The Land (7 page)

Robert sighed heavily. “Wish we could go together, same school.”

“Our daddy said that can't be.”

Even though it was dark except for the moonlight, I could see Robert's eyes on me. “You know, Paul, I hate it sometimes. Hate we're not full brothers.”

Robert had told me this before. Once he had even wished my mama was his mama too, and when he was younger, he had thought she was, for his own mama had died soon after he was born, and my mama was pretty much the only mama he knew.

“I hate folks thinking of me as white and you colored,” he went on. “Wish folks thought of us as the same.”

“Which the same?” I questioned. “White or colored?”

“Don't matter to me,” said Robert without hesitation, “long as we were the same.”

“I figure it'd matter you had to live colored awhile.”

Robert was silent to that, then reluctantly agreed. “Maybe so . . . but I'll tell you something, Paul. You don't feel no different to me than Hammond or George. I hate folks saying that word ‘half' brother. How can you be ‘half' of a brother? Either you're brothers or you're not!”

“Well,” I decided, “that's just the way things are.”

“I s'pose.”

“It's true.”

We let the silence settle once more.

“Well, anyway,” Robert said, breaking it again, “I don't want us going off to separate schools, miles and miles from each other.”

“Me neither, but it's a ways off yet. Least we got the summer.” I was trying to look on the bright side of the thing; I resigned myself to what was to come. “'Sides, it's our daddy's decision. We've got no say in it.”

“Yeah . . . I know. But maybe he'll change his mind.”

We looked at each other then. We both knew there was little our daddy ever changed his mind about. We knew, too, our daddy figured sending us off to school was what was best; still I couldn't help but feel something was being wedged between Robert and me.

 

It was during that summer before Robert and I were supposed to go off to school that I came to the true realization that I had two families. In part it was Mitchell who brought me to this realization, and the things he said to me; in part it was all the little things of my life and a matter of growing up. There were my daddy and my brothers on the one side of our family, and Cassie, my mama, and me on the other. Though from the beginning there had been some separateness between us, what with my mama having her own house and Cassie and me staying with her, that hadn't seemed strange to me, seeing that we were always up to our daddy's house anyway and my daddy and my brothers were always around. We were all connected, but the family line was muddled by color, and as I grew older, things began to take on different meanings for me. When I was younger, before Mitchell and the other boys started in on me, I had given little thought to any difference: to the fact that my mama, Cassie, and I were colored, and my daddy and my brothers were white.

Maybe that was partly because I had never experienced any real hardship from being colored. Although I was born into slavery shortly before the start of the war that would end slavery, I had never been treated as a slave. It was the early 1870's when I was growing up, and by then life on my daddy's land had settled down from the four years of war. The farm had suffered badly during the war years; there had been no cash crops, and what was grown, including the animals, was confiscated. Things now, though, were going well. That's because after my daddy had returned from the fighting, he had begun to rebuild his land. His own daddy, Lyndsey Logan, along with his mama, Helen, had died of influenza during the conflict, and his brother had been killed in action, so everything fell on my daddy's shoulders. To save his land, my daddy had let part of it go for taxes and had allowed logging on another. He had also traded for horses both at home and in Texas. My mama often talked about the hard times of those days during and right after the war, and how my daddy had struggled to keep his land. She talked about the hard times of slavery too, and she said the war hadn't changed things totally for anybody. White folks ruled the world before the war, she said, and they ruled it still.

I was, of course, too young to remember slavery or even that much of the war, but I could see certain aspects of what my mama meant. I could see what she meant in the way some white folks talked to colored folks, in the way some colored folks talked to white folks. I could see it in the shanties colored folks lived in on my daddy's land and in the clothes they wore and in the food they ate. I could see it in the towns when I went with my daddy: White folks were in charge. Still, when I was a small boy, that didn't bother me so much. My life being as it was, my family being as it was, in the beginning I accepted things the way they were. I worked in the fields alongside my daddy and my brothers, and when the fieldwork was done, I helped tend the horses and the cattle too, but of course anything to do with horses wasn't work to me; that was pure joy. When there wasn't work to be done, I was often with my daddy or my brothers about the place or with them somewhere on my daddy's business. When I was little, I figured to always be on my daddy's land. After all, I had no reason to want to leave.

My life was good.

But then as I grew older, I began to take note that Cassie and I weren't always included in my daddy's and my brothers' lives. When folks came over to supper, Cassie and I weren't allowed to sit at our daddy's table, while Robert, Hammond, and George still did. Whenever there was any socializing at the place, we weren't allowed the roam of the house, but had to stay put in the kitchen, where my mama and others served up preparations for my daddy's guests. That's not to say there was a whole lot of socializing going on. My daddy was a private kind of man and he pretty much kept to his family, but he was also a businessman, a well-to-do businessman, and knew most of the people in the community, so there were some social exchanges.

Now, when I say that my daddy was a well-to-do man, I don't mean he was rich. Very few Southern folks, white or black, were, following the war. But he was comfortable, and by the time I was about to turn twelve, I wasn't wanting for anything that I needed, and neither were Cassie nor my brothers. My daddy didn't have thousands of acres of plantation land, as some folks had, nor had he owned hundreds of slaves. But he did have a sizeable piece of property with the necessary number of people to work it, enough to make him acceptable among the most prominent in the local society. Even the knowledge of a slave woman's children in his house didn't mar that acceptance. Only his blatant disregard of all social rules would have done that. Allowing Cassie and me to sit at his table while his company visited would have broken those social rules.

