The Land Read Free

Mitchell’s axe. “Boy, you better answer!” he demanded, but Mitchell in a dangerous move yanked on the axe. George too yanked on the axe in an attempt to twist it from Mitchell’s grasp, but then Hammond intervened, stepping between George and Mitchell. George’s hand slipped from the axe, but he still tried to get at Mitchell.
    Hammond pushed him back. “Stop it, George!” he ordered. Then he turned to Mitchell. “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!” Mitchell looked at George, at Hammond, then slammed the axe into a log. Hammond stepped back calmly. “There’s to be no more of that.”
    George shoved past Hammond and pointed his finger right in Mitchell’s face. “You try that on me again and I’ll have your head, boy! You hear me? You best be remembering I’m not Paul!”
    I was afraid Mitchell was going to slap George’s hand away and the two of them would get into it right there, but Mitchell only glared at George and kept his silence. Hammond eyed the both of them and said to Mitchell, “There’s to be no more fighting with Paul.”
    Mitchell looked at the ground.
    â€œIs that understood?”
    Mitchell looked up, first at Hammond, then at me, and I felt my knees go weak. “Yeah,” he mumbled, his eyes fixed on me, and at that moment I knew that my troubles with Mitchell were far from over.
    And I was right.
    The next time Mitchell Thomas caught up with me alone, he near to whipped the living daylights out of me. “Now, go tell your brothers ’bout this beatin’, you white nigger!” he cried as he pummeled me. “For all I care, you can tell yo’ white daddy ’bout it too!”
    But after Mitchell got finished beating on me, I told no one. Instead, I made my way over to the creek and sat on its bank, looked out over my daddy’s land, and pondered why Mitchell and the other boys hated me so. Now, what Mitchell said was true: I did have a white daddy. My daddy was Edward Logan, and Edward Logan was a much-respected man. He was a prosperous man too, or at least he had been before the war had come in 1861, and still now that the war was over by several years, he was doing better than most. He owned a lot of land, and until a few years back he had owned his share of slaves too.
    My mama had been one of those slaves.
    My mama was called by the name of Deborah, and she was equally of the African people and of the native people, the Indians, whom we called the Nation. She was a beautiful woman. My daddy took a liking to her soon after she came into her womanhood, and he took her for his colored woman, and that’s how my older sister Cassie and I came to be. Cassie and I were our daddy’s children, and both of us were born into slavery. Now, there were a lot of white men who fathered colored children in those days, even though the law said no white man could legally father a black child; that was in part so no child of color could inherit from his white daddy. Some white men took care of their colored children; most didn’t. My daddy was one who did. Not only did he take care of Cassie and me, but he acknowledged that we were his, though it was quietly spoken, and he raised us as his, pretty much the same as his white children, and that’s what made us different, what made me different.
    I was a colored boy who looked almost white. Though I had a mixed look to me, upon first seeing me, most folks thought I was white, and for some folks, if they didn’t know different, they kept thinking so. My hair was brown and straight and hung somewhat long most times, to my shoulders. Some called that the Indian look in me, and my mama liked that. My skin was what some folks call olive for some reason, and my features being what they were, people made their own