The Land(20)

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 sleeping 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.”