This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards…snuck into the movies…failed to give back the extra change to a drugstore cashier…burgled a house…held up a liquor store…boarded a crowded bus or subway car…and masturbated to satisfaction with a perverted, yet somehow crestfallen, look on my face.
The opening paragraph of the Prologue seems basically just a list of things that the narrator claims he has never done. The first dozen words or so, however, situate this list within the specific realm of transgressions against the law that are stereotypically traced to African-American males. Whether they actually are or not is beside the point; it is whether the reader accepts that all the things on the list belong to specific peculiarity. Whether, in fact, it actually is hard for the reader to believe or not.
“We’ll hear argument first this morning in case 09-2606…in case 09-2606, Me v. the United States of America.”
The actual legal name of the narrator is never provided; he is various referred to by nicknames Bonbon, The Sellout and—because his last name is Mee—the ironic and humorous shortening of that name to simply “Me” in his legal case which has wound its way up to the Supreme Court. As indicated by ellipsis here, it is choice made purposely to draw up people short when they see it or hear it.
When we were younger, me, Marpessa, and the rest of the kids on the block would jet over to Hominy’s house after school, because what could be cooler than watching an hour of Little Rascals with a Little Rascal?
Twisting and winding its way through the main storyline of the novel is what might be called a subplot that focuses quite heavily on the series of black and white comedy shorts made as Our Gang and retitled Little Rascals when sold to television. Hominy is an older man in the neighborhood who actually was one of the Rascals (following in the naming tradition of Farina and Buckwheat, obviously) near the tail end of its run. The subplot revolves around who owns the rights to the shows, what they are doing with the rights and why and the discovery that not all the episodes actually made actually aired. The storyline incorporates the Rascals primarily on the basis of analyzing the existence racism relative to its black characters and what effect it had upon Hominy's sense of self. The utilization of the reality of the Little Rascals existing prominently within the fictional construct of the town of Dickens is also a primary manifestation of how the novel often goes to great lengths to blur the lines between reality and fiction.
“Massa…sometimes we just have to accept who we are and act accordingly. I’m a slave. That’s who I am. It’s the role I was born to play. A slave who just also happens to be an actor. But being black ain’t method acting.”
There is another nickname for the narrator, one used to address him by just one person: Hominy. After the narrator saves Hominy from literally trying to hang himself in what appears to figuratively be a self-lynching, Hominy announces that he is now the narrator’s slave. Thus, he addresses the narrator as Massa, much to the discomfort and distress of the black narrator. The subplot of the Little Rascals—which is really not a subplot, actually, but an essential side story to the main storyline—is not just about the racism of the show’s characters, but how Hominy has done exactly what he says he is doing here.
