The Land

It’s a special treat to return to the story of the Logan family, just over 25 years since Roll of Thunder was published, this time going back to the grandfather’s life and his eventual gaining of their land in Mississippi. Paul-Edward, the child of a part Indian, part African slave and a white plantation owner, has been brought up by both his mother and father. Caught between two worlds, he has to learn hard and difficult racial lessons. The book opens with Paul being beaten by Mitchell, the son of a black sharecropper, because of his whiteness: the first of many hardships which require Paul to learn to use his mind not force. When, later, Paul has a brutal demonstration of his difference from Robert, it marks a turning point. His gifts at working with horses and wood allow him to survive away from home and earn a good living with enormous dignity. There is heartbreaking injustice as he tries to gain his own land, such as the tough contract to earn forty acres by doing months of backbreaking daily work to clear trees which is ultimately reneged on – by Harlan Granger’s father. It’s a marvellous and very moving story fuelled by the tension of race and of deep injustice (might is right and white) where the remarkable moral and physical strength of Paul-Edward and his friends allows them to find ways beyond anger, pain and frustration to buy the land that becomes the Logan legacy. The Author’s Note at the end gives interesting links with her own desire for land as well as her family’s history.