Now “God” was no word in Jerry’s vocabulary, despite the fact that he already possessed a definite and fairly large vocabulary. “Mister Haggin” was the sound that meant “God.”  In Jerry’s heart and head, in the mysterious centre of all his activities that is called consciousness, the sound, “Mister Haggin,” occupied the same place that “God” occupies in human consciousness.  By word and sound, to Jerry, “Mister Haggin” had the same connotation that “God” has to God-worshipping humans.  In short, Mister Haggin was Jerry’s God.

And so, when Mister Haggin, or God, or call it what one will with the limitations of language, picked Jerry up with imperative abruptness, tucked him under his arm, and stepped into the whaleboat, whose black crew immediately bent to the oars, Jerry was instantly and nervously aware that the unusual had begun to happen.  Never before had he gone out on board the Arangi, which he could see growing larger and closer to each lip-hissing stroke of the oars of the blacks.

Only an hour before, Jerry had come down from the plantation house to the beach to see the Arangi depart.  Twice before, in his half-year of life, had he had this delectable experience.  Delectable it truly was, running up and down the white beach of sand-pounded coral, and, under the wise guidance of Biddy and Terrence, taking part in the excitement of the beach and even adding to it.

There was the nigger-chasing.  Jerry had been born to hate niggers.  His first experiences in the world as a puling puppy, had taught him that Biddy, his mother, and his father Terrence, hated niggers.  A nigger was something to be snarled at.  A nigger, unless he were a house-boy, was something to be attacked and bitten and torn if he invaded the compound.  Biddy did it.  Terrence did it.  In doing it, they served their God—­Mister Haggin.  Niggers were two-legged lesser creatures who toiled and slaved for their two-legged white lords, who lived in the labour barracks afar off, and who were so much lesser and lower that they must not dare come near the habitation of their lords.

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.