oice of his "master" which yanks To Noel out of his reverie about the great African kings of the past.
The important in the opening scene is repeated in different ways again and again throughout the book. Cultural miscegenation, like biological miscegenation, is a one-way-street, and the traffic cop on the street is the white man in the slavery-based society described by the author. There are inevitably black influences which enter into the white culture, but for the most part the influence is from the white culture onto the black culture.
On the other hand, in both the real and the fictional world, the two cultures--black and white, enslaved and free-
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