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
             an area of living that he could never know. He stood before his very own
             father, poised, his mind aching as it embraced the simple nakedness of his
             life, feeling how completely his soul was imprisoned by the slow flow of the season, by wind and rain and sun, how fastened were his memories to
             a crude and raw past, how chained were his actions and emotions in
             direct, animalistic impulses oh his withering body ...
             One morning Richard and his brother, while playing in the rear of
             our flat, found a stray kitten that set up a loud, persistent meowing. They
             fed it some scraps of food and gave it water, but it still meowed. His
             father, clad in his underwear, stumbled sleepily to the back door and
             demanded that ...