Now, George, when he was angry, was always short with me; he never minced his words. At other times he was the most jovial of my brothers, the most patient too, taking the time to teach me his skills. But he was known for his impatience with fools or those who gave themselves no worth, and that’s what I was seeing in him now as he chose to have nothing more to do with me. He had said his piece, and now he was finished with it. I watched him go. Robert stayed with me. “You want me to bring you something, Paul?” he asked.
“No,” I said, going down the steps.
“Well, then come on back in the kitchen and get yourself something. There’s a lot of good food in there—ham and fried chicken, dumplings, sweet-potato pie and—”
“Don’t want any,” I replied, and started across the yard.
“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.”