an SDR for the hip-hop campaign. That night, Brian brings a young Black poker buddy, Rose Butler, to his sales lesson. Darren objects, but when he has Rose do a sales call roleplay as a representative from Diamond Dildos, she closes the deal successfully, and he decides she can stay. Darren challenges Brian and Rose to convince people on the subway that they are students from Julliard who are performing the dance “Don’t Take Another Step, Whitey”; they net close to $50 and “not only convince a subway full of white people that they were Black but also that they were proud of it” (261).

The next night, Rose and Brian bring two more students to learn from Darren: Jacob. D. Green, or Jake, from Kentucky; and Ellen Craft, whom Darren initially perceives as “a tall androgynous white guy” (265), but who is in fact a Black woman. They also want to learn Darren’s sales techniques and stress the social responsibility he has to share the knowledge he has learned with other Black folks: “Each one teach one” (264), Jake tells Darren, referencing the strategy enslaved people used to pass on any hard-won education attained to others. Darren agrees to teach them. He gets a text from Barry demanding an SDR to interview the following Monday morning. To teach his students a lesson in projecting confidence, Darren orders them to walk down the street drinking beer in front of a police precinct. Under the stress, Brian’s Tourette’s flares up, and he blurts out inappropriate language, causing the cops to pursue them, but they all escape into Darren’s car. Darren learns that it’s Chauncey’s daughter’s birthday, and he drives Chauncey home and learns about his life. Darren plans to pick one student for Barry’s SDR and then stop teaching them.

Darren takes his students to the expensive restaurant Per Se, where he confiscates their wallets before they eat a lavish meal. The lesson is to convince the staff that they are not paying the bill. As the staff call security and everyone panics and flees, Brian gets left behind. Darren learns that Rose is homeless and invites her to stay in his apartment. He learns that Brian is in jail and that, due to a case of mistaken identity, he’s been accused of murder. He tells Rose that she will interview with Barry Dee the next morning.

Darren and Rose practice sales techniques for her interview and review salary negotiation strategies. Barry offers her the job. Brian is out of jail, and Darren realizes that he needs to be more careful about how his actions affect others. After her social media post describing herself as a “happy camper” intrigues others who want to follow in her footsteps, Rose brings more people to Darren so that they can learn how to achieve what she has using his techniques. Darren doesn’t want to get involved, but he remembers his mother’s final letter urging him to help others succeed, and he agrees. After he establishes some ground rules—he will only teach people of color, he can’t be publicly associated with the group, and everyone has to use the knowledge they gain for beneficial purposes rather than exploitation—the Happy Campers organization is born.

The Happy Campers set up at Darren’s old house, which he still owns. He reconnects with Wally Cat, who tells him that Jason now works at McDonald’s and that Soraya is at the bodega, having left nursing school, and has a new boyfriend. Though they both continue to resent how Darren behaved in the past, Darren persuades Jason and Soraya to stop by Happy Campers. Darren overcomes their skepticism by claiming that he will be honest with them going forward and that he can teach them how to create opportunities that will allow them to “be free to do whatever you want” (302).