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She had a naked child with her, a little naked girl, barely able to toddle, and after a while she set this child on the ground and give her a push and whispered something to her. This child come toward me, barely able t'walk, come toddling up to me and—Jesus, it makes you sick t'remember a thing like this! It stuck out its hand and tried to unbutton my trousers!

In a rather strange digression, Daddy recalls his world travels at the beginning of his dialogue with Brick in Act II. Daddy's memories of his travels introduce a motif familiar to Williams' readers: the Mediterranean/North Africa as a primal space, a space of savagery, lawlessness, and sexual excess—in short, all that which civilization would repress. These exotic locales and their inhabitants become ciphers for the desires that remain tenuously repressed at the home. It is fitting that later Brick tells of a fraternity pledge who flees to North Africa when the brothers discover that he is a sodomite.

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