The new-comer was a man about thirty years old; known to everybody in the village as Gussie Fisky. He was well-built; with a wealth of unkempt, reddish-blond hair, and a shaggy mustache of the same color. His eyes were large and gray, and stared with a reckless, determined air. His complexion was one of remarkable sallowness; and his features, while plain and commonplace, were free from every negroid characteristic; having certain regularities of cast that declared him indubitably a white man, however ordinary the extraction.
The new-comer was a man about thirty years old; known to everybody in the village as Gussie Fisky. He was well-built; with a wealth of unkempt, reddish-blond hair, and a shaggy mustache of the same color. His eyes were large and gray, and stared with a reckless, determined air. His complexion was one of remarkable sallowness; and his features, while plain and commonplace, were free from every negroid characteristic; having certain regularities of cast that declared him indubitably a white man, however ordinary the extraction.
A strange mystery surrounded Gussie’s origin. A mystery known to no one except old Aunt Fisky,the kindly colored woman with whom he lived, the only mother he had ever known.
There were many legends related regarding Gussie’s origin, his birth, and his abandonment by his white family; some ribald, some romantic; any of which Gussie never troubled himself to comment on or disprove. He knew that he was white; that Aunt Fisky had raised him from infancy, and had given him her name; that he had lived his inconsequent years among illiterate Negroes; that it was sheer madness to hope to be received as a fellow-man by white people who despised him; and that life was nothing more than a merry game for anyone who could play it with a reckless spirit.
And so he spent his days among his chosen companions, resigned to his humble fate; satisfied with old Aunt Fisky’s motherly attentions, and the squalid atmosphere of the poor shanty they called home; comfortable with the boisterous young colored women who permitted him to bestow upon them the freedom of his prodigal affection; and companionable with the roustabouts and longshoremen with whom he worked and gambled and caroused; imbibing their thoughts and ideas, adopting their dialect, and imitating their manners and ways.