A shocking treachery from the world he loved with a trusting passion, a treachery which came not from where he might have expected it, the shaggy-browed father with his eyes too deeply set in tired flesh, or from the cool eyes of the pale mother, but from the spice-scented, barefooted, tenderhanded black mother he loved. Such treacheries throw human beings into outer space, at a safe distance from human beings. They are propelled into space by attacks from the human species. Could not the nurse have laughed at the children exploring the wonders of the body? Could she not have laughed at their games as she laughed at their games while swimming? Did she not herself keep her warm dry hand on his coltish shoulder blades and comb his hair with her fingers "To feel the silk of it"? He had almost reached the earth with her, with her he had almost been born fully to his molten life.

The child has set his planet's course, has chosen his place in outer space, according to the waves of hostility or fear he has encountered. Pain was the instrument which set him afloat and determined his course. The sun, whether gold, white, or black, having failed him, he will exist henceforward in a more temperate zone, twilit ones, less exposed to danger.

Lillian had at first misinterpreted his silences. He communicated only with children, and with animals. His absences (if only I knew where he was when he was gone) distressed her. Never knowing until later that, as a measure of safety he had sought the periphery, the region of no-pain, where human beings could not reach him.

The first betrayal had thrust him into space to rotate at a certain distance from the source and origin of the first collision.

Lillian calculated the effect of his not having been wanted. The effect of adopting a family and then being betrayed. The atmosphere of gaiety and freedom was altered. When the Negro shack was accidentally destroyed by fire he had no regrets. When he was made to sail away from the Brazilian planet to England, he was sullen. The parents had decided he could not grow up into a native "savage." He needed discipline. Larry already preferred drumming to sixteenth-century English songs. He liked the stamping of bare feet more than the waltzing of high heels and patent leather shoes. He liked vivid pinks, not his mother's colorless dresses. He liked time for dreaming, not his father's tightly filled days.