When I was a little boy, being sent off to the kitchen to eat or outside to play didn't bother me, because Robert was always sent off with me. But then as we grew older, Robert was allowed to stay when the visitors came for their socializing, though at first he wouldn't stay without me. Even his grandmother couldn't make him stay. Robert's grandma on his mama's side always hated the fact that my daddy allowed Cassie and me to sit at his table and enjoy the life she felt was owed only to her daughter's children. When the daughter died, her mother was there in my daddy's house. Of course, I was only a baby at the time, but later I grew to know her hatred. She had stayed on in my daddy's house and took over running it. I remember she was always hard on my mama, and on Cassie and me. When my daddy was away during mealtime, she would send Cassie and me from the table. When that happened, Robert always went with me, and she couldn't make him come back. Worse than that, she would sometimes say cruel things to us. “They're like mites,” she said once. “You get them in your bed, and you don't ever get rid of them.”

She said that right in my daddy's presence. My daddy spoke her name, as if to quiet her, but Cassie had been sitting at the table and she jumped up and threw her plate right on the floor. “Don't you think I know what you mean?” she cried. “I know what you mean, you hateful old thing! Come on, Paul!”

I got up, not fully understanding. My daddy told me to sit back down and I did so, but Cassie had run out.

Later Robert said to our daddy, “Why don't you just make her go away?” I was standing right beside him.

My daddy glanced at me, then said to Robert, “She's your mother's mother and she's to be respected.”

“Well, she don't respect Paul and Cassie!”

My daddy nodded. “I've spoken to her.”

“Well, she ain't listened!”

“Maybe not,” said our daddy, “but she stays just the same. She's your mother's mother, and she'll be here as long as she wants to be. Both of you, all of you, you'll just have to put up with her ways.” I noticed that my daddy glanced past us and that his eyes settled on my mama standing in the doorway.

Robert's grandmother died a few years later, but there were always others who sat at our daddy's table who thought the same as she had about Cassie and me. I suppose my daddy could have been trying in part to protect Cassie and me from all those people, while saving his own social standing, but even thinking of that possibility didn't ease our pain. We'd been sent off just the same.

Eventually there came the time on a late summer afternoon just before my twelfth birthday when folks came to visit and it was my mama, not my daddy, who ordered me to the kitchen. Robert was now expected to stay at my daddy's table, and no amount of protest on his part changed that. My mama set a lone plate for me on the sideboard in the kitchen. That was truly the first time I felt unwanted in my daddy's family. My daddy hadn't even bothered to tell me himself not to sit at his table. He had left that to my mama, and I resented not only him for it, but her too.

“You sit down,” my mama said, “and I'll fix your plate.”

“You don't have to fix me anything,” I said, pouting.

“It'll be the same food I've cooked for your daddy.”

“I don't want it.”

“Paul, you hafta eat.”

“Not in this house,” I said, and left.

“Paul-Edward!” she called after me. “Boy, don't you go no farther'n them steps! You hear me?”

I heard her, all right. I just didn't admit I did. I walked the back side of the veranda, out of my mama's view, and leaned against a post and looked out across the backyard to my daddy's forest. I stared at that forest, the forest that had always seemed to be a part of me, and felt alienated from it, from it and everything that was my daddy's.

It was then that George and Robert came along, exiting from the kitchen in their best suits. “So, what's this I hear from your mama about you not taking any supper?” asked George.

I slipped my hands into my pockets and looked stone-faced at George and Robert. “You worried about me eating?”

“Not worried about it,” said George jovially. “But considering how much you do eat, just was wondering why you're not.”

“You're smart enough to be going off to a military academy,” I said with a smart mouth, “you figure it out.”

George moved closer to me, and his smile faded as he gazed at me with his sky-blue eyes. “Oh, I got it figured, all right. You want to be the fool because of it and not eat, that's up to you. Just know that your not getting good food isn't doing anybody any detriment except maybe for yourself. I was in your place, I'd eat my daddy out of house and home. I'd figure he owed me that much. Course, what you do is up to you.” George stared at me a moment or two, then walked away, up the veranda toward the front of the house.

Now, George, when he was angry, was always short with me; he never minced his words. At other times he was the most jovial of my brothers, the most patient too, taking the time to teach me his skills. But he was known for his impatience with fools or those who gave themselves no worth, and that's what I was seeing in him now as he chose to have nothing more to do with me. He had said his piece, and now he was finished with it. I watched him go. Robert stayed with me. “You want me to bring you something, Paul?” he asked.

“No,” I said, going down the steps.

“Well, then come on back in the kitchen and get yourself something. There's a lot of good food in there—ham and fried chicken, dumplings, sweet-potato pie and—”

“Don't want any,” I replied, and started across the yard.

“Where you going?” Robert called. “Your mama told George and me you were to stay on this porch!”

“Well, that's between my mama and me!”

“You leave, you gonna miss out on all this good food!”

I stopped long enough to turn and shout, “Last thing I want is my daddy's food from a table he doesn't even want me to sit at when his company comes calling!” As I finished my words, I saw that Hammond was standing at the corner of the house. I knew he saw me too, but I didn't care. I turned and ran toward the woods with Robert calling after me to come back.

I headed for the creek. Before I reached it, Hammond joined me. “Mind some company?” he asked.

“It's your woods,” I retorted, feeling a sudden anger and resentment for all my brothers as well as my daddy.

“I thought we all lived here,” said Hammond.

“I might live here,” I returned, “but there's not a thing I see here's mine.”

Hammond didn't say anything to that. He just walked along beside me in silence for some while as we made our way through the woods. After a while he said, “Tell me something, Paul. You mad at everybody today or just our daddy?”