“Hell of a way to live,” Bert thought, the night before his arrival, sitting in the Jim Crow car bound for south Georgia. During the long ride, he had turned over in his mind incidents of his childhood on the Big House Plantation. Sitting in the smoky half-coach allotted to Negroes (the other half being a baggage car) he thought of what it meant growing up as one of Colonel Norwood’s yard-niggers (a term used by field hands for the mulatto children of a white planter).

“It’s hell,” Bert thought.

Not that Cora’s other kids had found it hell. Only he had found it so, strangely enough. “The rest of ’em are too dumb, except little Sallie, and she don’t say nothing—but it’s hell to her, too, I reckon,” the boy thought to himself as the train rocked and rumbled over the road. “Willie don’t give a damn so long as his belly’s full. And Bertha’s got up North away from it all. I don’t know what she really thought…. But I wish it hadn’t happened to me.”

With the self-pity of bewildered youth, he began to think about himself. Always, he had known the Colonel was his father, from the earliest he could remember. For one thing, Bert had been lighter than any of the other colored children on the plantation—a sort of ivory white. And as a small child, his hair had been straight and brown, his eyes grey, like Norwood’s. His grandma, old Aunt Tobie, used to refer to them all, Willie and Bertha and Bert and Sallie, not without pride, as Colonel Tom’s children. (There had been another brother who died.) Bert noticed early in life that all the other kids in the Quarters were named after their fathers, whereas he and his brother and sisters bore the mother’s name, Lewis. He was Bert Lewis—not Bert Norwood. His mother slept in the Big House—but the children lived outside with Aunt Tobie or Cousin Betty. Those things puzzled little Bert.

As he grew up, he used to hear folks remarking on how much he looked like Colonel Tom, and how little like Cora. Nearly light enough to pass for white, folks said, spittin’ image of his father, too. Bert had a temper and ways like white folks, too. Indeed, “You needn’t act so much like quality with me,” was one of Aunt Tobie’s favorite ways of reprimanding him when she wanted to take him down a peg or two.

He was always getting into mischief, playing pranks and worrying his mother at the backdoor of the Big House. There was a time once when the Colonel seemed to get pleasure out of letting little Bert trail around at his heels, but that period didn’t last very long, for young Bert sassed the Colonel, too, just as though he were colored. And somehow, he had acquired that way of referring to Norwood as papa. The Colonel told him, sternly and seriously, “Boy, don’t you use that word to me.” But still, forgetful little devil that he was, he had come running up to the Colonel that day in the stables yelling, “Papa, dinner’s ready.”