In this short story by Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014), an unstable use of racial epithets is symptomatic of the challenge the writer faced when thinking through, naming or imaging the situation of Afrocolombians. In this early short story's title the protagonist is identified as black, but for the story's third-person narrator he is always Nabo, and for a supplementary first-person plural narrator he is a little black (or little nigger); the other Afro-Colombian character in the story only appears in sections told by the thirdperson narrator; before his death, he is referred to as black, but when he returns as a ghost, he is a man. The dialogue between these two Afro-Colombian male characters invokes differing stances towards disability; a shared love of music constitutes their main bond.