Dickens
The name of the fictional town in which the story takes place is Dickens. A city within the city of Los Angeles, it is literally disappearing off maps. Even the signs welcoming visitors is removed. This is symbolic of the invisible state of African-Americans throughout history and the ease with which they have been removed from historical accounts.
Dickensian
Dickens is also important as a symbol having nothing to do with the black experience in America. The city is beset by poverty, crime and a sense of surrendering to the inevitable domination of the more powerful. In this way, it is symbolically tied to its literary namesake, Charles Dickens, and the adjectival description of his works which connotes the same sense of lower class, invisible lives among Victorian London’s underclass.
The Little Rascals
Fiction and reality collide in the person of Hominy Jenkins, an actor who greatest claim to fame was being part of the cast of the rotating gang of kids around whom the black and white shorts sold to TV under the name Little Rascals revolved. The show comes to symbolic the way in which media in America has created generations of black people who have conformed to the inherently racist portrayal of the black kids in the shorts: Farina, Buckwheat and, (of course), Hominy. In real life, Hominy is an Uncle Tom character who is self-loathing to the point of attempted suicide at the way he has lived a life engendered by that systemic racism.
The Bus
The bus which Marpessa drives for a living is a historical symbol intended to force readers to recall all the various racist connotations connected to busing: segregated seating, force school integration, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Freedom Riders, and, of course, Rosa Parks’s world-shattering defiance to give up her seat to a white man. As the story moves into the concept of resegregation of Dickens to ironically put it back on the map, the bus takes on enormous symbolic significance
Watermelon
Much like Marpessa’s bus, the watermelons that the narrator grows and sells is also deeply symbolic because of its association with racism. The use of watermelons in the narrative is loaded with racial connotations as the story touches upon a contractual agreement to replace watermelons with satsumas at the request of the black kids acting in the Little Rascals, to the narration playing the song “Watermelon Man” as he peddles his fruit to his amazement by all people when confronted with the square melons he claims are easy to grow.
