Jimmy had burst into tears and revealed that he was illegitimate. He had learned this “terrible truth” about himself in a conversation between his parents. What he overheard he had vaguely suspected; it explained much of Mr. Baldwin’s attitude towards him. His “father’s” house was not his house. “Set thy house in order” was a call to the prophet within young James and the essence of the message he would soon carry as the “bastard of the West” into the house that was Western civilization at large, the house that had dispossessed him even as it had dispossessed his ancestors.
