Stephen is a joker and a mocker. Even before he put his bicycle in the shade, even before he take off his hat and bicycle clips, even before he take the first shot of rum, Stephen start mocking. I don't know why he find our donkey so funny; it is as though he never see one before. He mock us because of the donkey; he mock us when the donkey die. Then when we buy the lorry and it get laid up for a few weeks below the house, blocks of wood below the axle, he mock us because of that. Everything we do is only like a mockery to Stephen, and my father encourage him by laughing.

Stephen mock me a lot too, in the beginning. 'When you marrying off this one?' he used to ask my father, even when I was small. My father always laugh and say, 'Next season. I got a nice girl for him.' But as I grow older I show I don't appreciate the humour, and Stephen stop mocking me.

He is not a bad or cruel man, Stephen. He is just a natural joker, with all his so-called worries. Sometimes he mock himself. One time, when he bring his son to see us, he say, 'My son never yet tell a lie.' I ask the boy, 'It is true?' He say, 'No.' Stephen burst out laughing and say, 'My God, the influence of you people! The boy just tell his first lie.' This is Stephen, a little seriousness always below the mockery, and you feel that one reason he mock us is because he would like us to be a little more progressive.

Stephen is always asking my father what we are doing to educate my younger brother. 'The others are lost,' Stephen say. 'But you could still give this one a little education. Dayo, boy, you would like to take some studies?' And Dayo would rub his foot against his ankle and say, 'Yes, I would like to take some studies.' It was the beauty of the boy that attract Stephen, I feel. He used to say, 'I will take away Dayo with me.' – 'Yes,' my father would say, 'you take him away and give him some studies. In this school here he learning nothing at all. I don't know what teachers teaching these days.'

I always think it would be nice if Stephen could take an interest in Dayo and use his contacts to get Dayo in a good school in the city. But I know that Stephen is just talking, or rather, it is the rum and curry chicken talking, and I don't see how I can talk to him seriously about Dayo. If Stephen was a stranger it would have been different. But Stephen is family, and family is funny. I don't want to give Stephen or his son the idea that I am running them competition. Stephen would more than mock, if he feel that; he might even get vexed.

So I let Stephen talk. I know that he will drink and mock, that his eyes will get redder and redder until his worries begin to show on his face in truth, and that when the fête is over he will jump on his bicycle and ride off back to the city and his family.

I know that Stephen can't really take an interest in Dayo, because Stephen's whole mind and heart is full of his own son. For years Stephen talk of his son's further studies, and for years he save for these further studies; he don't keep it secret. Even when the time for these studies get close, when everything is fixed up with the university in Canada, Stephen don't relax. You begin to feel then that Stephen is more than ambitious for his son, that he is a little frightened too. He is like a man carrying something that could break and cut him. Even my father notice the difference, and he begin to say behind Stephen's back, 'My brother Stephen is going to get throw down by his son.' Like a happy man, my father. He educate, none of his own children to throw him down.

Then one Sunday afternoon, some months before the boy leave, Stephen come. Without warning, as usual. This time he is not on a bicycle and he is not alone. He is in a motor car and he is with his whole family. From the para-grass field at the back of the house I see the car stop and I see all Stephen's girl children get out, and I remember the condition of our house. I race up in a foolish kind of way trying to sweep and straighten up. But my heart is failing me, because I can see the house as the girls will see it. And in the end, hearing the voices coming up the steps at the side, I pretend to be like my father, not caring, ready to make a joke of everything, letting people know that we have what we have, and that is that.

So they all come upstairs. And you could see the scorn in the face of Stephen's Christian wife and his Christian daughters. It would be much more bearable if they was ugly. But they are not ugly, and I feel that their scorn is right. I try to stay in the background. But then my mother, rubbing her dirty foot against her ankle, grin and pull up her veil over the top of her head, as though it is the only thing she have to do to make herself presentable, and she say, 'But, Stephen, you didn't give us warning. You had this boy' – and she point to me – 'running about trying to clean up the place.' And she laugh, as though she make a good joke.

The foolish woman didn't know what she was saying. I run out of the house to the para-grass field at the back and then through the sugarcane, trying to fight down the shame and vexation.

I walk and walk, and I feel I would never like to go back to the house. But the day finish, I have to go back. The frogs croaking and singing in the canals and the ditches, the dim lights on in the house. Nobody miss me. Nobody care what they did say to me. Nobody ask where I went or what I do. Everybody in the house is just full of this piece of news. Dayo is going to live in the city with Stephen and his family. Stephen is going to send him to school or college and look after his studies. Stephen is going to make him a doctor, lawyer, anything. Everything settled.

It was like a dream. But it come at the wrong moment. I should be happy, but I feel that everything is now poisoned for me. Now that Dayo is about to go away, I begin to feel that I am carrying him inside me the way Stephen is carrying his own son, like something that might break and cut. And at the same time, forgive me, a new feeling is in my heart. I am just waiting for my father and mother, for Stephen and all Stephen's family, for all of them who was there that day, I am just waiting for all of them to die, to bury my shame with them. I hate them.

Even today I can hate them, when I should have more cause to hate white people, to hate this cafe and this street and these people who cripple me and spoil my life. But now the dead man is me.

I used to have a vision of a big city. It wasn't like this, not streets like this. I used to see a pretty park with high black iron railings like spears, old thick trees growing out of the wide pavement, rain falling the way it fall over Robert Taylor in _Waterloo Bridge__, and the pavement covered with flat leaves of a perfect shape in pretty colours,. gold and red and crimson.

Maple leaves. Stephen's son send us one, not long after he went to Montreal to pursue his higher studies. The envelope is long, the stamp strange, and inside the envelope and his letter is this pretty maple leaf, one leaf from the thousands on that pavement. I handle the envelope and the leaf a lot, I study the stamp, and I see Stephen's son walking on the pavement beside the black railing. It is very cold, and I see him stopping to blow his nose, looking down at the leaves and then thinking of us his cousins. He is wearing an overcoat to keep out the cold and he have a briefcase under his arm. That is how I think of him in Montreal, furthering his studies, and happy among the maple leaves. And that is how I want to see Dayo.

It was after Stephen's son went to Montreal that the jealousy really did break out in Stephen's family against Dayo. They did always scorn the boy. They used to make him sleep in the drawing-room, and he had to make up a bed on the floor after everybody else went to sleep. He didn't have a room to pursue his studies in, like Stephen's son. He used to read his books in the tiny front gallery of Stephen's tiny house. The gallery was almost on the pavement, so that he could see everybody that pass and they could see him. See him? They could reach out a hand and turn the page of the book he was reading. Still, this regular reading and studying he do in the gallery win him a little fame and respect in the area, and I feel it was this little respect that the poor boy start to pick up. that make Stephen's family vexed. They feel they are the only ones who should pursue studies.