Dickens

Dickens is an impoverished, minority city located ten miles south of Los Angeles. Originally set aside as agricultural residential land, the city now has the strange appearance of being urban farmland. The City of Dicken is “deleted” from maps in order to give a property value boost to the surrounding areas. This angers the narrator and hurts Hominy deeply. The deletion of Dickens –and its subsequent restoration –become core to the narrator’s efforts not only to put the city back on the map, but to actually improve the community and the lives of the people in the city. He uses the event as a way to begin a conversation about community, race, and improvement by way of segregation signs and attempting to integrate the local school with white students. The narrator’s efforts gain national attention through his Supreme Court case, and the City of Dickens is...