“I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be getting too close to Wade Jamison,” I said when the day’s work was done and we sat at the outdoor fire eating our supper.
Nathan glanced away, then back at me again. “Why not? He nice enough.”
“Nice enough, yes,” I agreed. “But he’s white.”
Nathan’s eyes went downward and he studied his cup. “Ain’t nobody round here much, ’ceptin’ us. Wade, he seem t’ like me and he smart. I don’t see nothin’ wrong bein’ friends with him.”
“Maybe you don’t,” I said. “But in my life I’ve found there’s no such thing as a lasting and equal friendship between black and white.” I thought on my brother Robert. “If you’re colored, that white man’s going to always think of you with your color in mind, and I don’t care how close you think you are, if that white man figure it’s in his interest to turn his back on you, that’s just what he’s going to do.”
Nathan shrugged off my words. “All we do is go fishin’.”
“Fishing?” Again I thought on my brother. I thought on the fishing poles nestled near the creek in that mound of rocks on my daddy’s land. I knew it had to be hard on Nathan being in this place with only me, working this land without his family. I knew what it meant to have a friend when a boy was his age. I knew that kind of blind trust. I knew also about betrayal. I could have told him about Robert, but I chose not to do so. Maybe for a while this boy Wade wouldn’t hurt him. “Fishing,” I repeated. “It’s a good passing of time with a friend,” I said. Then I looked pointedly at Nathan. “Just don’t pass too much of it with Wade Jamison.”
Nathan eyed me resentfully, and I figured he was regretting his daddy’s admonition to do what I told him. “I gotta go fetch water for the mornin’,” he said, and got up. As I watched him heading for the creek with a bucket in each hand, I knew I hadn’t gotten through to him. I took one last sip of my chicory, then tossed another log on the fire. I decided Nathan would have to find out for himself what it meant to have a friendship with a boy the likes of Wade Jamison, a friendship with a white boy.
It wasn’t long following that talk with Nathan that I came down from chopping and found Wade working alongside Nathan hacking off branches. I called Nathan aside. “How come you’ve got Wade working with you?”
“He jus’ helpin’ me out, that’s all.”
“Well, you thank him and tell him to go.”
“But—”
“Do as I say!” My words came out sterner than I’d intended.
As I walked away, I heard Wade say to Nathan, “You get in trouble ’cause of me?”
And I heard Nathan say, “Forget it. He don’t understand.”
I heard that, and I knew unless I talked to this boy about how things were, about how things had been between folks as close as my brothers and me, I knew he would go on trusting folks he shouldn’t, folks he couldn’t. So I went back on what I’d decided earlier about Nathan learning for himself how the world was, and that same night, after the day’s work was done and the brush was burned, I sat with Nathan again at the outside fire and told him about Robert. “You might know this already,” I said, “that my daddy was a white man. Well, my daddy had five children, far as I know. Two of those children were with my mama. That was my sister and me. The other three were boys with his white wife. My daddy raised my sister and me with those boys, and he acknowledged my sister and me, that we were his. He made those white sons of his share everything of theirs with my sister and me, and that included their learning.
“Now, of those boys who were my brothers, I was closest with the youngest because he was the same age as me. The two of us, we did everything together. We weren’t only brothers, we were the best of friends. We couldn’t’ve been any closer. Then there came the time when we were both thirteen, entering our young manhood, when white friends of his from school came to visit. They were boys we’d both despised when we were younger, and we’d stood together against them. But on this visit my brother wanted only to please them, and he turned his back on me to do it.”
I stared out into the black night and felt that old hurt welling up within me again. “He was my brother, my best friend, but he turned his back on me so he could face his white friends. I learned a terrible, painful, hurtful lesson the day he did that, and I keep it with me in remembrance. We weren’t just friends, we were blood. Still, he turned his back, and I learned right then that white folks are going to be white folks, no matter how close a person of color is to them. White folks, they’re going to look out for their own, and that’s other white folks.”