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He said he could talk to animals and trees. He said everything was alive the same as you and me and had the very same feelings. I squashed a beetle to prove him wrong and he cried. I said he was a crybaby and he said he would rather be a crybaby than a bug killer. I didn't like it when he cried so pretty soon I quit squashing things. I liked it a lot better when he laughed and as I remember, he laughed a lot.

After a while I forgot all about his nakedness and his blackness. I did anything I could to make him laugh again. I didn't care what kind of fool I made of myself. I didn't care how much I had to contort my body and my principles. I guess I was in love. Late in the day, as the West Texas sun was burning hazy and red just above the horizen, we lay between the rows of the cotton field, exhausted from playing hide and seek. We lay close, his head upon my chest. He was listening to my heart beat.

"Your heart beats with a steady rhythm..." I knew that. After all, I was a man of science. "...Just like your body, the world has a heart that beats, a basic rhythm to its song. The trees hear it, the birds hear it and the bugs hear it." He looked up at me. "You can hear it too...want to?" The whole thing sounded wierd to me but what the heck, I was an explorer. "Sure."

He told me to sit up, cross my legs and close my eyes. He told me to find the sun and when I protested that my eyes were closed he just repeated "Keep your eyes closed and find the sun." There was something about the little black boy that made me believe anything was possible. I overcame my disbelief and looked into the dim swirl of impressions in varying degrees of grey that covered the back of my eyelids. Lines, waves of black on grey moved like amoebas under a microscope across my field of vision. Spots separated from less distinct amorphous blobs and began to take on vague colors. After a while one spot, less dull than the others began to form in the murky fluid and as it became more evident, it began to glow with a smoky grey brilliance.