The narrator of this story, who is not named, is preparing to leave his native Barbados in order to attend college in Canada. As the story opens, he is going to visit his estranged father, who is dying in an almshouse. The head nurse of the almshouse, Miss Brewster, shows the narrator to the room where his father lies dying. His mother and father had never been married, and so the narrator was born a "bastard" and was not given his father's surname. His mother then married another man, and he was raised in a house with his mother and stepfather. Although his mother forbade the mention of his father's name for the eighteen years of his childhood, the narrator occasionally risked punishment to sneak off and visit his father at his shack. The narrator was disturbed by the pornographic pictures of women hanging on his...