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

was standing right beside him.
    My daddy glanced at me, then said to Robert, “She’s your mother’s mother and she’s to be respected.”
    â€œWell, she don’t respect Paul and Cassie!”
    My daddy nodded. “I’ve spoken to her.”
    â€œWell, she ain’t listened!”
    â€œMaybe not,” said our daddy, “but she stays just the same. She’s your mother’s mother, and she’ll be here as long as she wants to be. Both of you, all of you, you’ll just have to put up with her ways.” I noticed that my daddy glanced past us and that his eyes settled on my mama standing in the doorway.
    Robert’s grandmother died a few years later, but there were always others who sat at our daddy’s table who thought the same as she had about Cassie and me. I suppose my daddy could have been trying in part to protect Cassie and me from all those people, while saving his own social standing, but even thinking of that possibility didn’t ease our pain. We’d been sent off just the same.
    Eventually there came the time on a late summer afternoon just before my twelfth birthday when folks came to visit and it was my mama, not my daddy, who ordered me to the kitchen. Robert was now expected to stay at my daddy’s table, and no amount of protest on his part changed that. My mama set a lone plate for me on the sideboard in the kitchen. That was truly the first time I felt unwanted in my daddy’s family. My daddy hadn’t even bothered to tell me himself not to sit at his table. He had left that to my mama, and I resented not only him for it, but her too.
    â€œYou sit down,” my mama said, “and I’ll fix your plate.”
    â€œYou don’t have to fix me anything,” I said, pouting.
    â€œIt’ll be the same food I’ve cooked for your daddy.”
    â€œI don’t want it.”
    â€œPaul, you hafta eat.”
    â€œNot in this house,” I said, and left.
    â€œPaul-Edward!” she called after me. “Boy, don’t you go no farther’n them steps! You hear me?”
    I heard her, all right. I just didn’t admit I did. I walked the back side of the veranda, out of my mama’s view, and leaned against a post and looked out across the backyard to my daddy’s forest. I stared at that forest, the forest that had always seemed to be a part of me, and felt alienated from it, from it and everything that was my daddy’s.
    It was then that George and Robert came along, exiting from the kitchen in their best suits. “So, what’s this I hear from your mama about you not taking any supper?” asked George.
    I slipped my hands into my pockets and looked stone-faced at George and Robert. “You worried about me eating?”
    â€œNot worried about it,” said George jovially. “But considering how much you do eat, just was wondering why you’re not.”
    â€œYou’re smart enough to be going off to a military academy,” I said with a smart mouth, “you figure it out.”
    George moved closer to me, and his smile faded as he gazed at me with his sky-blue eyes. “Oh, I got it figured, all right. You want to be the fool because of it and not eat, that’s up to you. Just know that your not getting good food isn’t doing anybody any detriment except maybe for yourself. I was in your place, I’d eat my daddy out of house and home. I’d figure he owed me that much. Course, what you do is up to you.” George stared at me a moment or two, then walked away, up the veranda toward the front of the house.
    Now, George, when he was angry, was always short with me; he never minced his words. At other times he was the most jovial of my brothers, the most patient too, taking the time to teach me his skills. But he was known for his impatience with fools or those who gave themselves no worth, and that’s what I was seeing in him now as he chose to have