Black Buck

Darren’s mother is a crucial figure in the text. Her death midway through the book provides a turning point in the plot. The period just before her death marks the low point in Darren’s relationships with his friends and family. The period directly following her death, when Darren feels he has nothing to lose, spurs him to take the chance on cold calling Barry Dee, which leads to a promotion and the rapid growth of his sales career.

It is Ma’s values, however, that affect Darren even more significantly. Her belief that he can achieve more than his job at Starbucks can accommodate is one of the reasons that Darren takes a shot at working at Sumwun. Ma has also inculcated in Darren the habit of making deals with people (5), a principle that he invokes repeatedly. Ma and Darren also share a work ethic and take pride in their skills. However, Ma’s job differs significantly from Darren’s: She works at a Clorox factory, with seemingly little to no room for advancement, and the harsh working conditions end up costing her her life. When Darren founds the Happy Campers to provide more opportunities for Black people and other people of color, he is influenced both by his mother’s letter exhorting him to “help others like [him] live the best life they can” (210), and by the example of her death, which shows what happens when people work hard but lack opportunities.  

The daughter of Yemeni immigrants, Darren’s childhood friend Soraya is now his girlfriend. She hopes to become a nurse following the tragic death of her sister when they were kids. Like Mrs. Vender, Soraya wants Darren to seek out opportunities beyond Starbucks, but she is critical of Sumwun when it seems to be turning Darren into a different person. Unlike most characters in the book, she does not call him Buck and mostly refers to him as “D.”

Darren’s closest childhood friend, Jason is also a salesman, selling drugs on the corner. A rift grows between Jason and Darren once Darren goes to work for Sumwun: Jason feels like Darren is judging him for selling drugs and that Darren thinks he is better than everyone else in the old neighborhood. When Jason gives a televised interview about Darren, Darren retaliates by beating Jason severely. The two friends don’t reconnect until after Darren starts the Happy Campers. Their differences remain, however. When the reactionary white group WUSS starts criticizing the Happy Campers, Jason wants to retaliate with violence; along with Rose, he kidnaps and tortures Clyde. He also inadvertently sets up Darren for being entrapped and incarcerated on drug charges. Jason and Darren’s friendship both tests the bounds of loyalty and shows what happens when people lack access to opportunities: Jason sells drugs because he feels that it is the only option he has to try to give his mom a better life. Ironically, it is Darren who ends up paying the price for Jason’s lack of choices when he agrees to do one last drug deal for Jason and thus falls into the trap that Clyde and Trey have set.

The tenant of the garden apartment in Mrs. Vender’s house, Mr. Rawlings has known the Vender family since before Darren was born and takes on the role of a grandfather to him. Mr. Rawlings has a green thumb, and the vegetables and flowers in the garden flourish under his care. He is a respected elder and source of wisdom and strength. Darren cruelly evicts him when he learns that Mr. Rawlings knew of his mother’s lung cancer and kept that knowledge from Darren. Darren pays for his betrayal of Mr. Rawlings when Trey, Mr. Rawlings’s grandson, exacts revenge for his grandfather’s stroke, and eventual death, in a nursing home. 

A local who Darren describes as his “urban-corner-philosopher-cum-fairy-god-uncle” (xi), Wally Cat keeps an eye on what’s happening in Bed-Stuy. Unlike those people who are selling their properties and leaving, he stays on in the neighborhood, despite having made some money off betting on horse racing and from canny investments based on talking to service workers at corporations. Wally Cat illustrates that there are other goals, and other ways of judging and displaying success, beyond the tech startup milieu that Darren embraces. 

A Dungeons and Dragons-loving former Starbucks employee of Darren’s, Brian wants Darren to help him get into sales. After an interview that Darren sets up for Brian at Sumwun goes poorly, Brian doubts he has what it takes to succeed in sales. Darren’s decision to help Brian is his first step in rejecting his purely self-interested vision of success. When he starts to teach Brian sales techniques, using a series of hands-on experiments that often have disastrous results, he begins to think of how to share opportunities with others rather than just acquiring them for himself. Brian’s evolution from a shy, self-effacing person with low self-esteem into a happy and confident person who believes in himself illustrates the book’s representation of salesmanship as a means of achieving not only financial success, but also self-empowerment.   

