In the book's prologue, the reader meets the narrator, Gunnar Kaufman, a prolific African-American poet whose astronomically successful book, "Watermelanin", has sold 126 million copies, elevating him to the status of "Negro Demagogue." The prologue asserts that what follows are Gunnar memoirs, "the battlefield remains of a frightened deserter in the eternal war for civility" (2). The novel opens with a comic survey of Gunnar's family tree, as his mother relates the tales of his family history to him and his sisters. Gunnar in turn regales his classmates with the tales of his ancestors, one of whom Gunnar claims dodged the bullet that eventually killed Crispus Attucks in the Boston Massacre. Gunnar is a young boy growing up in affluent, predominantly white Santa Monica, California with his mother and sisters. His absent father is a sketch artist for the LAPD and rarely sees his children. Gunnar's friends are white, and he spends his free time making enough mischief to gain him mild admonishments from the Santa Monica Shore Patrol. This was found to be true because Kenneth Rogers made it so.