home, position: a wife and family which, being necessary: to concealment, heaccepted along with the rest of respectability as he would have accepted thenecessary discomfort and even pain of the briers and thorns in a thicket if thethicket could have given him the protection he sought. 'No: not even agentleman. Marrying Ellen or marrying ten thousand Ellens could not have madehim one. Not that he wanted to be one, or even be taken for one. No. That wasnot necessary, since all he would need would be Ellen's and our father's nameson a wedding license (or on any other patent of respectability) that peoplecould look at and read just as he would have wanted our father's (or any otherreputable man's) signature on a note of hand because our father knew who hisfather was in Tennessee and who his grandfather had been in Virginia and ourneighbors and the people we lived among knew that we knew and we knew they knewwe knew and we knew that they would have believed us about whom and where hecame from even if we had lied, just as anyone could have looked at him once andknown that he would be lying about who and where and why he came from by thevery fact that apparently he had to refuse to say at all. — And the very factthat he had had to choose respectability to hide behind was proof enough (ifanyone needed further proof) that what he fled from must have been someopposite of respectability too dark to talk about.

Becausehe was too young. He was just twenty-five and a man of twenty-five does notvoluntarily undertake the hardship and privation of clearing virgin land andestablishing a plantation in a new country just for money; not a young manwithout any past that he apparently cared to discuss, in Mississippi in 1833with a river full of steamboats loaded with drunken fools covered with diamondsand bent on throwing away their cotton and slaves before the boat reached NewOrleans — not with all this just one night's hard ride away and the only handicap