Summary

“The Avocado” begins at a luncheon where an old black man is telling the speaker a story he has heard many times before about marching into the president’s office in 1971 and giving him a list of demands. Meanwhile, the speaker’s hungry eyes wander toward a bowl full of guacamole and he thinks if the abolitionists had a flag, it would have featured the avocado on it. As the older man continues to list the demands, the speaker considers how the “money-colored flesh” of the fruit represents the desire for reparations, how the strong roots of the tree represent revolt, and so on as his hunger and his imagination make it possible for the speaker to focus on the man’s tired story in which every time he hears it, it’s the storyteller who is the hero (27).

In “A House is...