[1] It explores the tumultuous life of a character named Not Sidney Poitier as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his wealth.
Each adventure reflects a prominent film starring Sidney Poitier, such as The Defiant Ones or Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and incorporates a significant twist.
The novel begins with the conception of Not Sidney Poitier, a boy whose mother, Portia, invests on the ground floor in Turner Broadcasting.
In the dream, he watches a high-yellow (mixed-race) woman be taken from her high-society life and be bought as a slave by his master, who Not Sidney eventually kills.
Upon returning from his failed cross-country trip, Not Sidney decides to go to college, and sets up a meeting with Gladys Feet.
While attending Everett's classes, NS meets Maggie, a Spelman College student, and they begin a relationship.
Near the end of the visit, Maggie's parents find out that Not Sidney is immensely wealthy, and begin to treat him with a near-reverent respect.
He is Buck, leader of a wagon train of freedmen in the West who are running from a posse of army men wanting them to work their land.
A massive tornado starts to form as he returns to the nuns' house, and he sees Mr. Scrunchy and Sister Iranaeus shoveling his money into a bag.
and In the Heat of the Night Not Sidney flies to Los Angeles, where he is met with press and a limousine, and is whisked away to an award show.
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 following main characters are listed in order of appearance: I Am Not Sidney Poitier explores the identity crisis associated with racial performances.
Michael Buening, an editor from PopMatters, attaches this idea to the confusion that many Black men feel during situations in which they can't escape expectations associated with their skin and ethnicity.
Buening concludes that Everett's parodied trope characterizes the experience of life for Black men as a journey of immense searching.
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.
Everett's supporters lauded his absurdist comedic approach in creating a character that "negates" everything he is intended to represent.
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, including Schmidt, recognized Everett's emphasis on parody and noted instances such as his 2009 Fuck were discredited by many "intratextual critiques".
"[3] 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".