Black Boy:Life

A quarter of a century was to elapse between the time when he saw

his father sitting with the strange woman and the time when he was to see

him again, standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a

sharecropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled ,

veined hands-a quarter of a century during which my mind and

consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered then when he

tried to talk to him he realized that, though ties of blood made us kin,

though he could not see a shadow of his face in his father’s, though there

was an echo of his voice in his father’s voice, they were forever strangers,

speaking a different language, living on vastly different planes of reality.

That day a quarter of a century later when he visited his father on the

plantation-his father was standing against the sky, smiling toothless, his

hair whitened, his body bent, his eyes glazed with dim recollection, his

fearsome aspect of twenty-five years ago gone forever from him-he was

overwhelmed to realize the his father could never understand, him or the

scalding experiences that had swept him beyond his father’s life and into

. . .