I DON’T know where I was born. I reckon it must have been somewhere in Virginia, because, when I first saw you and heard you speak, I felt as if I had got back home again after a long stay away. Your voice and the way you pronounced your words seemed so natural to me that I think the people about me when I was a child must have talked in the same way. You know how quickly I fell into the Virginia way of speaking. That was because it all seemed so natural to me. So I think I must have been born in Virginia. At any rate I had a black mammy. I remember her very well. She was very, very big—taller than a tall man, and very broad across her back. I know that, because she used to get down on the floor and let me ride on her back, making believe she was a horse. Her name was Juliet. When I read about Romeo and Juliet years afterward, I remember laughing at Shakespeare for not knowing that Juliet was big and strong and black. That must have been while I was still a little child, or I should have understood better. Besides, I remember where I was when I read the play, and I know I was only a little child when I was there. That is all I remember about my life in Virginia, if it was in Virginia that I was born. There must have been other people besides Juliet around me at that time, but I do not remember anything about them. I cannot recall what kind of a house we lived in; but I do remember playing on a beautiful lawn under big trees. And I recollect that there were a great many squirrels there, just as there are in the trees in your Wyanoke grounds. It is strange, isn’t it, that I should remember the squirrels and not the people? But perhaps that is because I used to feed the squirrels and play with them, and one day one of them bit me painfully. I must have been treating it badly. Chapter the Second