It is interesting to note as well, that it is the dietician who causes Joe to be taken out of the orphanage, the only home he has even known, by telling the matron of the orphanage of Joe's mixed heritage. Because of his race, and because of this woman - he is led out of security and familiarity, recurring theme throughout his life. .
The next woman who further impacts Joe as a young man is his adoptive mother, Mrs. McEachern. His stepfather, Mr. McEachern is a devoutly religious man who frequently physically abuses Joe. However, this is the sort of punishment Joe wants. He comes to prefer Mr. McEachern's beatings to the faltering kindness of Mrs. McEachern:.
"It was the woman: that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men." - Pg. 169.
Joe needs the physical repercussions of wrongdoing: beatings and verbal debasement. He can rely on this, he feels, as a constant. The kindness of women, however, is something that comes and goes in his life and he doesn't know why or how, and cannot trust it. He puts his trust in "the hard and ruthless justice of men" and accepts that he cannot trust and rely on the "soft kindness" of women. This realization is another indicator of how Joe will deal with the women he has relationships with later on in his life. .
When Joe meets Bobbie, a waitress and prostitute, he experiences love for the first and only time in his life. She is perhaps the only person in the novel that he is truly able to communicate with, although at this point he is still a young man. They initially have a very surprising and sweet rapport: .
"That night they talked. They lay in the bed, in the dark, talking. Or he talked, that is. All the time he was thinking "Jesus. Jesus. So this is it." He lay naked too, beside her, touching her with his hand and talking about her. Not about where she had come from and what she had done, but about her body as if no one had ever done this before, with her or with anyone else.
