As he matured he began to feel a strange, secret pride in that white family whose blood he shared. He familiarized himself with its genealogy. There is many a courtier who cannot trace his ancestry as far back as Carter could. One of his forebears had signed Magna Charta; several had fought in the Revolutionary War. There had been a United States Senator in the family, and a Confederate General. At times, feeling the vigorous impulse of hereditary instinct and ambitions, Carter looked upon himself as all white man, but never for long, nor to any purpose. The consciousness of his negro blood pulled him down again.
But, as he grew up, he ceased to herd with black negroes; he scorned them. He crept about the world cursing it and himself--an unfortunate and bitter creature that had no place; unfortunate and bitter, cursed with an intellect, denied that mitigation that might have come with a full share of the negro jovialty of disposition, forever unreconciled.
There was one member of that white family from which he drew so much of his blood whom Carter particularly admired. Willoughby Howard was about Carter's own age, and he was Carter's half-brother. Howard did not distinguish Carter from any other mulatto; probably did not know of his existence. But as Howard reached manhood, and, through virtue of his wealth and standing and parts, began to attain an excellent place in the world, his rise was watched by Carter with a strange intensity of emotion. Carter in some occult way identified himself with the career of Willoughby Howard--sometimes he almost worshiped Willoughby Howard, and then he hated him; he envied him and raged over him with the same breath.
But mostly, as the isolation of his own condition, ate into his soul, he raged over himself; he pitied himself; he hated himself. Out of the turmoil of his spirit arose the one despairing cry, Oh, to be white, white, _white!_
Many a night he lay awake until daybreak, measuring the slow minutes with the ceaseless iteration of that useless prayer: Only to be white! O God, for _one little year of being white!_
Carter went North. He went to New York. But the North, which affects to promise so much to the negro, in a large, loose, general way, does not perform in the same degree. There was only one thing which Carter would have thanked any one for performing; it was the one thing that could never be performed--he wanted to be made white. Sometimes, indeed, from the depths of his despair, he cried out that he wanted to be altogether black; but in his soul he did not really want that.