The Land: List 1

“They got no business beating on you,” Robert said, expressing my sentiments exactly.

That very next morning Robert and I, sitting behind Hammond and George on their bays, went over to the patch of ground Mitchell’s family tended.

Now, the Thomases, like all the other families who lived on my daddy’s land, were sharecroppers, and because of that fact, they were obliged to take heed of whatever my daddy or my brothers said.

“See you got quite a woodpile there, Mitchell,” said Hammond cordially.

“Now, you, boy, you put that axe down.” There was a moment when I didn’t know if Mitchell would obey. Hammond didn’t waver. “I said put it down! Now!”

Just by being with Edward Logan and a part of his world, I was receiving an education none of the other boys of color on the place were privy to.

She rubbed salve on my wounds and said, “You haven’t done anything, huh? Well, how you think it make Mitchell feel for you to be sending Hammond and George to his house to speak to him and scaring his mama?”

Now, my daddy loved horses and in particular fast horses, and he’d recently heard about Ghost Wind, who some folks claimed was the fastest thing on four legs. Since my daddy didn’t own Ghost Wind, the fastest thing on four legs, he soon took steps to rectify that fact.

Now, the thing was, Robert had always been skittish around horses. He had once been thrown by a horse, and his leg and ribs were broken.

The concession he finally made to Robert was to replace one of the five with a lesser horse, but still of fine quality.

One of the Waverlys caught me by the lapel of my coat.

“Yeah, we’re sure sorry,” said Jack in sudden repentance as he glanced nervously back at the road, as if expecting my daddy and his at any moment.

I frowned apprehensively.

Again I leaned forward along the Appaloosa’s neck. “All right, let’s really show them,” I said, feeling akin to him now.

Christian Waverly reddened, then said to his daddy, “Fact is, we made Robert here a wager, seeing it’s our horse and all. Said...said, um, if that boy there could ride him, the Appaloosa was his.”

Then he and my daddy dismounted and went to the house to haggle price.

Now, Willie Thomas was mighty good with horses, and my daddy entrusted the most prized of his horses to his care. Willie Thomas knew their ailments and how to fix most of them.

He whinnied just a bit, and I patted him gingerly, trying to make him know me; then, when he was still, I took a closer look at his leg.

He whinnied just a bit, and I patted him gingerly, trying to make him know me; then, when he was still, I took a closer look at his leg.

Mitchell glanced sideways at me, almost as if he felt bad about my predicament. “That bad as a whippin’?”

“Wouldn’t’ve had t’ be,” he said, eyeing me in his old belligerent way, “he ain’t been so scairt of your white daddy.”

Mitchell seemed to relent.

I knew every bit of lowland, every rise and knoll, every cave and watering place, every kind of plant and tree.

“Naw, ain’t got no problem.”
Mitchell nodded at the understanding and dismissed any grievance he had with R.T.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Not worried about it,” said George jovially.

“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.”

Now, George, when he was angry, was always short with me; he never minced his words.

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

“What you expect him to do? Go against the law, break all the rules to claim you as his son? That wouldn’t do anybody any good. He break all the social taboos, he might as well pack up and leave this state.”

But there were tender moments between them that I did see, tenderness in the way they looked at each other, tenderness in the way their voices softened in their concern for each other and in their concern for Cassie and me.

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.

“Yes, that’s right, I did it!” she declared defiantly.

He had a broken bridle in his hands.

Howard liked to keep busy when he came, and was always looking for something to do. He couldn’t sit idle.