“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?”
I glanced up at Hammond. “Who said I was mad?”
Hammond laughed. “You think I don’t know when you’re mad? Ever since you were a bit of a boy, you’d always go off by yourself when you got mad. You wouldn’t put up a holler like Robert or fight like Cassie and George; you’d just go off by yourself.”
“I suppose you figure I got no reason to be mad.”
“Now, I didn’t say that. From what I been hearing, I know what you’re mad about, and I don’t blame you for it. Fact is, I know how you feel.”
I turned on Hammond. “How could you know anything about how I feel? How could you know how it feels being caught between colored folks and white folks? How could you know how it feels to be sent off from our daddy’s house when his white company comes calling? How could you know anything?”
Hammond scratched at his neck. “You think you’re the only one ever felt this way? Well, Paul, I might not know exactly how it feels to be turned away from our daddy’s table, but I sure know how it feels to hate and resent our daddy, and I sure enough know how it feels to be caught between colored folks and white folks. I know how it feels too to resent the hell out of your own blood, your own brother and sister.”
I stopped, and Hammond did too. He looked straight into my eyes. “You know, when Cassie was born, I was only three. But when you were born, and Robert, I was nine and old enough to understand some things about our daddy, and old enough to understand some things about my mama and how she was feeling. My mama was a good woman, but you know she had to feel bad about our daddy going off being with a colored woman and having children with her. Your mama had four children with our daddy, two of them stillborn, and I remember my mama saying once it was the justice of the Lord that those babies died.
“Then when my mama was expecting Robert, she found out you were born, and I can only imagine what that was like for her, her expecting a baby same time as your mama. She got sick with fever when she was carrying Robert, and she died soon after he was born. Now, you know I had to resent your mama, you, and Cassie too.”
I nodded, never having thought of things that way. “I don’t remember you acting that way, like you didn’t want us.”
“That’s because you were too young to realize it. Ask your mama. For a while there nobody could do a thing with me, I was hating everybody so much. But over time I got to realizing some things. Most important was that your mama took real good care of George and me, and especially Robert. You know, Robert was born sickly, and your mama used to stay up all through the night with him when he was a baby, tending to him.”
My mama had already told me that. She had told me too that though she had tended to Robert, she had never nursed him; she had me to nurse. Besides that, she refused to nurse another woman’s child. She had always had strong feelings about being Edward Logan’s “colored woman,” for there were those who faulted her for being so, despite the fact she’d had no choice in the beginning. She had told Cassie and me, even though she was Edward Logan’s property before the war, there were some things she refused to do for him. Being Robert’s wet nurse was one of them. She said having to nurse another woman’s child reminded her of a sow being forced to suckle another sow’s pig, and no matter what people thought of her, she was no sow.
“Now, even though your mama took good care of all of us,” Hammond went on, “I didn’t want anything to do with her, and I let her know it. I remember one time I disrespected her and my daddy heard, and he near about tore me up because of it. But that still didn’t change things for me. Wasn’t until I was about fourteen or fifteen and your mama herself talked straight to me that I began to let go of some of my feelings.”
“What she say?”
Hammond shook his head and smiled. “I don’t know if you’re old enough to hear. Let’s just say she told me my daddy, when he was a young man, was at first same as any fox in a henhouse where the hens couldn’t get out, and she asked me if I’d be any different than my daddy if the war hadn’t come and all the young chicks were still in the henhouse with no say in their taking. You think on that, she told me, before you go making any judgments.
“Well, by this time I was beginning to feel my manly needs, and I thought on what your mama said. That’s not to say she totally turned me around in my thinking. At first I had kind of resented the way my daddy treated you and Cassie, bringing you up to the house, seating you at the table. Resented too the time he took with both of you and the fact that he himself taught you how to read and write, then expected George and me, along with Robert, to share at the end of each day with you and Cassie whatever we learned in school. I resented a lot of things at first, and I hated him for fathering you and Cassie, then treating you the same as he did my mama’s children, and making us watch out for the two of you. More than one time I got bloodied taking up for you and Cassie when our white friends found out the way our daddy treated you. I even once told him there were plenty of other white men had colored children, but you didn’t see them seating their colored children at their table and seeing that they learned from books.”
“So what our daddy say to that?”
“Said if he treated any of his children less than any other, then what kind of father could he be to any of us? ‘I fathered all of you,’ he said, and said he was responsible for each and every one of us, regardless of who the mother was.”
We both took a moment before I said in a low voice, “You sorry he feel that way?”
“You asking if I still hate him? I got over that a long while back, Paul.”
“What about Cassie and me?” I asked, lower still.
“What about you? I’ve had to wipe your bottom and wipe your nose, clean you both up when you threw up, clean you up when you messed up, so I’ve gotten used to you. You’re my brother, same as George and Robert, and Cassie’s my sister. We might not be able to sit at the same table always, but that shouldn’t make a difference with us.”
“Hammond, how I’m feeling, it’s not just about sitting at the table. It’s that I’m my daddy’s colored son, and that’s how everybody sees me. White folks don’t think I’m as good as you are, and there’re some colored folks think I think I’m better than they are. When I go places with our daddy, he doesn’t say, ‘This is my son Paul.’ He doesn’t own up to me outside of this place, even though everybody knows I’m his. He makes different rules for his white children and his colored children. He talks about treating us the same, but we’re different and he’s the same as anyone else in treating us that way.”
“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.”
“Well, he didn’t mind breaking any taboos when he started sleep
ing with my mama.”
“You’ve got to understand, Paul, that wasn’t really a taboo, just something that wasn’t discussed in polite society.”
