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and down all over my own body in a loving caress, finally coming to the soft, moist spot between my legs, and a gasp of pleasure had escaped my lips which I would allow no one to hear.

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    It perhaps was inevitable that as soon as I came to know the long walk from my father’s house to my school in the next village like the back of my hand, I was to leave it behind. This walk, all five miles of it one way, five miles of it the other, never ceased to be of some terror for all the children who walked it, and we tried never to be alone. We walked in groups always. In any one year, at any one time, there were not more than a dozen of us, more boys than girls. We were not friends; such a thing was discouraged. We were never to trust each other. This was like a motto repeated to us by our parents; it was a part of my upbringing, like a form of good manners: You cannot trust these people, my father would say to me, the very words the other children’s parents were saying to them, perhaps even at the same time. That “these people” were ourselves, that this insistence on mistrust of others—that people who looked so very much like each other, who shared a common history of suffering and humiliation and enslavement, should be taught to mistrust each other, even as children, is no longer a mystery to me. The people we should naturally have mistrusted were beyond our influence completely; what we needed to defeat them, to rid ourselves of them, was something far more powerful than mistrust. To mistrust each other was just one of the many feelings we had for each other, all of them the opposite of love, all of them standing in the place of love. It was as if we were in competition with each other for a secret prize, and we were afraid that someone else would get it; any expression of love, then, would not be sincere, for love might give someone else the advantage.
    We were not friends. We walked together in a companionship based on fear, fear of things we could not see, and when those things were seen, we often could not really comprehend their danger, so confusing was much of reality. It was only after we had left the immediate confines of our village and were out of the sight of our parents that we drew close to each other. We would talk, but our conversation was always about terror. How could it not be so? We had seen that boy drown in the mouth of the river we crossed each day. If our schooling was successful, most of us would not have believed we had witnessed such a thing. To say that we had seen this boy float out to meet a woman surrounded by fruit, and then vanish in the swollen waters in the mouth of the river, was to say that we lived in a darkness from which we could not be redeemed. I then and now had and have no use for redemption.
    My father did not believe that I had witnessed the boy’s drowning. He was angry with me for saying I had seen it; he blamed the company I kept. He said I was not to speak to those other children; he said they did not come from good homes or good people; he said that I should remember that he was my father and that he occupied an important official position and that for me to say such things could only cause him embarrassment. I remember mostly the way he told me that I did not see what I knew, and still know: what I had seen. My father had inherited the ghostly paleness of his own father, the skin that looks as if it is waiting for another skin, a real skin, to come and cover it up, and his eyes were gray, like his own father’s eyes, and his hair was a red and brown like his father’s also; only the texture of his hair, thick and tightly curled, was like his mother’s. She was a woman from Africa, where in Africa no one knew, and what good would it do to find out, she was simply from somewhere in Africa, that place on the map which was a configuration of shapes and shades of yellow. And he pointed his brownish-pink, pinkish-brown finger at me