And nigger-chasing was adventure.  Not long after he had learned to sprawl, Jerry had learned that.  One took his chances.  As long as Mister Haggin, or Derby, or Bob, was about, the niggers took their chasing.  But there were times when the white lords were not about.  Then it was “’Ware niggers!”  One must dare to chase only with due precaution.  Because then, beyond the white lord’s eyes, the niggers had a way, not merely of scowling and muttering, but of attacking four-legged dogs with stones and clubs.  Jerry had seen his mother so mishandled, and, ere he had learned discretion, alone in the high grass had been himself club-mauled by Godarmy, the black who wore a china door-knob suspended on his chest from his neck on a string of sennit braided from cocoanut fibre.  More.  Jerry remembered another high-grass adventure, when he and his brother Michael had fought Owmi, another black distinguishable for the cogged wheels of an alarm clock on his chest.  Michael had been so severely struck on his head that for ever after his left ear had remained sore and had withered into a peculiar wilted and twisted upward cock.

Still more.  There had been his brother Patsy, and his sister Kathleen, who had disappeared two months before, who had ceased and no longer were.  The great god, Mister Haggin, had raged up and down the plantation.  The bush had been searched.  Half a dozen niggers had been whipped.  And Mister Haggin had failed to solve the mystery of Patsy’s and Kathleen’s disappearance.  But Biddy and Terrence knew.  So did Michael and Jerry.  The four-months’ old Patsy and Kathleen had gone