“So what?” Hammond questioned. “George, Robert, Cassie, you, me, we’re all different in our way, but we’re still family.”
“And what about when I get full grown?”
“What do you mean?”
“Will we still be family then? Can I sit at your table then?”
My brother shook his head. “I don’t know, Paul. The world’s not made that way, and it’s hard for me to imagine it ever will be much different than now, so I’m not going to lie to you and promise you what I can’t. All I can say is I truly don’t know if you’ll sit at my table openly or if I’ll sit at yours, but I can promise you’ll always be my family. You and Cassie too. I won’t deny you or myself that.”
I thought on his words. “Know what the preacher was speaking on at church this past Sunday?”
“What’s that?”
“How Peter said he’d never deny Jesus either.”
“You comparing yourself to Christ?”
I shook my head. “No. Just saying that when it suits a body, anybody can deny anybody, blood or not.”
After Hammond and I parted, I walked the woods alone for some time and finally made my way home as dusk began to fall. Home was my mama’s house. There was a vegetable garden in the back and a flower garden in front. The house was small and there were only two rooms to it. One was a bedroom that my mama and Cassie had shared. The larger room contained the kitchen, my bed, and the living area. Robert was often at the house as we went about our play and adventures. George and Hammond never came to the house, and my daddy only stopped by occasionally. He never stayed long and I don’t recall his ever spending the night. I stopped in the yard and didn’t go in right away. The kerosene lamp in the front window was already lit. I knew my mama was waiting for me.
I wasn’t ready to face her yet.
I leaned against the old pecan tree that dominated the yard and gazed at my mama’s house, thinking on what was between my mama and my daddy. Everybody knew that my mama was my daddy’s housekeeper and cook, and he paid her for it. But she was more than his housekeeper and cook, and everybody knew that too. Yet my mama and daddy never flaunted what was between them. I never saw them hold each other. I never saw them show open affection. But there were tender moments between them that I did see, tenderness in the way they looked at each other, tenderness in the way their voices softened in their concern for each other and in their concern for Cassie and me. When there was only family present, my mama spoke frankly to my daddy and sometimes she spoke sharply to him too, as a wife might. But she never sat at his dining table. She said she was there to serve his table, not to sit at it, though I think she was more concerned about how it would look to others if she sat at his table. People hearing that Edward Logan’s children of color sat at his table was one thing. A colored woman with her children sitting at his table would have been another; that would have been too bold.
Still, there were times when my mama and daddy did sit together, though not at meals. Sometimes when my daddy came into the kitchen, he would sit at the table and talk to my mama as she worked, and sometimes she would stop her work and join him. She would pour my daddy a cup of coffee or a glass of lemonade or such, and one for herself too, and they would talk of the farm or of my daddy’s business or of us children. Though my mama sat with my daddy, I never saw her set a meal for the two of them. Whatever meals they shared together, they shared alone.
I thought on the life my mama and my daddy had made together and the life they had made for Cassie and me. I thought on Hammond and what he had said. I thought on his mother too. I considered how my life would have been if I had had a colored daddy. Boys like Mitchell and R.T. would have been more accepting of me, and I wouldn’t have felt so much hurt about not sitting at Edward Logan’s table when company came, for I would never have been invited to sit there in the first place. But then I thought about the fact that if my daddy had been a man of color, I wouldn’t have had George and Hammond and Robert as my brothers. I thought on a lot of things about my life and in the end decided I had a right to be angry. I had a right to be angry at both my mama and my daddy. I took that anger into the house with me.
I found my mama sitting in her rocker, a splendid rocker made by a man up in Macon, the same man with whom my daddy said he was sending me to study. My daddy had given my mama the rocker. As I entered, my mama glared at me. “You think you grown now?” she asked.
“Ma’am?” I answered.
“You think you grown? I told you not to leave that porch.”