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.