Groundskeeper/butler August Sitwell feels indebted to the Barclays, who hired him when he was just nine. “Miss Mamie,” the Barclay’s talented cook, doesn’t share Mr. Sitwell’s sentiment. When a promising financial opportunity opens up, Mr. Barclay decides to take the last of his savings to mass produce Mamie’s sauce throughout the nation’s burgeoning grocery store chains. Mr. Barclay insists that Mr. Sitwell pose as “The Rib King” on the bottles—a humiliating caricature that immediately draws the ire of the black community. An aggrieved Mr. Sitwell serves the Barclays soup with a untraceable poisonous flower, then sets the mansion on fire. Elegantly written and exhaustively researched, The Rib King is an examination of America’s fascination with black iconography and the mass marketing of black caricatures.