“Sure, keep on thinking,” jeered Buster, “and turn right ashy after while and be all stoop-shouldered like Father Hill.” (The Episcopalian rector was said to be the smartest colored man in town.) “But I’m not gonna worry about being smart myself. A few more years, boy, and I’ll be in some big town passing for white, making money, and getting along swell. And I won’t need to be smart, either—I’ll be ofay! So if you see me some time in St. Louis or Chi with a little blond on my arm—don’t recognize me, hear! I want my kids to be so yellow-headed they won’t have to think about a color line.”

And Sandy knew that Buster meant what he said, for his light-skinned friend was one of those people who always go directly towards the things they want, as though the road is straight before them and they can see clearly all the way. But to Sandy himself nothing ever seemed quite that clear. Why was his country going stupidly to war? . . . Why were white people and colored people so far apart? Why was it wrong to desire the bodies of women? . . . With his mind a maelstrom of thoughts as he lay in bed night after night unable to go to sleep quickly, Sandy wondered many things and asked himself many questions.

Sometimes he would think about Pansetta Young, his class-mate with the soft brown skin, and the pointed and delicate breasts of her doll-like body. He had never been alone with Pansetta, never even kissed her, yet she was “his girl” and he liked her a great deal. Maybe he loved her! . . . But what did it mean to love a girl? Were you supposed to marry her then and live with her for ever? . . . His father had married his mother—good-natured, guitar-playing Jimboy—but they weren’t always together, and Sandy knew that Jimboy was enjoying the war now, just as he had always enjoyed everything else.

“Gee, he must of married early to be my father and still look so young!” he thought. “Suppose I marry Pansetta now!” But what did he really know about marriage other than the dirty fragments he had picked up from Jimmy and Buster and the fellows at the pool hall?

On his fifteenth birthday Tempy had given him a book written for young men on the subject of love and living, called The Doors of Life, addressed to all Christian youths in their teens—but it had been written by a white New England minister of the Presbyterian faith who stood aghast before the flesh; so its advice consisted almost entirely in how to pray in the orthodox manner, and in how not to love.

“Avoid evil companions lest they be your undoing (see Psalms cxix, 115–20); and beware of lewd women, for their footsteps lead down to hell (see Proverbs vii, 25–7),” said the book, and that was the extent of its instructions on sex, except that it urged everyone to marry early and settle down to a healthy, moral, Christian life.... But how could you marry early when you had no money and no home to which to take a wife, Sandy wondered. And who were evil companions. Neither Aunt Hager nor Annjee had ever said anything to Sandy about love in its bodily sense; Jimboy had gone away too soon to talk with him; and Tempy and her husband were too proper to discuss such subjects; so the boy’s sex knowledge consisted only in the distorted ideas that youngsters whisper; the dirty stories heard in the hotel lobby where he had worked; and the fact that they sold in drugstores articles that weren’t mentioned in the company of nice people.