Of Mulattas and Mutts :: Personal Narrative Essays

Of Mulattas and MuttsSome poor white redneck made a teensy extra money by being a census man. His party boss says, What ab erupt them people bundle on Hog Key? and the cracker says, Them? Those people just a passel of niggers and injuns. What I have to go gobble up there for? His boss just gives him the evil eye. So he got out his skiff and poled on down in the mouth to Hog Key. He was met by five shotguns. later begging for his life he finall(a)y got those people to understand what he was there for. And he went on home and marked that census up. He didnt know what those people were so he just thinned great big Ms all over the page. take a shit he heard that the old midwife Richard used to be a slave up Marion County agency. And that his ma was a Choctaw Indian. And his son, Gene, King 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 negro man and was innate(p) 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 taken down in the swamps, right up to the time the US government took away what we had farmed and fished and hunt and built so they could make a park out of it. And all of a sudden we were Ws white, Caucasian. Cause we could always pass. change surface way back at the beginning when Richard ran from that Plantation up Marion County way and joined up as a cook on a brig heading out of Key West. He could pass. But word gets pulse as it always does, flies across invisible lines and roosts in places it has no business. And a body has no choice but to accept the point that being able to pass and actually passing is two antithetic things entirely. So no one knew what he was, what his children were, what the rest of us to place 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 cause they had each different and didnt need the white mans world for shit.