The Land (9 page)

 

The next day and the days that followed, I refused to eat in my daddy's house. In fact, I wouldn't even enter his house, not even to see my mama. But after a week my daddy changed that. He ordered me back to his table. “You might not like it,” he said to me, “but when I sit down to supper with just my family, I expect all my children on this place to be sitting down at the table with me.”

“Can't make me,” I said.

“I'm your daddy,” he said. “You want to test me on what I can do?”

Needless to say, I sat at my daddy's table, but I never forgot why I had been sent from it.

 

By the time I was dealing with all my realizations about my two families, my sister, Cassie, had moved to Atlanta and was married. At first she had gone to school there, and later she met Howard Milhouse. After their marriage when Cassie was seventeen, she and her husband, who was nearly some ten years older, set up a little store and they were now living in back of it. Since Cassie had married, she had come home only a few times, and I missed her terribly. After that day I'd gotten so upset about not being allowed at my daddy's table, I wrote to her and told her my thoughts, for I figured only she could truly understand how I felt. Cassie didn't write back; she came instead.

“You know, Cassie,” I said when we were alone, “there are times I don't feel good about our mama . . . I mean, for being with a white man.”

“You're talking as if you think she had a choice about the thing.”

I was silent.

“Paul, she was his property, just like everything else around here.”

“Well . . . I know at first she didn't have much of a say—”

“
Much
of a say? What about
no
say?”

“But that was nearly twenty years ago, before you were born. Why'd she keep on being with him after we were free? What's she doing with him now?”

“You ever thought maybe it's because she loves him? Besides, it's her life now.”

“I asked her once, you know.”

“Asked her what?”

“If she loved him, and if she didn't, then why'd she stay with him?”

“And what she tell you?”

“Said she supposed she did love him and, besides, if she ran off and took me with her, he'd come after us.”

“Don't you think he would?”

I shrugged. “I suppose.”

“He's our daddy, Paul.”

“Well, sometimes I wish he wasn't. She raised his family, both sides of it, and what does she have to show for it? This house and this little bit of ground he lets her stay on, while she's still up there taking care of his big house and him.”

Cassie studied me before she spoke again. “Paul, you're sounding awfully resentful.”

“Got a right to be. I been picked on all my life 'cause of him and her, and don't tell me you don't know how it feels.”

“I'll tell you this, little brother. I won't stand for you disrespecting either one of them, not our daddy, not our mama.”

I met her eyes and looked away.

“Now, what they done and what they feel, it's their business and they live with it. All I figure we need to concern ourselves with is that they've been good to us and they've taken care of us, both of them. They love us.” She waited, as if expecting me to say something to that. When I didn't, she spoke again, her voice sounding a bit harsh. “Don't you think your mama loves you, Paul? Boy, look at me! Don't you think your mama loves you?”

“Course.”

“What about your daddy? Don't you think your daddy loves you?”

“I suppose . . .”

“You suppose? Why else you think he did what he did for us? You expect he would have brought us up like he did, taking us into his house, bringing us up with Hammond and George and Robert, if he didn't care about us? You think he would've seen to it we wore clothes as good as our brothers' and that we never went raggedy or hungry? What they ate, we ate too. You forgetting that? You think our daddy would have seen to our book learning, even teaching us himself how to read and write and figure, when it was against the law and he could have been jailed for it, if he didn't care about us? I suppose his taking you all around with him, same as he does Hammond, George, and Robert, so you can learn how to handle business, same as them, that's because he doesn't care about you either!”

“I never said he didn't care,” I mumbled.

“Well, you've said just about that.”

“Well, maybe it would have been better if our daddy hadn't treated us so well. Maybe it would have been better if we'd grown up hating him and Hammond and George and Robert rather than caring about them. Maybe then I wouldn't feel like I do, like our daddy put a big shiny box all wrapped out there in front of us, making us feel we were the same as his white boys, then just when we reached to open it up, he snatched it away.”

“You know what?” said Cassie. “Maybe you're right. Maybe our daddy has made us feel too special, too accepted. I grew up on this place feeling pretty good about who I was and figuring I'd do all right if I ever left here. Then I went off to Atlanta and found I couldn't hardly find a place to fit there until I met Howard. That must have been our daddy's fault. You know our daddy had me staying with that colored preacher and his family, but they weren't accepting of me because I was too white. They treated me nice enough, but they never really warmed to me. I was always a stranger, as far as they were concerned, and they treated me that way. They never treated me like family. In fact, as soon as I'd walk into a room, they'd stop their talking and have little to say to me. Other colored folks weren't that polite. They'd talk about me behind my back and in front of my face too. Things were really awkward and it didn't help matters that our daddy would show up whenever he was in Atlanta.

“Then there were those times the white folks mistook me for white and would act really friendly until they found out who I was. Then they treated me like a leper, worse than they'd have treated a person obviously of color. It was like they had contaminated themselves by treating me the same as one of them. I was trapped there, Paul, between two worlds, a white one and a black one, and neither one accepting me. I even passed a few times—”

“Yes, that's right, I did it!” she declared defiantly. “And you know why? Just so I could feel good about myself again! Just so somebody would be accepting of me. I'd walk into stores or in the white part of the city and folks would treat me with respect, white folks and colored folks too, because they thought they knew who I was. That respect they showed, it made me feel good for the moment, but it was all false because it was for who they thought I was, not for who I really am, Cassie Logan. I was miserable, and I was just like you. I got to blaming our mama and our daddy for my misery. Well, not so much our mama, but our daddy. I blamed him for treating me like I was somebody, like I would be treated the same away from this place as he'd treated me here. I was his daughter, but I could never be a part of his world off this place. I was pretty bitter the way I turned my resentment on him, and every time he came to see me, I let him know it too. Then I met Howard at a church social.”

