The Land by Mildred D. Taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

did.”
    â€œDon’t matter,” said Mitchell. “Your daddy’s the boss man—the white boss man—and you got no right t’ throw that in their face.”
    â€œAnd they’ve got no right to judge me ’cause of who my daddy is. I’m not ashamed of who I am, and I’m not ashamed of my daddy!”
    Mitchell was silent.
    I closed my book and stared at him. “You figuring maybe I need to be?”
    Mitchell looked at me. “Not figurin’ anythin’. Jus’ can’t understand how it feels t’ have a white daddy, that’s all. Can’t figure out how you could love a white daddy who owned your mama and you. Can’t figure how you can be so crazy ’bout them white brothers of yours neither, when once y’all all grown, they’ll be the boss and you’ll be jus’ another nigger.”
    I got up from the bank. “They never use that word to me, and that’s not how it’s going to be.”
    â€œWhat make you think so?”
    â€œBecause they’re my family.”
    Mitchell nodded and faced the pond. “Still can’t figure it.”
    â€œI’ve got to go. I’m going hunting.”
    â€œWho wit’?”
    â€œWith my daddy.”
    Mitchell looked around at me. “Good huntin’, then” was all he said.
    Â 
    â€œMitchell been beating up on you again?” asked my daddy as we set up camp that evening.
    â€œNo, sir. Some other boys.”
    â€œHow do they look?”
    I grinned up at my daddy. “’Bout the same. Mitchell helped me out.”
    My daddy nodded, and the two of us went about building a fire. We were planning to hunt coon later in the night, and in the morning hunt some wild turkeys. My daddy often took me hunting. Sometimes we all went, my daddy and my brothers and me, though Hammond and George often went hunting on their own. There were times too when my daddy took just Robert and me. But the times that were most special were when it was only my daddy and me on a hunt. At those times I had my daddy all to myself, and I cherished that. I learned many things from my daddy, and when I was a small boy, there seemed no one like him to me. I’m not ashamed to admit it. In those early days I adored my daddy.
    Now, when my daddy would take me on a hunt, he often talked about when he was a boy, and it made me proud when he said I reminded him of himself. “You’re much like me,” he told me once. “When I was a boy, I loved to read and I loved horses. I loved this land too. My granddaddy had gotten it before I was born, back before the turn of the century, when there were plenty of Indians settled around here. There still were some here when I was a boy, and I got to know a few and they taught me a lot.”
    â€œMister Edward,” I said when he told me that, thinking of my own Indian blood, “you ever meet my mama’s daddy?” Now, I always called my daddy “Mister Edward,” just as Cassie and my mama did, though I had come on my mama and daddy in their quiet times and had heard her say his name out straight Edward and that was all. It seemed peculiar to me at first that I called my daddy by a formal name while Robert and Hammond and George called him “Daddy.” But my mama had broken both Cassie and me when we were still little from ever calling Edward Logan “Daddy.” She had broken that misspeaking with bottom-warming spankings whenever we did. When I asked my mama why Cassie and I couldn’t call our daddy the same as Robert and George and Hammond, she said simply, “They’re white and you’re not, and their mama was his legal wife.” I didn’t ask her again about it after that, and I settled into addressing my daddy as if he were not, and after a while calling him “Mister Edward” was the same as calling him Daddy, or at least that was what was in my mind.
    As for what my daddy