The Land by Mildred D. Taylor Page B

folks saying that word ‘half’ brother. How can you be ‘half’ of a brother? Either you’re brothers or you’re not!”
    â€œWell,” I decided, “that’s just the way things are.”
    â€œI s’pose.”
    â€œIt’s true.”
    We let the silence settle once more.
    â€œWell, anyway,” Robert said, breaking it again, “I don’t want us going off to separate schools, miles and miles from each other.”
    â€œMe neither, but it’s a ways off yet. Least we got the summer.” I was trying to look on the bright side of the thing; I resigned myself to what was to come. “’Sides, it’s our daddy’s decision. We’ve got no say in it.”
    â€œYeah . . . I know. But maybe he’ll change his mind.”
    We looked at each other then. We both knew there was little our daddy ever changed his mind about. We knew, too, our daddy figured sending us off to school was what was best; still I couldn’t help but feel something was being wedged between Robert and me.
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    It was during that summer before Robert and I were supposed to go off to school that I came to the true realization that I had two families. In part it was Mitchell who brought me to this realization, and the things he said to me; in part it was all the little things of my life and a matter of growing up. There were my daddy and my brothers on the one side of our family, and Cassie, my mama, and me on the other. Though from the beginning there had been some separateness between us, what with my mama having her own house and Cassie and me staying with her, that hadn’t seemed strange to me, seeing that we were always up to our daddy’s house anyway and my daddy and my brothers were always around. We were all connected, but the family line was muddled by color, and as I grew older, things began to take on different meanings for me. When I was younger, before Mitchell and the other boys started in on me, I had given little thought to any difference: to the fact that my mama, Cassie, and I were colored, and my daddy and my brothers were white.
    Maybe that was partly because I had never experienced any real hardship from being colored. Although I was born into slavery shortly before the start of the war that would end slavery, I had never been treated as a slave. It was the early 1870’s when I was growing up, and by then life on my daddy’s land had settled down from the four years of war. The farm had suffered badly during the war years; there had been no cash crops, and what was grown, including the animals, was confiscated. Things now, though, were going well. That’s because after my daddy had returned from the fighting, he had begun to rebuild his land. His own daddy, Lyndsey Logan, along with his mama, Helen, had died of influenza during the conflict, and his brother had been killed in action, so everything fell on my daddy’s shoulders. To save his land, my daddy had let part of it go for taxes and had allowed logging on another. He had also traded for horses both at home and in Texas. My mama often talked about the hard times of those days during and right after the war, and how my daddy had struggled to keep his land. She talked about the hard times of slavery too, and she said the war hadn’t changed things totally for anybody. White folks ruled the world before the war, she said, and they ruled it still.
    I was, of course, too young to remember slavery or even that much of the war, but I could see certain aspects of what my mama meant. I could see what she meant in the way some white folks talked to colored folks, in the way some colored folks talked to white folks. I could see it in the shanties colored folks lived in on my daddy’s land and in the clothes they wore and in the food they ate. I could see it in the towns when I went with my daddy: White folks were in charge. Still, when I was a small boy, that didn’t bother