It was many years now that Melanctha had not heard or seen or known of anything her father did.

Melanctha Herbert almost always hated her black father, but she loved very well the power in herself that came through him.  And so her feeling was really closer to her black coarse father, than her feeling had ever been toward her pale yellow, sweet-appearing mother.  The things she had in her of her mother never made her feel respect.

Melanctha Herbert had not loved herself in childhood.  All of her youth was bitter to remember.

Melanctha had not loved her father and her mother and they had found it very troublesome to have her.

Melanctha’s mother and her father had been regularly married.  Melanctha’s father was a big black virile negro.  He only came once in a while to where Melanctha and her mother lived, but always that pleasant, sweet-appearing, pale yellow woman, mysterious and uncertain and wandering in her ways, was close in sympathy and thinking to her big black virile husband.

James Herbert was a common, decent enough, colored workman, brutal and rough to his one daughter, but then she was a most disturbing child to manage.

The young Melanctha did not love her father and her mother, and she had a break neck courage, and a tongue that could be very nasty.  Then, too, Melanctha went to school and was very quick in all the learning, and she knew very well how to use this knowledge to annoy her parents who knew nothing.

Melanctha Herbert had always had a break neck courage.  Melanctha always loved to be with horses; she loved to do wild things, to ride the horses and to break and tame them.

Melanctha, when she was a little girl, had had a good chance to live with horses.  Near where Melanctha and her mother lived was the stable of the Bishops, a rich family who always had fine horses.

John, the Bishops’ coachman, liked Melanctha very well and he always let her do anything she wanted with the horses.  John was a decent, vigorous mulatto with a prosperous house and wife and children.  Melanctha Herbert was older than any of his children.  She was now a well grown girl of twelve and just beginning as a woman.

James Herbert, Melanctha’s father, knew this John, the Bishops’ coachman very well.

One day James Herbert came to where his wife and daughter lived, and he was furious.

“Where’s that Melanctha girl of yours,” he said fiercely, “if she is to the Bishops’ stables again, with that man John, I swear I kill her.  Why don’t you see to that girl better you, you’re her mother.”

James Herbert was a powerful, loose built, hard handed, black, angry negro.  Herbert never was a joyous negro.  Even when he drank with other men, and he did that very, often, he was never really joyous.  In the days when he had been most young and free and open, he had never had the wide abandoned laughter that gives the broad glow to negro sunshine.