". . . He didn't even know he was innocent that day when his father sent him to the big house with the message. He didn't remember (or did not say) what the message was, apparently he still didn't know exactly just what his father did, what work (or maybe supposed to do) the old man had in relation to the plantation--a boy either thirteen or fourteen, he didn't know which, in garments his father had got from the plantation commissary and had worn out and which one of the sisters had patched and cut down to fit him and he no more conscious of his appearance in them or of the possibility that anyone else would be than he was of his skin, following the road and turning into the gate and following the drive up past where still more niggers with nothing to do all day but plant flowers and trim grass were working, and so to the house, the portico, the front door, thinking how at last he was going to see insider of it, . . . he told Grandfather how, before the monkey nigger who came to the door had finished saying what he did, . . . while the monkey-dressed nigger butler kept the door barred with his body, . . . And now he stood there before that white door with the monkey-nigger barring it and looking down on him in his patched made-over jeans clothes and no shoes . . . and he never even remembered what the nigger said, now it was the nigger told him, even before he had had time to say what he came for, never to come to that front door again but to go around to the back. . . .
  "Because he was not mad. He insisted on that to Grandfather. He was just thinking, because he knew that something would have to be done about it; he would have to do something about it in order to live with himself for the rest of his life . . . [he] looked out from whatever invisible place he (the man) happened to be at the moment, at the boy outside the barred door in his patched garments and splayed bare feet, looking through and beyond the boy, he himself seeing his own father and sisters and brothers as the owner, the rich man (not the nigger) must have been seeing them all the time--as cattle, creatures heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without hope or purpose for them, . . . with for sole heritage that expression on a balloon face bursting with laughter which had looked out at some unremembered and nameless progenitor who had knocked as a door when he was a little boy and had been told by a nigger to go around to the back. . . . I went up to that door for that nigger to tell me never to come to that front door again and I not only wasn't doing any good to him by telling it or any harm to him by not telling it, there aint any good or harm either in the living world that I can do to him. It was like that, he said, like an explosion--a bright glare that vanished and left nothing, no ashes nor refuse: just a limitless flat plain with the severe shape of his intact innocence rising from it like a monument. . . . 'So to combat them you have got to have what they have that made them do what he did. You got to have land and niggers and a fine house to combat them with. You see?' and he said Yes again. He left that night. He waked before day and departed just like he went to bed: by rising from the pallet and tiptoeing out of the house. He never saw any of his family again.
  "He went to the West Indies." (pp. 185-92)

[From Absalom, Absalom!, Chapter 7
Pagination from Vintage International Edition, 1990]