Pearl’s four years old. She’s as wild as they come. Wild in the Puritan New England society Hawthorne writes about means evil anti-society criminal. Wild. Wild. Going wherever you want to go and doing whatever you want to do and not even thinking about it. ‘Why did you get stoned?’ the Persian slave trader asked me this morning. In ‘primitive’ ‘wild’ societies like Haiti the word ‘why’ doesn’t exist. Pearl, according to Mr Hawthorne, wears hippy clothes and runs around in the forest and makes no distinction between what’s outside her and her dreams. On the whole she doesn’t make many distinctions. She doesn’t know human beings exist. Sometimes she senses human beings exist. She senses a black vertical mist that’s a wall pressing into her as if on top of her. She wants to scream. She feels helpless.

She doesn’t like people much.