The Third Generation

by Chester B Himes

  Her father had been a tall, spare man with light brown hair and a long silky beard. His complexion was as fair as any white person’s. Her mother, though slightly darker, had the coarse black hair and high cheekbones of an Indian. Both would have been accepted as white in a northern state. But it had never occurred to them to leave the South.

  They had three small children when they were freed. Their one asset with which to face a new, strange life had been their ability to read and write. Both had been “body slaves” and after the Civil War their master had tried to persuade them to remain on the plantation.

  “You have never known want, and if you remain with me, you never will,” he had promised them.

  Dr. Jessie Manning was descended from the English peerage, and had once served in the United States Senate. According to his own lights he had tried to be a kind and just master. Both Charles and Lin loved him. But they had refused to stay. Even though the very thought of freedom had terrified them, they had wanted to be free. Deep inside them had been some compelling urge to flee from the shadow of slavery, to rear their children in the sunlight, to provide them with something better, with education and opportunity. They had heard these ideas propounded by their master; they had listened to the reverence in his voice; they had believed.

  For two years they lived in a floorless, one-room cabin with a lean-to on an acre of land they had cleared. Charles had learned brick masonry and did odd jobs in the neighborhood while Lin took in washing and worked as a wet nurse.

  But the proximity of the old plantation had stifled their sense of freedom. They moved to a railroad town in Georgia and took the family name of Manning. For a decade Charles worked as a brick mason. Another son and three daughters were born to them there. Mrs. Taylor’s Christian name was Lillian, and she was second from the youngest.

  Although she was then a little girl, not more than five, Lillian could remember the crisis that had arisen when her father went broke. He had been ill for a long time and one day he had said to Lin, “Hon, we got to sell the house.”

  They had moved to Atlanta and he had worked for a time as a Pullman porter before finally having to quit. For three years he had been ill with tuberculosis, and for a year he had been confined to his bed. It had fallen Lillian’s lot to nurse him. All of the older children had worked desperately to make ends meet. Lillian never forgot the great piles of laundry her mother washed each day. But they had never given up.

  When her father recovered, the family returned to the town in South Carolina where the parents had grown up as slaves. Once again they had cleared a plot of land and built another house. The parents were more determined than ever to bring their children up in the church, give them an education and a better start in life. They joined the Presbyterian Church; Charles became a Deacon and the Superintendent of the Sunday School, and Lin became active in missionary work. For years the church had been the center of their social life.

  It had been a slow, hard struggle all the way. Despite his ill health, Charles had worked long hours as a brick mason and day laborer, while Lin did washing. But they had sent their children to college, the girls to the church seminary and the boys to a college in Atlanta.

  All of the girls had been considered very talented; they played the piano and had “white folks’ manners.” All had fair complexions and reddish hair. The three eldest had taught at the seminary upon graduation. Tom, the eldest son, had become a successful building contractor. Both Charlie, his younger brother, and his father had worked for him.

  During that time the family had gained in prestige and had become prominent throughout the town and state. Two of the girls had married doctors. Lillian’s oldest sister had married a minister who had later become a bishop. Both brothers had married schoolteachers.

  Lillian had taken piano lessons from the age of six and had been considered the genius of the family. She had been given to daydreaming and was moody and temperamental. When her older brothers and sisters had grown up and began earning their living the family showed signs of prosperity. After the age of ten she had been raised in very pleasant circumstances. It had been during her early teens she had first conceived the romantic notions of her heredity.

  She had seen only one of her grandparents, “Grandma Mary,” her father’s mother, who had lived on the old plantation until her death. Her parents never spoke of the others. She had been a curious girl. Once she had asked her mother, “Where does Grandpa live, ma?”

  “Your grandpa was killed in the war,” Lin had replied.

  “Both of them?”

  Lin had stopped ironing and had sat in the rocker by the hearth. “Come here, chile, and I will tell you all ‘bout your grandpas. Your Grandpa Manning, your pa’s pa, was killed at Chickamauga when he threw himself in front of Ol’ Mars to save his life. He caught the bullet that was ‘tended for Ol’ Mars’ heart and fell dead at his feet. And my pa was shot trying to get through Gen’l Sherman’s lines to carry orders to the cap’n of the Georgia troops. They never did find his body.”

  Lillian had known that this was fiction to satisfy her curiosity and had become more curious than ever. After that she had eavesdropped on her parents’ conversations. One of her favorite positions was in the dark by the open kitchen window when her parents thought her in bed. Here she had learned that her father was the son of Dr. Jessie Manning, and that her mother was the daughter of an Irish overseer and an Indian slave.

  She had added to the story, enlarging and changing the parts she didn’t like. The resulting story was that her father was the son of Dr. Manning and a beautiful octoroon, the most beautiful woman in all the state, whose own father had been an English nobleman. Her mother was the daughter of a son of a United States President and an octoroon who was the daughter of a Confederate Army general.

