When I was a little boy, being sent off to the kitchen to eat or outside to play didn’t bother me, because Robert was always sent off with me. But then as we grew older, Robert was allowed to stay when the visitors came for their socializing, though at first he wouldn’t stay without me. Even his grandmother couldn’t make him stay. Robert’s grandma on his mama’s side always hated the fact that my daddy allowed Cassie and me to sit at his table and enjoy the life she felt was owed only to her daughter’s children. When the daughter died, her mother was there in my daddy’s house. Of course, I was only a baby at the time, but later I grew to know her hatred. She had stayed on in my daddy’s house and took over running it. I remember she was always hard on my mama, and on Cassie and me. When my daddy was away during mealtime, she would send Cassie and me from the table. When that happened, Robert always went with me, and she couldn’t make him come back. Worse than that, she would sometimes say cruel things to us. “They’re like mites,” she said once. “You get them in your bed, and you don’t ever get rid of them.”
She said that right in my daddy’s presence. My daddy spoke her name, as if to quiet her, but Cassie had been sitting at the table and she jumped up and threw her plate right on the floor. “Don’t you think I know what you mean?” she cried. “I know what you mean, you hateful old thing! Come on, Paul!”
I got up, not fully understanding. My daddy told me to sit back down and I did so, but Cassie had run out.
Later Robert said to our daddy, “Why don’t you just make her go away?” I was standing right beside him.
My daddy glanced at me, then said to Robert, “She’s your mother’s mother and she’s to be respected.”
“Well, she don’t respect Paul and Cassie!”
My daddy nodded. “I’ve spoken to her.”
“Well, she ain’t listened!”
“Maybe not,” said our daddy, “but she stays just the same. She’s your mother’s mother, and she’ll be here as long as she wants to be. Both of you, all of you, you’ll just have to put up with her ways.” I noticed that my daddy glanced past us and that his eyes settled on my mama standing in the doorway.
Robert’s grandmother died a few years later, but there were always others who sat at our daddy’s table who thought the same as she had about Cassie and me. I suppose my daddy could have been trying in part to protect Cassie and me from all those people, while saving his own social standing, but even thinking of that possibility didn’t ease our pain. We’d been sent off just the same.
Eventually there came the time on a late summer afternoon just before my twelfth birthday when folks came to visit and it was my mama, not my daddy, who ordered me to the kitchen. Robert was now expected to stay at my daddy’s table, and no amount of protest on his part changed that. My mama set a lone plate for me on the sideboard in the kitchen. That was truly the first time I felt unwanted in my daddy’s family. My daddy hadn’t even bothered to tell me himself not to sit at his table. He had left that to my mama, and I resented not only him for it, but her too.
“You sit down,” my mama said, “and I’ll fix your plate.”
“You don’t have to fix me anything,” I said, pouting.
“It’ll be the same food I’ve cooked for your daddy.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Paul, you hafta eat.”
“Not in this house,” I said, and left.
“Paul-Edward!” she called after me. “Boy, don’t you go no farther’n them steps! You hear me?”
I heard her, all right. I just didn’t admit I did. 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.
It was then that George and Robert came along, exiting from the kitchen in their best suits. “So, what’s this I hear from your mama about you not taking any supper?” asked George.
I slipped my hands into my pockets and looked stone-faced at George and Robert. “You worried about me eating?”
“Not worried about it,” said George jovially. “But considering how much you do eat, just was wondering why you’re not.”
“You’re smart enough to be going off to a military academy,” I said with a smart mouth, “you figure it out.”
George moved closer to me, and his smile faded as he gazed at me with his sky-blue eyes. “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.” George stared at me a moment or two, then walked away, up the veranda toward the front of the house.