He suspected his family might object to his action. But he had no idea they would pronounce treason and declare war. From top to bottom, uniformly, they condemned him. It was not the piercing of his ear, it was what it represented, they said. He was commanded to remove that stud from his ear, not to contemplate replacing it, and by no means to consider “hanging out,” as you calls it, with them no-account white boys. I don’t care who their daddies are. Leave them be. I didn’t raise you to run the road with a bunch of fools, drinking and carrying on, not with black ones, and my God, not with white ones . . . I don’t want to hear it. Look at that, to think that a grandson of mine would do a damn fool thing like that. Them white boys done took a hold of your mind. Well, no more. Do you understand me? No more. You go to school. You come home. You do your school work. Curfew, young man . . . I don’t care if you “just pierced your ear.” By Jesus, you’d “just kill somebody” if one of them white boys asked you to. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you? It shames me right much, boy. Shames me to see you come to this. We come this far for this. I’m glad your grandmother ain’t around to see it. Shamed.

What does a young man replace the world with, when the world is denied him? True, the world was never his, but if the promise of the world, free of charge, is suddenly plopped in his lap and then revoked? If the rights and freedoms of patricians are handed to him and then snatched away? If he is given a taste of a shining city of no limits, and then told to go back to the woods?

Horace had no alternative but to retreat into a world of guilt and confusion, not understanding the reasons for his exile.

So he wrote his autobiography, without stopping, one long suspended effort, words upon words flowing out of him, expressing his grief. But he never read what he had written, hoping rather to exorcise his confusion. So strong was his belief in words—perhaps they would lead him out of this strange world in which he had suddenly found himself. In the end, after reams and reams of paper and thousands of lines of scribble, he had found no answers. In frustration he burned it.