  At first it had been a childish game of fantasy. After having received several whippings for recounting it to her wide-eyed schoolmates she had kept it to herself, and in time had outgrown it. As a young woman she had felt a real sense of superiority which, in her home environment, had needed no support.

  It was only after the disillusionment of her marriage and the first bitter conflicts about color with her husband and the dark-complexioned faculty wives that she revived it. She never gave the story absolute credence, but it became conceivable. She certainly had a great percentage of white blood, she told herself. And it was quite reasonable it should be the blood of the type of persons who had been friends of the aristocratic Dr. Manning.

  She created the fiction of being only one thirty-second part Negro deliberately. It symbolized her contempt and disdain for all the Negroes she felt had tried to hurt her. It was her final rejection of all the people who would not recognize her innate superiority. Because regardless of how much they hated her, or tried to hurt and belittle her, none of them could possibly be her superior, and but a very, very few her equal, because she possessed the very maximum of white blood a Negro can possess and remain a Negro.

  At the beginning it was a simple mechanism to bolster her morale. But after all the inroads of hurt, discouragement and despondency, it slowly attained the strength of fact. For a time it became the only fact she possessed. She thought of it as a legacy, and she wanted to pass this legacy on to her children. She wanted to impress on them that in their veins flowed the blood of aristocrats.

  For a moment her attention was drawn back to the children. They were pulling at the rosebushes. But she checked the impulse to scold them. She should be thankful, she told herself, that they had not begun that awful shrieking and hammering and slaughtering of palefaces.

  When she looked up the street again, Mrs. Barnes’ carriage had passed from sight. She felt strangely relieved. There were various other professional and business people who lived on the street, but none disturbed her as did the Barneses. Although most of them earned more money than the professors, the professors had the greater prestige.

  Negroes put a great value on education, she meditated. They thou
ght of it as both the source and result of all good things. And she, too, believed in its efficacy. That had been the reason she had married Professor Taylor.

  She recalled how dazzled she’d first been by the dashing young professor from the state college who had courted her. How impressed she’d been by his education. All the fuss and bother; all the fine talk of his dreams and ambition. She’d been thrilled by the thought of the wonderful things they could accomplish together. They would complement each other like no other two people who had ever lived.

  She had come home to live that spring, following her father’s death. For the previous two years she had been teaching music at the seminary. She had loved her father dearly, and for a time had been disconsolate, a lonely lady immersed in sorrow. It had given her a rare beauty, vivid but withdrawn, as if she were lost in reverie.

  Most of the young men thereabouts had felt uncomfortable in her presence. At that time her eyes were hazel in color, with an attractive tilt at the outer edges; but they had been level and challenging. She had seldom worn the brilliant colors that had been fashionable at the time. Her preference had been for light grays and blues; and her favorite dresses had been silk jerseys with lace collars and white, frilly dickies. She had loved fine lace with a rare passion. Her only jewelry had been a string of pearls her brother Tom had given her on her eighteenth birthday. At times she was painfully intense. Music had seemed to be her only passion.

  The young men had thought her cold and unapproachable. Her restraint had dampened their ardor. No one but her mother had known how sensitive and deeply emotional she was inside. Outwardly, she had seemed so conscious of her worth, her beauty and intelligence, that she had repelled most people. She could give little of herself, and only to one she considered an inferior, only in the manner of one bestowing a grace. But she would have been horrified had she known this about herself.

  Professor Taylor had come first to call on her younger sister. But he soon became infatuated with the strange, distant, beautiful girl. He had resolved to win her.

  At that time he had been head of the mechanical department of the Georgia State College. He had attended Boston Technological Institute. Most women in the town had considered him a good catch, even though he was dark.

  But it had not been his position that had first attracted Lillian. It had been his homage. He had given the appearance of worshipping at her shrine, even on occasions when she had acted ridiculously.

  Their parlor had been heated by a wood-burning stove that had tiny panes of isinglass in the door. One evening Professor Taylor had called unexpectedly. She and her mother had been sitting in the kitchen. Her mother had answered the door, and when Lin had called that it was Professor Taylor, Lillian had snatched up the kitchen lamp and, running to the parlor, put it in the stove. She had wanted him to think she had been sitting in the parlor all the time. But after a time she had realized it was extremely chilly for so bright a fire to be burning. She had made some excuse about the damper being broken and the heat going up the chimney. But Professor Taylor had smilingly insisted that it was quite warm in the room. He had known the lamp was in the stove. It was an old trick; he had done it many times himself.

  Then there had been all the entertaining when they had become engaged. Several times that winter she had visited him at the college. She had been lavishly entertained by the faculty. And he had spent his Christmas vacation with her family.

  They had been married the following June.

  The “Violet Teas,” she recalled, as her memories went completely sour. The “Yellow Buffet,” the garden parties, the wedding reception; all the many people, both white and colored, who had turned out to bid them bon voyage on their honeymoon. They had engaged a drawing room all the way to Philadelphia. People in the town said they had never seen anything like it.

  It now seemed more like a prelude to a nightmare. She couldn’t imagine herself as that idealistic young schoolteacher who had had such high-flown dreams.

