Free The Land by Mildred D. Taylor

Cassie too.”
    I nodded, never having thought of things that way. “I don’t remember you acting that way, like you didn’t want us.”
    â€œThat’s because you were too young to realize it. Ask your mama. For a while there nobody could do a thing with me, I was hating everybody so much. But over time I got to realizing some things. Most important was that your mama took real good care of George and me, and especially Robert. You know, Robert was born sickly, and your mama used to stay up all through the night with him when he was a baby, tending to him.”
    My mama had already told me that. She had told me too that though she had tended to Robert, she had never nursed him; she had me to nurse. Besides that, she refused to nurse another woman’s child. She had always had strong feelings about being Edward Logan’s “colored woman,” for there were those who faulted her for being so, despite the fact she’d had no choice in the beginning. She had told Cassie and me, even though she was Edward Logan’s property before the war, there were some things she refused to do for him. Being Robert’s wet nurse was one of them. She said having to nurse another woman’s child reminded her of a sow being forced to suckle another sow’s pig, and no matter what people thought of her, she was no sow.
    â€œNow, even though your mama took good care of all of us,” Hammond went on, “I didn’t want anything to do with her, and I let her know it. I remember one time I disrespected her and my daddy heard, and he near about tore me up because of it. But that still didn’t change things for me. Wasn’t until I was about fourteen or fifteen and your mama herself talked straight to me that I began to let go of some of my feelings.”
    â€œWhat she say?”
    Hammond shook his head and smiled. “I don’t know if you’re old enough to hear. Let’s just say she told me my daddy, when he was a young man, was at first same as any fox in a henhouse where the hens couldn’t get out, and she asked me if I’d be any different than my daddy if the war hadn’t come and all the young chicks were still in the henhouse with no say in their taking. You think on that, she told me, before you go making any judgments.
    â€œWell, by this time I was beginning to feel my manly needs, and I thought on what your mama said. That’s not to say she totally turned me around in my thinking. At first I had kind of resented the way my daddy treated you and Cassie, bringing you up to the house, seating you at the table. Resented too the time he took with both of you and the fact that he himself taught you how to read and write, then expected George and me, along with Robert, to share at the end of each day with you and Cassie whatever we learned in school. I resented a lot of things at first, and I hated him for fathering you and Cassie, then treating you the same as he did my mama’s children, and making us watch out for the two of you. More than one time I got bloodied taking up for you and Cassie when our white friends found out the way our daddy treated you. I even once told him there were plenty of other white men had colored children, but you didn’t see them seating their colored children at their table and seeing that they learned from books.”
    â€œSo what our daddy say to that?”
    â€œSaid if he treated any of his children less than any other, then what kind of father could he be to any of us? ‘I fathered all of you,’ he said, and said he was responsible for each and every one of us, regardless of who the mother was.”
    We both took a moment before I said in a low voice, “You sorry he feel that way?”
    â€œYou asking if I still hate him? I got over that a long while back, Paul.”
    â€œWhat about Cassie and me?” I asked, lower still.
    â€œWhat about you? I’ve had to wipe your bottom and