“You can use this talent too, Paul,” she instructed me. “You could go into business for yourself if you wanted. Enterprising men of color are doing that now, I hear. You ever decide to go into the furniture business, I know a good person to see is a man by the name of Mister Luke Sawyer in Vicksburg. He’s had skilled wood craftsmen working for him before. He runs a mercantile, and he’s a fair man. You could get a good start with him. But you’ve got other possibilities as well. You could go to school. There are great opportunities for young folks like yourself these days. Why, you could go to one of the colored schools here in Mississippi or even north to study. You could become one of the great educators of your people or maybe a lawyer or a doctor to them. You could do it, Paul. You’ve already got the foundation, and you’re certainly bright enough. You could do it easy.”
Maybe that was so, but I wasn’t interested in being a doctor or a lawyer or an educator. I knew Miz Crenshaw meant well, but I never told her what I truly wanted. That I told only to Mitchell. What I wanted was land. I wanted land like my daddy’s. In a way, I suppose, I was driven by the thought of having land of my own. In my early years, before I truly realized my two worlds, I had figured that I’d always live on my daddy’s land, that my daddy’s land would be mine and I’d always be a part of it. When I discovered that wouldn’t be, I created my own land in my mind. I knew that land was what I had to have.
During the time Mitchell and I stayed at Miz Crenshaw’s place, the will to have my own land grew. Although Miz Crenshaw and her daughters and eventually her daughters’ husbands treated Mitchell and me fair, I recognized I was no more than a hired hand, working at somebody else’s say-so, and I knew I had no real future there. As a boy, even though I worked for my daddy, I felt my soul was vested in all I did. It wasn’t that way on the Crenshaw farm. As nice as they were, the Crenshaws were strangers, and what was theirs would stay theirs; they weren’t about to share any of it with me.
Besides that, once Miz Crenshaw’s oldest daughters married, their husbands made it quite clear that things would be taking on a change. One of them, in fact, told Mitchell and me outright, “I know you boys have gotten pretty accustomed to having the run of the place. Over the years since her husband and her boys died in the war, Miz Crenshaw’s had to depend on a number of folks to keep this place running. Now that she’s got menfolks in the family again, she and her daughters won’t have the burden of all that worry. You have questions about the place, you come to us. No need to worry them. One other thing too. You boys stay ’way from inside the main house. There be things to discuss, they can be talked about outside those walls. Understood?”
It was understood, all right. Though Mitchell and I were grateful to Miz Crenshaw and her daughters, it wasn’t long after that Mitchell and I took to the road, and mostly we stayed to it. I still sometimes dreamed of going west and maybe meeting up with George. I also dreamed of meeting my granddaddy Kanati’s people, but none of that happened. Mitchell and I took on jobs and ended up staying for the most part in Mississippi and Louisiana.
First job we took on was in a turpentine camp. In the turpentine camps men of color, many times having their womenfolks with them, set up families and worked in woods far removed from other people. The men were mostly rough, sometimes coming into the camps from whatever they were running from. Some admitted to being escaped convicts. Some even admitted to murder. The bosses didn’t care. They just wanted workers. Besides, sometimes the bosses were murderers or convicts too. In the turpentine camps the men, called chippers, chipped the pines year after year draining from them all that was good, resin for turpentine, resin for tar, resin for medicine. Then, when there was only a shell of the tree left after five years or so, the camp moved on. I didn’t like what was done to the trees. They were hacked out to a slow death, drained of all their treasures until they were worthless. They couldn’t be used for lumber and were left like ghosts to stand hollow and fragile until knocked down in a storm, or a fire consumed them.
Mitchell and I were only seventeen and sixteen years old when we joined up with the turpentine camp, and we thought we knew more than we did. We soon found out differently. The white boss man was in full control. What he said was absolute law and usually there was no other law around. Even if there had been, it would have made no difference. Whatever the white boss man said, the white law would have gone along with him. Once we saw one man of color kill another man of color in the middle of a dispute. The boss man told the chippers to bury the dead man and sent the other man on back to work, and that was all there was to it. He didn’t care. But then there came the day a boy of color not much older than Mitchell and me beat one of the white operators of the camp until he was bloody, then ran away. The bosses and their hounds hunted that boy down, killed him, dragged him back to the camp, and left him there to rot. They wouldn’t even let us bury him. They wanted us to be reminded daily of who was in charge. Mitchell and I got out of that camp as soon as we could, and we didn’t make the mistake of working again in the turpentine camps.