  She felt the leak of bitter tears. Blindly she turned away from the sunshine and went back to her chores. After twelve years the memory of her wedding night was as vivid as if it had happened yesterday.

  2

  IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT when the train pulled into the old stone station. A short black man wearing a black derby hat, dark suit and black, box-toed shoes alighted from a Pullman car. The conductor looked away. The short black man stood at the bottom of the steps and extended his hand to a woman. She wore a linen duster over a pale-blue silk jersey dress, and a large pink hat with feathers. Her face was white and strained; her deep-set eyes fixed in an unseeing stare.

  The short black man touched her arm. She looked at him. A smile flickered in her stiff white face, flickered out. The short black man helped her down the steps. The conductor’s mouth pursed in a grim, straight line; his face reddened slowly.

  A Pullman porter followed, carrying two heavy valises and a woman’s straw traveling case. The short black man tipped him and hailed a station porter. Then he took the woman’s arm and, preening with self-importance, followed the porter through the huge, dimly lit South Station to a dark side street.

  “We’ll just go straight to the hotel, honey, unless you want to stop for a bowl of hot milk or a glass of wine,” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  He looked at her, undecided, as if to interpret her meaning. She seemed passive, acquiescent. He smiled indulgently and patted her arm.

  The porter hailed a horse cab and put the luggage aboard, and the short black man, tipping him generously, helped the woman to enter and climbed in beside her. His actions were slightly erratic. He seemed laboring under great emotion, tautened with excitement.

  The old cab went clattering through the drab cobbled streets, past row after row of gray stone houses interlocked and identical as peas, in the dim light like prison walls enclosing the tunnel down which she went to her doom. She couldn’t help the distortions of her imagination. She was frightened, lonely, homesick. The man beside her, whom she had married that morning, now seemed a stranger. And this seemed a monstrously wrong thing they were doing.

  He sensed her need for reassurance and patted her hand comfortingly. But tremors of his excitement passed down through his touch into her skin and she shuddered.

  He’d gone to great pains to arrange everything so there would be no embarrassment or anxiety, and her attitude puzzled and angered him.

  “It’s a big city,” he said. “More people here than in all the state of North Carolina.”

  She looked out at the depressing sameness of the gloomy streets. “Yes,” she replied.

  They lapsed into silence…

  …as if she were that kind of woman, she was thinking…

  …she’ll be all right, he reassured himself doubtfully…

  The clop-clop of the horse’s hoofs hammered on the silence. The neighborhood changed. Smell of city slums pressed into the cab. Strident Negroid laughter shattered on the night. The horse cab pulled up before an old dilapidated stone-faced building which carried the faded legend, HOTEL, atop a dingy door.

  The short black man alighted and helped the woman down. He paid the driver and struggled with the luggage. She opened the door for him and followed across the dusty foyer to the scarred and littered desk. A few moth-eaten chairs sat here and there in the dim light of turned-down lamps and in one a fat black man sat slumped, asleep and snoring slightly. The smell of damp decay hung in the air.

  The short black man put down his luggage and smiled at the woman reassuringly. “It’s the best colored hotel in town. I thought it’d be better than to try to…” his voice petered out, leaving the thought unspoken.

  She didn’t answer.

  The night clerk came from somewhere out of the shadows, hitching up his suspenders.

  “I reserved the bridal suite,” the short black man said.

  “Yas suh,” the night clerk said, and teeth came alive in his face as he slanted a glance at the strained white fa
ce of the waiting woman. “Yas suh!”

  The short black man signed the register and the night clerk picked up the luggage and preceded them up the narrow, bending stairs, his footsteps muffled on the threadbare carpet. The night clerk opened a door at the front of the narrow corridor, entered the darkness and lit a lamp, lit the grate, carried the luggage within, and stood to one side, his big white teeth winking at them like an electric sign. The woman looked at him with a shudder of distaste.

  Impulsively the short black man lifted the woman across the threshold. Her body was stiff and unyielding. Gingerly he stood her erect, then turned and tipped the servant.

  “Thankee-suh, thankee-suh; Ah knows y’all gonna have uh good time,” the night clerk said as if it was a dirty joke.

  The short black man quickly closed the door. He turned and went across to the woman, who hadn’t moved, and tried to put his arm around her. She pulled away and went over and sat on the moth-eaten sofa. The same smell of decay encountered below was in the room, but here it was dry, mingled with the vague scent of countless assignations. Again the woman shuddered as her thoughts were assailed by a sickening recollection. Once, as a little girl, when cutting through a vulgar street in nigger-town, Atlanta, she had heard an obscene reference to her vagina. She had not known then what it had meant, only that it was vulgar and dirty and had filled her with a horrible shame. She had never told anyone, but the feeling of shame had lingered in her thoughts like a drop of pus, poisoning her conception of sex. As she had approached womanhood, she had resolved to make her marriage immaculate. And now it seemed dirtied at the very start by this cloying scent.