The Land (19 page)

Though Mitchell and I otherwise remained pretty closemouthed, Miz Crenshaw seemed not to take offense and was always giving us her advice, and particularly to me, since Mitchell showed no interest whatsoever in following any she gave him. When she discovered I had book learning, she encouraged me to read and was always bringing books she thought would be good for me. Later on she arranged for me to do some teaching to other folks of color in the area, and when she learned of my carpentry skills, she took that in hand too. She had some carpentry tools she let me use, and I built her two small lamp tables. She paid me extra to fix things for her, and even sent me up to a man in the area to do further apprenticing.

“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.

After that, I took on teaching jobs and carpentry work, and sometimes I trained and raced horses. But mostly, Mitchell and I went lumbering, working long hours in the Louisiana and Mississippi lumber camps. I didn't have to go to the camps to find work. I went because of Mitchell. He liked the camps, the excitement of them, and the danger. When Mitchell asked me to work in a camp with him, I did so because he asked, and Mitchell was now family to me, the only person near I could count on. I was the only person Mitchell could count on too.

Now, being small built and so white-looking, I always had to prove myself in the camps, and I worked as hard as any man to pull my own load and didn't let anybody beat me. Mitchell had no problem in pulling his own. He was tall and muscular, a good-looking young man to the womenfolks, and other men respected him on sight. Mitchell was just that kind of person. However, he still had his quick temper and sullen ways, and that meant trouble too many times. Seeing that Mitchell and I always backed each other up, like at Miz Mary's place, I sometimes found myself in a fight when the matter had nothing at all to do with me and many times made no sense to me either. I didn't like brawling, and I figured the best way to stay out of needless trouble was to stay out of places like Miz Mary's. Now I was angry at myself for letting Mitchell talk me into going there in the first place.

The longer I sat on that stump in that night chill, I thought that maybe it was a good thing I had been caught up in another senseless fight. Maybe it was a good thing the boss man Jessup had taken such a strong dislike to me and pushed me into working for him for nothing. Maybe I needed this anger that had built up in me to get me moving in another direction. It was my nature to always look at what seemed a setback as being something from which I was supposed to learn. I figured everything that happened was supposed to be telling me something, and I always figured there was something good that was supposed to come out of the something bad, if I just took the time to study on what it was. Well, I was taking the time now, and I had made up my mind about one thing. This kind of life wasn't what I wanted, and it was time for me to move on.

I rose from the stump. I'd been sitting there for the better part of the night, but I had things figured now. First thing I did was gather up some firewood, then I headed back with it to the shanty. No one was there. It was dark and cold in the shanty, with not even the fire that dimly lit the room on work nights. There wasn't even moonlight shining in, for there were no windows. I laid the wood on the floor, then tacked back the tarp over the door to bring the moonlight in. I found my bedroll packed with my gear. I unrolled it and took out one of the blankets. I placed logs in that blanket, rolled it carefully up again, and tied it with rope, so that it looked as if all my gear was still inside. I did the same with Mitchell's gear, then placed the blanket-wrapped logs where our bedrolls had been. I re-rolled the rest of our gear and took it with me back to the woods, where I hid it in the brush. Then, without a blanket or a fire to warm me, I settled on the damp ground and went to sleep.

 

That morning I rose with an aching head and a swollen jaw. It was another foggy morning, and though I had on long johns under my pants and wore a coat over the heavier of my two work shirts, I shivered uncontrollably. My body was stiff from sleeping in the damp, but I took up my axe from the tool shed and headed for the slope. It being Sunday, there was no breakfast. The cook had the day off. When I got to the chopping line, I found Mitchell sitting on a stump, waiting for me.

“What you doing here?” I said.

“Waitin' on you. Time t' go t' work.”

“This is my load,” I contended. “It's not on you.”

“Not on me? You know Jessup just used me bein' away the other night as an excuse to come down on you. 'Sides, anythin' on you, it's on me. You know that.”

I knew that, all right. I had expected Mitchell to come sooner or later, for if the situation were switched, I would have been there for him. I acknowledged his words with a nod, then said, “I decided, Mitchell.”

“What's that?”

“I can't stay working here.”

Mitchell jumped up. “Then let's go! We get our gear and head outa here right now!”

“Can't do that, not yet. Jessup'll be watching, and he won't hesitate to put the sheriff after us.”

“Then what we do? Work here all day for nothin'?”

“That's right.”

“Ah, naw—”

“We put in this day's work, Jessup won't figure us to be going off come nightfall. He would be figuring if I were going to run, I'd've done it last night. If we leave at nightfall headed back toward Miz Mary's, nobody'll question us. Lot of the men'll be staying up at Miz Mary's sleeping the night through, so there'll be no question either about us not being in camp come nightfall. Now, I figure we can both work this day if it means putting some ten or more hours between us and them.”

Mitchell nodded, mulling over what I was saying. “Thing is, I just don't like the idea of givin' this man a day's work for nothin'.”

“It's either that or we take off right now and end up with Jessup's dogs chasing after and most likely catching us.”

Mitchell conceded to my thinking. “Well, I ain't leavin' without my gear.”

“Don't worry. I've got it already and I've got it hid, all except for one of your blankets. Had to leave one of yours and one of mine.”

“I gotta leave my good blanket? Why ain't you brung it?”

“Because I wrapped those blankets around some logs. Had to leave something looking like bedrolls. Figured as long as they thought our gear was still here, they'd think we were too.”

Mitchell wasn't happy. “First a day's pay, now my good blanket!” He slammed his axe into a tree. “That boss man, he better stay clear of me this day! He done made me mad!”

 

Maylene arrived unexpectedly at noon riding one of Miz Mary's mules and bringing us dinner. She surprised both Mitchell and me with a feast of fried chicken, ham hocks and collard greens, corn bread, and even pecan pie. She brought hot coffee too, the real thing, not the chicory we'd been drinking in the camp. It was a Sunday feast. I thanked Maylene and took one of the drum-sticks and a piece of corn bread.

“Girl, where you get a chicken t' fry?” Mitchell asked her.

“Miz Mary,” Maylene said shyly. “I done tole Miz Mary how Paul Logan done had t' work this day and how you done said ya wasn't gonna let him do this work by hisself, and how you was gonna work too. Tole her wasn't no food served on Sunday here at the camp and she done tole me I could bring part of this here chicken up to y'all.”

Mitchell grinned. “Yeah? That a fact? Never knowed Miz Mary was so generous.”

“Had t' do some tradin' too,” said Maylene.

“What kinda tradin'?”

“Nothin' much. Jus' tradin'” She looked at me as she reached into a sack she held. “These papers here, they yo's,” she said, handing them to me. “Found 'em on the floor last night where ya been sittin'.”

It was the letter I had been writing to Cassie. “Thank you,” I said.

Maylene accepted my gratitude with the same shy smile with which she had first greeted me, then admonished, “Y'all eat up now. I'm a good cook.”

She started away, but Mitchell pulled her back, putting his arms around her waist. “Ain't ya gonna eat with us?”

“Naw. I gotta get back.”

“I don't think so.” Mitchell smiled down at her, and she glowed in his smile.

I interrupted the lovers. “Mitchell, I need to talk to you a minute.”

“Now?”

“Now, before Miss Maylene goes,” I said, and walked away, still holding my chicken and corn bread. After a minute or two, Mitchell followed.