The Third Generation

by Chester B Himes

  His father carried him home in his arms. His mother saw them coming down the road, her husband straining with the burden, William tagging along in the dust. Her hand flew to her hair. The acid bite of fear coursed through her flesh. She rushed forward and opened the gate, holding to it for support, and the prayer kept sounding in her mind, “Please, God…please, God…please, dear God…” When she saw her husband’s face, haggard from exhaustion, she cried out in anguish, “He’s dead, oh my little baby, he’s dead, I know he’s dead.”

  “He’s just fainted; he’s just had a shock,” her husband gasped.

  But her baby’s eyes were open and she knew that he was dead. “My baby, my baby,” she cried. “What have they done to you?”

  They got him up to bed. His eyes held no intelligence, but he was breathing. She fell to her knees beside the bed and prayed.

  “He’ll be all right, honey,” his father kept saying, helplessly. “He’ll be all right.”

  Down below the front door slammed. “Hey, where is everybody?” Tom called. He came clattering up the stairs, frenzied with excitement. “A girl got run over—” he panted, then stopped. “What’s the matter with Chuckie?” he asked bewilderedly.

  “Run get Dr. Wiley,” his father ordered.

  “Lord, dear God, if You’ll just give me the strength I’ll take them out of this wilderness,” Mrs. Taylor sobbed.

  “The boy’s not hurt, honey,” her husband soothed. “The boy’s not hurt. He’s just shocked; he just saw a girl get run over.”

  “He saw her die?” she questioned.

  “We don’t know whether she’s dead or not.”

  She turned her gaze on him. “His soul is hurt,” she said condemningly.

  The doctor came in out of breath and treated Charles for shock. He was preoccupied and didn’t take the matter seriously.

  “That girl,” he said, shaking his head. “She died instantly, poor thing.”

  Professor Taylor and the older boys followed him to the door. Mrs. Taylor stayed with Charles, sitting on the bed and smoothing his forehead with her hand. Slowly he came out of his trance.

  “I was dead, Mama,” he said, looking at her with strange solemnity. “I was dead.”

  She fell across him and smothered him with kisses. “My baby, my little baby.”

  He clung to her, terrified again. “She was bleeding from the mouth and nose and her eyes…Mama!” he cried, feeling himself going down-down-down, away from the terror and hurt.

  “Charles!” she cried, trying to hold him back. “My baby!” And then she screamed, “He’s fainted again!”

  Professor Taylor came running up the stairs. “Let him alone, honey. Don’t frighten him anymore.”

  “We must do something,” she sobbed. “You must send to Natchez and get a doctor.”

  He tried to draw her from the room. “Now he’ll be all right. Just let him alone. Dr. Wiley’s one of the best doctors in the state.”

  “Then why doesn’t he do something?”

  Tom and William rushed into the room and their father caught them and turned them around. “Now let’s get out and let your brother sleep.”

  In a few minutes he was conscious again.

  “Does it hurt you?” his mother asked.

  “It was just dark,” he murmured. “It was just like a funny dream. I wasn’t scared at all.”

  The next day he was up and about. She tried to get him to talk about the accident.

  “Won’t you tell Mother, son?”

  She wanted him to get it out of himself. But when he tried to remember, all the shock and horror returned and he felt himself going away, down-down-down…

  “I can’t!” he cried. “I can’t, Mama, I can’t!”

  She was terribly afraid it was going to affect his mind. For the first time during her marriage she pleaded with her husband. “Mr. Taylor, take us away from here. Take us away.”

  He was embarrassed. “I can’t, honey. You know I can’t. I can’t just quit my job and leave. We just got here. How would we live?”

  “God will take care of us.”

  “Now, honey, I believe in God as much as you do—”

  “Then send us away,” she begged. “This wild, savage country will kill the children. They’re not used to it. They’ll be dead before another year.”

  “Now, honey, you’re just exaggerating. You’re letting your imagination run away with you. The boys will like it here. You’re just upset. Later on you’ll agree—”

  “Then I’m going to send Tom away,” she vowed. “I’m not going to see him perish in this jungle. I’m going to save one of my children.”

  “Well, he can go to Cleveland and live with Lou,” he relented.

  Some years before, his older sister had married a county school principal in Georgia, and they had moved to Cleveland. For the past ten years Mr. Hart had worked in the post office. They owned their home and had four children, one of whom, Casper Junior, was Tom’s age.

  Mrs. Taylor hated the idea of her son living with his father’s relatives. It sickened her to think of him living in the home of such black people. But it was too late to enter him in any of the boarding schools. And all of her own relatives still lived in the South. She wanted him out of the South entirely. It was a difficult choice. But finally she consented that he go.

