She, though, gives him money to buy a present, and he is grateful to her for that. [3]
             John suffers not only racial injustice and an internal torment about himself, but he feels discomfort about the sexual stirrings in himself. One of the first things to cross John's mind when he wakes up at the novel's beginning is that it was his fourteenth birthday and that he has sinned. The particular sin he refers to appears to be a combination of homosexuality and masturbation, as he had
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