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born.
    My uncle said this was a profitable system for the upland farmers. When the slave children grew up, they could be put to work in the fields or sold for a profit. By the time the Civil War ended, there were Gullahs spread over the whole state. And that was when the first mulattoes began to appear. The Confederate soldiers, and the Yankees, were the fathers of them, and whenever you saw a mulatto or quadroon or octoroon, you could be sure he would not have to reach very far back to claim kinship with a white family. He said he had seen quite a few whites and Negroes in Newberry County who looked almost like twins except in color.
    I asked him what the difference was between a mulatto and a quadroon or octoroon and why Bisco was much lighter in color than his mother and father.
    He said I might not understand everything until I was a little older, but that the mixing of races was something I was going to hear about for the rest of my life and that I ought to know all I could for my own good how it came about.
    The way he explained it was that if Bisco was lighter in color than his parents, it was because he had more white blood than they did. He said it was as simple as that. When you mix black and white, it’s going to be some shade in between that will vary with the proportions of the mixture. When the races mix the first time, the color is likely to be brown, and then the color becomes a lighter tan each time the races mix after that. If the mixing is kept up long enough, somebody will eventually be light enough in color to pass for a white person.
    Anyway, my uncle said, it’s no miracle and there’s nothing mysterious about it. It’s merely a natural result. One way it happens is when a white boy living in the country or a small town like this one is too bashful or can’t find a chance to do anything sexually with a white girl. But a boy can have a strong urge to do something about the call of manhood when he’s fifteen or sixteen and a good-looking Negro girl might coax him just enough to let him know that she’s willing for him to do what he wants with her.
    When that happens, color won’t have a thing in the world to do with it—it’s girl you want. You know about some of the older boys going off to the woods in the daytime after school or hurrying to get out at night after supper. It’s not always the same, because sometimes boys will make up masturbation clubs and put up a target to aim at. But a lot of times they go off like that because they’re either looking for a Negro girl or already know where to find one. And then if she has a baby, there’s another mulatto or quadroon born. Most white people don’t like to talk about such things and pretend not to notice it, but it’s something you ought to know about before you get to that age.
    After that I asked him if white girls ever had mulatto babies. He shook his head emphatically.
    I wouldn’t say so. That time may come somewhere in the future, but right now in South Carolina it’s something as rare as seeing an albino walking down the street. I’ve heard of it happening, but I’ve never seen proof of it. I don’t know why it is, but white girls just don’t seem to want to mix with the other race like white boys do. All I can think of is they must have a good reason for not wanting to mix. Maybe they’re afraid they’ll have a mulatto baby and be sent away from home to live somewhere in secret.
    The risk of having a mulatto baby is one thing that would ordinarily stop a white girl, and they can be real strong about guarding their sex when they want to. Anyway, let’s leave it at that, because I’m not going around asking them about it. That would take more nerve than I’ve got.
    There was still one thing that had not been explained, and that was the reason why the Gullah preacher from Charleston was blacker than any Negro I had seen in any other place I had been in the South. My uncle, who had lived in Virginia and North Carolina, as