Inside classrooms and lecture theatres, all signage is in English, as is the signage in the staff office blocks. There were only three exceptions to this complete predominance of English.

If a white employer could take so much interest in the child of a black employee, in whom he had no property interest, that would illustrate—as did Hentz's other fiction—the moonlight and magnolia world of Southerners' concern for their slaves.

They were eating unleavened bread.

I clawed my way up a long, evil hissing slope and saw the light on the lonely beach and my father with a mulloway slung across his back like an aura […].