“Talking about me?” Howard Milhouse had come in the back door. He had a broken bridle in his hands. Howard was a good-looking young man of medium height and yellow-hued skin. He was quiet-spoken, yet a perfect match to Cassie's outspokenness. Cassie said that in any dispute Howard would sit back quietly while she ranted her views, and once she was tired of talking to herself, he would settle the argument with just a few words spoken. The two of them smiled at each other as only lovers do, and I was happy for my sister.

“Just looking for some leather to tie this together,” he said, holding out the bridle. “Figured maybe I could mend it.”

Howard liked to keep busy when he came, and was always looking for something to do. He couldn't sit idle. Maybe that's what made him such a good businessman.

“I was just telling Paul about when I first went to Atlanta,” said Cassie. “About how folks treated me up there.”

Howard nodded as he looked through an open tin of odds and ends my mama kept on a shelf. “You tell him that's how we come to meet?”

“Told him where we met. At that church social.”

Howard glanced back at Cassie. “But you didn't tell him why I got my courage up and came over to talk to you?”

“Well, no. I didn't go into all that.”

“Well, Paul,” said Howard, still looking through the tin, “there were some ladies who were saying some unkind things about our Cassie—mean little jealous kinds of things. They weren't saying them
to
Cassie, but within her hearing. I took one look at Cassie, and I knew she was about to explode. So, before hair got to flying and clothes got to ripping right there in the Lord's house, I went over and started talking to her. I calmed her down and got her out of there.”

“He did that, all right,” confirmed Cassie, “and just in time too. I was about to let those girls have it, Lord's house or not, 'cause of what they were saying about our mama and our daddy and how I came to be.”

“Lucky for me you did come to be,” said Howard with a grin, then held up a piece of leather string he'd found in the tin as if it were a prize, and went back out.

“I like him,” I said.

Cassie smiled. “So do I.”

“Things are better for you now in Atlanta, right?”

“Oh, yes. Not perfect, but better. Folks who don't know about me still shy away if they're colored, and if they're white, I don't try to pass. It's always awkward with them, but they're the ones who have to live with it. Now I've got Howard and his family, and they love me and I love them. Folks are getting to know who I am, and I've made friends.”

I nodded. “Still, what you had to go through, the way I'm being treated now, if our mama and daddy hadn't been together, things would be different.”

“Yeah, a whole lot different,” Cassie agreed with a laugh. “We wouldn't be here!”

I didn't laugh. I frowned at her. “You know what I mean.”

Cassie studied me. “When you were a little boy, you never thought this way.”

“When I was a little boy, I still had a lot to learn.”

“And you still do. You've got a lot to learn about a man and a woman and what goes on between them. You've got a lot to learn about love and and how folks show it. Kisses and hugs aren't all there is when folks are raising their younguns. Spankings and scoldings are about it too. Just because you've had to go up against a few fists over the years doesn't give you the right to blame all your troubles on our mama and our daddy and to go judging them. Didn't give me the right either. I figure they've done what they could, and I'm not faulting them for anything anymore. I've gotten past that.”

“I thought you would have understood.”

“I understand, all right. I understand you're angry right now because the world doesn't seem to be treating you right. I understand too that anger you've got will pass one day, and maybe then you can see what I see.”

“Well, Cassie, I'll tell you this true,” I said, meeting my sister's eyes.

“And what's that, Paul?”

“I ever have a daughter, I'll never let her take up with a white man. I never will.” I said that, and I've kept that opinion.

“Could be that's the best thing,” said my mama. Cassie and I both turned; neither of us had heard her come in. “Long as you talking about me and your daddy, I'm going to tell you a couple of things. First off, I'm not going to apologize to you or nobody else 'bout my life. There's folks who talk about me behind my back, but then grin in my face when they see me coming. I might've been too young to know much of anything what I really wanted when I came into my womanhood but what happened; still, though, I been with one man ever since, and that man has been good to me and to my children. All those folks talking behind my back can't say the same.”

Cassie got up and went over to her. “We didn't mean any disrespect, Mama,” she said.

I kept my silence.

My mama looked at me. “No matter.” She turned slightly as Cassie put her arm around her shoulders. “I'm glad you come home, Cassie. I'm glad I've got both my children here together. There's things I wanna tell you case anything happen to me.”

“What do you mean?” Cassie asked. “Something the matter, Mama?”

Now I got up. “Are you sick?”

My mama shook her head. “Just want you to know some things. Y'all all I got, and what little I got belongs to you.”

I remember my mama left us then and went off to her room, and when she returned, she was carrying a blue wooden box decorated with bright paintings of all kinds of flowers. She sat down with that box in her hands in the rocker my daddy had given her. She placed the box on her lap and held it close, but she didn't open it. “Old Josh made this box for me,” she said softly. “You know, he was like a daddy to me.”

Cassie and I both nodded, even though we had never known Old Josh, for he had died before either of us was born.

“All these years I been putting my treasures in it, and that includes whatever little money I could save. You know, ever since I was a girl and first had you, Cassie, I was earning me a little money of my own, not much, but a few pennies here and there, doing extra work. Then that war came and there wasn't much money for anybody, but after that, when things started settling down again, I began receiving wages for keeping your daddy's house and cooking. I also had my garden and a crop of my own. Had some hens and guineas and such, and I sold their eggs in town. Your daddy was always taking care of you, but I done my share as well. It wasn't just your daddy buying all your things. It's not much, but mostly I been saving what pennies I could so there would be something for us, case we need it. Your daddy, he's been good to us, but I never figured to depend on any man. I figured it best I have something of my own.