Fiction. African & African American Studies. California Interest. Set in the Central California countryside and the Southern California desert, BY THE LEMON TREE’s old school stories chronicle the collision of wide-eyed childhood with the end of lives human and animal. In Twice Good a downtrodden city administrator shows up for a Black Panther protest forty years too late. Funeral in Fresno introduces us to an impatient reverend who is forced to confront his past and his future, while in the title story, a young boy born and raised in East Oakland bears witness to life and death in an ancient rural world.