The Shallow South
When Dûrain was five years of age, he first became aware that he was different to the other children of the village. He realised because they realised: he suddenly found himself on the outside of their games, and the insults all children level at each other became, in his case, tainted with a darker edge. "You been rolling in the mud, Dûrain?" "You stay out in the sun too long, Dûrain?"
When Dûrain was eight, his family were driven out of town for the first time. He'd never understood why they had to keep moving, and had been delighted when his father decided they would settle down for him to get a basic education. That had lasted almost a year before the family's neighbours had made it very clear that Dûrain's parents were no longer welcome.
When Dûrain was eleven, he received his first beating. He had finally worked up the courage to talk to a girl of their current village, and she had been friendly enough, if a little nervous. That night, while he was making his way home, her three older brothers came at him from out of an alley and made certain he knew his attentions were unwanted. "A half-troll like you has no business with our sister, Southron."
When he was fifteen, he ran away from home.
Dûrain had a plan, one that didn't involve being beaten yet again for the colour of his skin and the country his grandparents had fled. From the hinterlands of Pelargir, where his father had been scratching a living in the shipyards, he struck west across Lebennin. He avoided the villages along Anduin, too many of which his family had already fled from; instead, he made his way across the heart of Gondor's breadbasket.
He earned his food where he could, doing odd jobs and labour in the villages he passed through. Dûrain had always been big for his age, and it served to his advantage now. Very few villagers were willing to give him money, but there was usually someone who would trade him a loaf of bread or a basket of fish.
He learned the hard way what not to do. Accepting more than a tharni or two was a recipe for disaster - the first time he did, no-one in the next village could believe that the 'black troll of Harad' came by his castar honestly, and he swiftly found himself relieved of it and hounded out into the fields. Talking to women lead to beatings; talking to sailors was even worse, since many of them had run afoul of the Corsairs of Umbar at one time or another.
In some towns, people assumed that his Haradrim father had assaulted his Gondorian mother; in others, that his Gondorian father had taken his Haradrim mother captive in one of the innumerable raids back and forth across the border. Dûrain quickly learned not to point out that both his parents were of southern descent - the added explanation that he himself had never even set foot in Harad never seemed to get through.
So Dûrain made his slow, painstaking (and often painful) way across southern Gondor, avoiding trouble whenever possible, fleeing from it if he had to. He crossed the mountains in three days, shivering even in the summer sun, and came down the other side into Dor-en-Ernil. Then more villages, more townsfolk unwilling to accept that dark skin didn't make him a monster - and then, finally, a gleam on the horizon, and the walls of Dol Amroth rising ahead of him.
Gondor's second city was unlike anything Dûrain had ever imagined. The waterways and irritable sailors of Pelargir were nowhere in sight: Dol Amroth was a sculpture of high towers and paved roads, everything neat and tidy and in its place.
And, for no more than the third time in his life, Dûrain saw people like himself. There weren't many of them, it was true, but they were there, and not confined to the edges of society either. He met (and spent his last tharni on a pie from) a shopkeeper whose mother had swum across Anduin to escape Harad, and at least one of the Royal Knights had skin even darker than his own. In fact, he was standing guard on the day Dûrain presented himself for service in the Prince's army - and that, Dûrain thought, was the best omen he had seen for a long time.
Disclaimer: Middle-earth and everything associated with it belongs to J.R.R. Tolkien. Dûrain and his life are my own invention.
Author's Note: There is a very powerful justification for racism in southern Gondor: the black folk of Harad are right across the river, and are a long-time enemy who are usually engaged in attacking their shipping. That doesn't make it easier on those who get caught in the wheels, though.
Dûrain ('Night's Wandering') is one of the few characters in this collection who has a clear story about him: he's going to be part of the fleet which razes Umbar under Thorongil (you know, Aragorn), and will have an outside view of the relationship between Gondor's future king, and Dol Amroth's future prince Imrahil. But that's a story I don't intend to write.
And yes, there's a Tolkien-created Gondorian currency! A silver tharni is worth one-quarter of a castar.