A friend of Brian’s who first appears in the novel in Part 4, Rose also wants to learn sales techniques from Darren—although she demonstrates that she already has what it takes on their very first meeting. When Rose lands the SDR job with media mogul Barry Dee, her social media post includes the phrase “happy camper,” which then becomes the inspiration for the network of opportunity for BIPOC would-be salespeople that Darren leads. 

One of the core members of the Happy Campers, known as the “Talented Fifth” because there are five of them, Jake introduces the importance of knowledge transfer by referencing the historical saying, “Each one teach one” (264). The name “Talented Fifth” alludes to the so-called “talented tenth,” a phrase used during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s that marked the proportion of educated and professional Black people who were presumed to be able to achieve extraordinary success. This is an example of “uplift” discourse: the idea that when some members of a group achieve success, the group as a whole rises. Askaripour’s novel interrogates uplift discourse in complex ways. 

Another member of the “Talented Fifth,” Ellen introduces ideas of gender fluidity and of the variations within Blackness as an identity category. Darren misgenders Ellen as male until informed that she is female. He also initially reads her as being white, even though she is Black. Askaripour’s descriptions of the wide variety of physiognomy amongst the Black characters he portrays, as well as the diversity of their backgrounds, experiences, and interests, contradict the monolithic, stereotyped version of Blackness represented in mainstream media.   

The host of the morning talk show Rise and Shine, America, Sandra Stork is a Black woman who has made it in the mainstream media. After an initial interview with Darren about the murder of a Sumwun customer, wherein he bests her, she becomes an advocate of Darren’s and gives him the heads up that news of his involvement with the Happy Campers is about to go public. Sandra wants to help Darren out, as a fellow Black person in the media spotlight, a gesture akin to the kind of mutual support that Darren promotes through the Happy Campers.

Trey, who becomes Darren’s assistant at Happy Campers after Darren determines that he does not have a knack for sales, gives Clyde the idea to start WUSS. Motivated by revenge against Darren for evicting his grandfather, Mr. Rawlings, Trey uses Clyde and his connections to orchestrate Darren’s arrest and conviction for drug sales. The character serves to move the plot forward to its conclusion by bringing about the moral reckoning for Darren’s lack of compassion regarding Mr. Rawlings. He also provides a negative example of anti-BIPOC solidarity: Rather than seek to uplift, like Darren does, he devotes his energy to thwarting Darren.

Clyde is director of sales at Sumwun, and he makes things difficult for Darren from the start. After demanding that Darren be let go and walking out when he does not get his way, Clyde later founds WUSS, the White United Society of Salespeople, with the express purpose of rivaling Darren’s Happy Campers initiative. The villain of the novel, Clyde is the archetype of white privilege and the face of white supremacist institutions. From his sockless loafers to his origins in Greenwich, Connecticut, Clyde is the WASPiest of all possible WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) in Askaripour’s over-the-top caricature. Clyde represents the access to opportunity that wealth and white privilege—forms of social capital that, importantly, Askaripour represents as being connected, but not conflated—brings. He also wields real power over Darren, most overtly in the form of his connections to the DEA, which result in Darren’s imprisonment.  

Rhett is the cofounder and CEO of Sumwun, the tech company on the 36th floor of 3 Park Avenue, where Darren’s Starbucks shop is located. Darren’s snap decision to upsell Rhett on a beverage at Starbucks leads to Rhett offering him an opportunity to work at Sumwun and to Rhett’s becoming Darren’s mentor. Though Darren parts ways from Rhett in Part 5 of the novel after Rhett asks Darren to denounce the Happy Campers and sets up a surprise interview with Bonnie Sauren, Darren nonetheless expresses gratitude to Rhett for giving him “an opportunity.”