  “Now be a good boy, Thomas, and don’t let them steal your affections. Mother is depending on you,” she said to him in private.

  “I won’t, Mother.”

  “You must be polite and courteous, but let no one influence you on things you know are wrong. Your father’s people are black like your father and think differently from us. You must make up your own mind. And never listen to anything bad they say about your mother.”

  Thomas felt ill at ease. It was strange and hurting to hear his mother talk in this manner. But he promised to do everything she said.

  After he left she began teaching her younger children at home. Their father brought home two school desks and they turned the front room that had served as a library into a school. He’d contended that Charles was too young for school; but their mother had insisted they begin together, and he’d given in. She hadn’t got over her fear of Charles losing his mind. Although she had never again pressed him to speak about the accident, she knew he still retained the shock and horror deep inside himself. He was becoming moody and introspective. She had to put his mind to work.

  They had a regular schedule of recitation periods and study hours. For six hours every day, five days each week, they attended school. At first, during the warm, beautiful days of Indian summer, they hated it. They were restless and irritable and had fits of temper and William cried a great deal. They drove their mother to desperation.

  But when the cold dreary rains of fall came they began to like it in the big pleasant room with a fire burning in the fireplace. They learned rapidly and it became fun. They loved the feeling of so many books surrounding them in the dark shiny bookcases. During their study hour they would take them down and browse through the pictures. Slowly, the room grew into a world apart, half of which was school, but the other half their own imagination. They experienced a feeling of security and happiness there that they had never felt before. And their mother was reassured.

  In other respects the family passed a miserable winter. All summer Mrs. Taylor had fought the dust that came into the house and settled on the furnishings as if they lived in the middle of the road. Now it was the drafts of winter. The old house was never warm. Great volumes of wood were consumed by the huge fireplaces, but most of the heat roared up the flues. In the evenings fires were lit in the stoves upstairs. But all the different fires only served to increase the drafts.

  All winter the children had colds. Mrs. Taylor worried constantly. There had been tuberculosis in her family, and she thought the children had inherited weak lungs. She became quite thin and her shoulders became more stooped. She wore an old gray woolen shawl continuously, and kept it clutched a
bout her throat. Professor Taylor developed a deep permanent frown between his eyes. They continued to sleep apart and both suffered a great deal from sexual frustration. They were irritable and short-tempered and flared up at each other on the slightest provocation. He suffered constantly from piles and she was revolted by his habit of digging at himself. On the other hand he was repulsed by her nightly use of cold cream and always avoided her after she had prepared for bed.

  With the falling of the leaves and the dying of the flowers beneath the drawn-out, rotting rain, the surrounding countryside settled into a state of unrelieved dreariness. It was a drear, lifeless rain, beneath which everything took on a soggy, water-soaked appearance, dull and drab. The world itself seemed exhausted, the sun was tired and weak, the sky cried melancholy tears. Mrs. Taylor became unutterably depressed. There were occasions when she felt she couldn’t bear it another minute. Then she’d sit at the piano, playing for hours, forgetful of the children’s studies, until she found solace of a sort. Only the children escaped the sad and lonely days, living in their half-imagined world.

  But Professor Taylor had his work to occupy him. He put on his rubber slicker, knee boots and fireman’s hat and went out into the rain. They didn’t have a horse and buggy and he walked the mile to work. Sometimes he hired a student to chop the kindling and kitchen firewood. The fireplace logs were ordered by the cord and stacked beside the house. Sometimes Lizzie did the chopping. But more often he did the work himself, standing in the rain and mud, splitting the slippery logs. He’d stand before the hearth and dry himself, steaming on one side and then on the other.

  After the rainy season it turned cold. He liked rising early on a frosty morning and going hunting, or taking the children to gather hickory nuts and pumpkins for Halloween. His cronies would ride up in a wagon with the hounds following behind, and he’d get his double-barreled shotgun and fill the pockets of his hunting jacket with twelve-gauge shells and they’d go to the deep woods and shoot whatever they could find. He often told the story of how Professor Norwood shot a hound dog way up in a tree. Or else they’d set out early in the evening with their lanterns and hunt opossum at night. Sometimes he brought home a ‘possum or a pocketful of squirrels and Lizzie would cook them for the boys and him. The boys loved the taste of game, but their mother wouldn’t touch it.

  A war was being fought in Europe that winter and its far-flung repercussions were felt even in that little Negro college in Mississippi. Cotton prices had gone up and the students were more affluent. The college had been granted a larger appropriation. Now the governor took an active interest in its administration. It became commonplace to see his short, pudgy figure about the campus, addressing the students in the chapel, or sitting at the faculty table in the mess hall, waiting for the others to finish eating so he could have his dinner. The governor felt that this was more democratic than having the entire student body and faculty wait for him to finish, since obviously they could not eat together.