“Taboo or not, it makes me different. Cassie and me both.”
“So what?” Hammond questioned. “George, Robert, Cassie, you, me, we’re all different in our way, but we’re still family.”
“And what about when I get full grown?”
“What do you mean?”
“Will we still be family then? Can I sit at your table then?”
My brother shook his head. “I don’t know, Paul. The world’s not made that way, and it’s hard for me to imagine it ever will be much different than now, so I’m not going to lie to you and promise you what I can’t. All I can say is I truly don’t know if you’ll sit at my table openly or if I’ll sit at yours, but I can promise you’ll always be my family. You and Cassie too. I won’t deny you or myself that.”
I thought on his words. “Know what the preacher was speaking on at church this past Sunday?”
“What’s that?”
“How Peter said he’d never deny Jesus either.”
“You comparing yourself to Christ?”
I shook my head. “No. Just saying that when it suits a body, anybody can deny anybody, blood or not.”
After Hammond and I parted, I walked the woods alone for some time and finally made my way home as dusk began to fall. Home was my mama’s house. There was a vegetable garden in the back and a flower garden in front. The house was small and there were only two rooms to it. One was a bedroom that my mama and Cassie had shared. The larger room contained the kitchen, my bed, and the living area. Robert was often at the house as we went about our play and adventures. George and Hammond never came to the house, and my daddy only stopped by occasionally. He never stayed long and I don’t recall his ever spending the night. I stopped in the yard and didn’t go in right away. The kerosene lamp in the front window was already lit. I knew my mama was waiting for me.
I wasn’t ready to face her yet.
I leaned against the old pecan tree that dominated the yard and gazed at my mama’s house, thinking on what was between my mama and my daddy. Everybody knew that my mama was my daddy’s housekeeper and cook, and he paid her for it. But she was more than his housekeeper and cook, and everybody knew that too. Yet my mama and daddy never flaunted what was between them. I never saw them hold each other. I never saw them show open affection. 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. When there was only family present, my mama spoke frankly to my daddy and sometimes she spoke sharply to him too, as a wife might. But she never sat at his dining table. She said she was there to serve his table, not to sit at it, though I think she was more concerned about how it would look to others if she sat at his table. People hearing that Edward Logan’s children of color sat at his table was one thing. A colored woman with her children sitting at his table would have been another; that would have been too bold.
Still, there were times when my mama and daddy did sit together, though not at meals. Sometimes when my daddy came into the kitchen, he would sit at the table and talk to my mama as she worked, and sometimes she would stop her work and join him. She would pour my daddy a cup of coffee or a glass of lemonade or such, and one for herself too, and they would talk of the farm or of my daddy’s business or of us children. Though my mama sat with my daddy, I never saw her set a meal for the two of them. Whatever meals they shared together, they shared alone.
I thought on the life my mama and my daddy had made together and the life they had made for Cassie and me. I thought on Hammond and what he had said. I thought on his mother too. I considered how my life would have been if I had had a colored daddy. Boys like Mitchell and R.T. would have been more accepting of me, and I wouldn’t have felt so much hurt about not sitting at Edward Logan’s table when company came, for I would never have been invited to sit there in the first place. But then I thought about the fact that if my daddy had been a man of color, I wouldn’t have had George and Hammond and Robert as my brothers. I thought on a lot of things about my life and in the end decided I had a right to be angry. I had a right to be angry at both my mama and my daddy. I took that anger into the house with me.
I found my mama sitting in her rocker, a splendid rocker made by a man up in Macon, the same man with whom my daddy said he was sending me to study. My daddy had given my mama the rocker. As I entered, my mama glared at me. “You think you grown now?” she asked.
“Ma’am?” I answered.
“You think you grown? I told you not to leave that porch.”
“I know you did . . . but I couldn’t stay there—”
“And why not?”
I turned on her. “I expect you know.”
My mama’s voice grew tight. “I knew, I wouldn’t be asking you.”
“Well, then,” I said, feeling my near to twelve-year-old manhood, “maybe you ought to be asking that white man you lying with—”
Now, I was feeling bad about all my angry thoughts against my mama, blaming her for being with my daddy. There was a part of me too that resented the fact that I was not like my brothers, born to their white mother. If I had been, then I could have always sat at my daddy’s table and socialized with my daddy’s friends. I would have been accepted. Even as I had those thoughts, I felt a mighty guilt, for I loved my mama. Though we clashed because of all my resentment, I wouldn’t have given her up for anything. I was all conflicted, and I suppose that’s what made me speak the way I did to her, and I was mad at myself for doing so.
But I was no match for my mama about being mad. She jumped up from that rocker quicker than lightning and grabbed the leather strap hanging by the fireplace. “Let me tell you something, boy,” she said in a voice I’d never heard from her. “I was your mama when I bore you, I was your mama to you all your eleven years, and I’ll be your mama to you ’til I die, and, what’s more, I’ll be your mama to you ’til you die!” Then she laid into me with that strap. I was taller than she was by now, stronger too, and I could have ripped the strap from her hands, but I would never have disrespected my mama in that fashion. Instead, I moved quick, so she only got a few licks on me; still, she kept on flailing that strap. I supposed it was the principle of the thing with her. I had disobeyed her, I had disrespected her, and she wouldn’t tolerate that. After all, as she said, she always had been, and always would be, my mama, and I knew that was true. There was no changing that, and in truth, I didn’t want to. I remember that whipping in particular, because that was the last time my mama whipped me.
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, Cassi
e,” 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?”