First Sentence

"ONCE THERE WAS a poor but honest man, un'omu d' onuri, a man of honor, who worked the whole day-day after day-in the unrelenting heat of the blazing sun, scratching the pitiful dirt at his feet with a wooden hoe, coaxing the useless dust first this way and then that way, like a mother combing her feverish child's thin, dulled hair, urging the earth to release something he and his children and wife might eat, so that they might live to work beneath the scorching sun another day, and not starve."