Of Mulattas and Mutts :: Personal Narrative Essays

Of Mulattas and MuttsSome poor white cracker make a little extra m aney by being a census man. His boss says, What about them large number down on slovenly person Key? and the cracker says, Them? Those people just a passel of niggers and injuns. What I crap to go down there for? His boss just gives him the evil eye. So he got out his skiff and poled on down to Hog Key. He was met by five shotguns. After begging for his life he fin entirelyy got those people to understand what he was there for. And he went on home and mark that census up. He didnt know what those people were so he just slashed great big Ms all over the page. find he heard that the old midwife Richard employ to be a slave up Marion County way. And that his ma was a Choctaw Indian. And his son, Gene, superpower Gene they called him down there, the meanest man in four counties, had married up with a Seminole. Richards pappy was a dark as night lightlessness man and was born and died a slave. That made every last one of them down on Hog Key great big Ms mulattas down to the infant in his mommas arms. We stayed Ms right up to the last census interpreted down in the swamps, right up to the time the US brass took away what we had farmed and fished and hunted and built so they could make a car park out of it. And all of a sudden we were Ws white, Caucasian. Cause we could always pass. Even way back at the beginning when Richard ran from that woodlet up Marion County way and joined up as a garble on a brig heading out of Key West. He could pass. just word gets round as it always does, flies across occult lines and roosts in places it has no business. And a body has no choice exclusively to accept the fact that being able to pass and actually musical passage is two different things entirely. So no one knew what he was, what his children were, what the simpleness of us to come would be and so they listed them all as Ms. And those folks down there in the Everglades just lived their lives as Ms, not really giving a damn anyhow driveway they had each other and didnt need the white mans world for shit.