"LITTLE MAN, would you come on? You keep it up and you're gonna make us late."
My youngest brother paid no attention to me. Grasping more firmly his news paper- wrapped notebook and his tin-can lunch of cornbread and oil sausages, he continued to concentrate on the dusty road. He lagged several feet behind my other brothers, Stacey and Christopher-john, and me, attempting to keep the rusty Mississippi dust from swelling with each step and drifting back upon his shinny black shoes and the cuffs of his corduroy pants by lifting each foot high before setting it gently down again. Always meticulously neat, six year- old Little man never allowed dirt or tears or stain to mar anything he owned.
Today was no exception.
"you keep it up and make us late for school, Mama's gonna wear you out,'' I threatened, pulling with exasperation at the high collar of the Sunday dress mama had made me wear for the first day of School - as if that event were something special. It seemed to me that showing up at school at all on a bright August-like October morning made for running the cool forest trails and wading barefoot in the forest pond was concession enough;Sunday clothing was asking too much.
Christopher-john and Stacey were not too pleased about the clothing or school either. Only little man, just beginning his school career,found the prospects of both intriguing. "y''all go ahead and get dirty if "y"all wanna,'he replied without even looking up from his studied steps. "Me,l'm gonna stay clean."
"I betcha mama's gonna "clean" you, you keep it up",I grumbled.
'Ah, Cassie, leave him be,'Stacey admonished, frowning and kicking tastily at the road.
"I ain't said nothing but-'
Stacey cut me a wicked look and I grew silent.His disposition had been irritatingly sour lately. If I hadn't known the cause of it, I could have forgotten very easily that he was, at twelve, bigger than I, and that I had promised mama to arrive at school looking clean and ladylike.'Shoot,' I mumbled finally, unable to restrain myself from further comment, 'it ain't my fault you gotta be in Mama's class this year.'
Stacey's frown deepened and he jammed his fists into his pockets, but said nothing.
Christopher-john, walking between stacey and me, glanced uneasily at both of us but did not interfere. A short,round boy of seven,he took little interest in troublesome things, preferring to remain on good terms with everyone. Yet he was always sensitive to others and now, shifting the handle of his lunch can from his right hand to his right wrist and his smudged notebook from his left hand to his left armpit, he stuffed his free hands into his pockets and attempted to make his face as moody as Stacey's and as cranky as mine.
But after a few moments he seemed to forget that he was supposed to be grouchy and began whistling cheerfully. There was little that could make christopher-john unhappy for very long, not even the thought of school. I tugged again at my collar and dragged my feet in the dusk, allowing it to sift back onto my socks and shoes like gritty red snow. I hated the dress. And the shoes. There was little I could do in a dress, and as for shoes, they imprisoned freedom -loving feet accustomed to the feel of the warm earth.
'Cassie, stop that,'Stacey snapped as the dust billowed on swirling clouds around my feet. I looked up sharply ready to protest. Christopher-john's whistling increased to a raucous,nervous shrill, and grudgingly I let the matter drop and trudged along in moody silence, my brothers growing as pensively quiet as I.
Before us the narrow, sun-splotched road wound like a lazy red serpent dividing the forest bank of quiet, old trees on the left from the cotton field,forested by giant green and purple stalks, on the right. A barbed-wire fence ran the length of the deep field, stretching eastward for over a quarter of a mile until it met the sloping green pasture that signaled the end of our Family's four hundred acres. An ancient oak tree on the slope, visible even now, was the official dividing mark between Logan land and the beginning of a dense forest. Beyond the prospective fencing of the fields, worked by a multitude of sharecropping families, covered two thirds of a ten square mile plantation. That was Harlan Granger land.
Once our land had been granger land too, but the Grangers had sold it during Reconstruction to a Yankee for tax money.