  He poked his nose into all the departments. “Mah boy, Burt,” as he referred to the president, always accompanied him. He made a point of seeing what the faculty members read. He searched their desks, examined their books and papers. But he did it openly and good-naturedly. “Ah jes’ wanna see what you Negra fessors are up to down heah with state money.”

  Most of the faculty members and student body held the governer in high regard. The college had prospered under his administration; the new machine shop was one of his innovations. And from time to time used equipment, machines and books and desks, had been sent from the white university at his direction. The governor was an avowed friend of the colored people and at every opportunity expressed his desire to see them become “good farmers an’ good blacksmiths an’ good Negras.”

  Professor Taylor always held a deep, secret fondness for those white southerners in authority. He knew instinctively how to get along with them, just how far to go and when to be ingratiating. As a consequence, he seemed far more audacious than the other professors. His interviews with the governor always gave President Burton a nervous stomach. And yet the governor liked him best of all the faculty members.

  There was an unwritten rule prohibiting faculty members from reading Negro newspapers and periodicals that were published in the North. In New York, militant Negroes and white sympathizers had organized a National Association to fight against discrimination. They published a magazine whose editor was a fiery, angry writer, revered among the Negroes as a great messiah, and feared and hated by the whites throughout the South. The penalty for reading this magazine was immediate dismissal and expulsion from the college.

  Once, on one of his raids, the governor found a copy of the magazine in Professor Taylor’s desk.

  “Willie,” he said, “you know the penalty for readin’ this heah inflammatory trash.”

  “Governor,” Professor Taylor replied in his sly, obsequious pose, “you know I don’t believe that trash. I just want to see what those crazy Negroes up North are up to.”

  “Willie, you let those Negras up there alone,” the governor admonished. “They don’ mean you no good. An’ don’ let me ketch you readin’ this heah trash no mo’. Heah, give it to me. Ah’ll destroy it.”

  But a short time later Professor Taylor returned to his office and found the governor with his feet propped up on his desk, reading the magazine.

  “Governor,” he said slyly, “I thought you just told me that trash wasn’t fit to read.”

  “It ain’t fuh you, Willie,” the governor said. “But it kain’ hurt me. Ah’m jes seein’ what those Negras are sayin’ ‘bout me.”

  On the other hand, the governor raised no objection to the teaching of Negro history. Obscure textbooks and treatises dealing with all phases of American slavery, its inception, slave uprisings, the political aspects, the rise of the abolitionist movement, were taught in special classes and diligently studied. The students learned the role the Freedmen had played during reconstruction; they knew the names of all who’d held public office. The college had obtained copies of the minutes of the various assemblies of the defeated Confederate states to which Freedmen had been elected. The students were informed that immediately following the end of the Civil War, more than half the legislators in the Mississippi Assembly had been Freedmen. They read the biographies of all the famous Negro rebels, leaders, educators. They knew the names of all the great American Negro actors, singers, scientists, writers, teachers; the name of the Negro who invented the railroad coupling; the name of the Negro who died at Bunker Hill. They learned, from these obscure texts, that Negro blood flowed through the veins of the Russian poet Pushkin, the French novelist Dumas, the English poet Browning, the German composer Beethoven. Every student of Negro literature had read the famous words of the Negro general, Hannibal, to which they gave various current meanings: “Beyond the Alps lies Rome.” They were taught to be proud of their racial heritage.

  Lincoln’s Birthday and Emancipation Day were the two most important holidays.

  Despite their seemingly easygoing acceptance of conditions, protest was lodged deep in the hearts of all. Debates were as popular as baseball games. The students drew upon their natural acting talent, employing their rich, stirring voices. Never was there so dramatic a moment in any debate as when some young black man with moving intensity pitched forth the mighty challenge that won for the colonies their independence: “An’ in the words of Patrick Henry, Ah say: ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’”

  Professor Taylor liked it there. In spite of the indignities there was a certain inalienable dignity in the work itself, in bringing enlightenment to these eager young black people. It wasn’t as if they could come there with the easy assurance of an upper Bostonian enrolling in Harvard. For what they learned, they and their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers paid in privation, in calico in January, corn-pone diets and pellagra deaths. Professor Taylor was one of them, a little, short, black, pigeon-toed, bowlegged, nappy-headed man; he’d co
me from the same background with the same traditions; he was just more fortunate. He knew this, knew that he was more fortunate also in the selection of the mother of his sons. He wanted his wife to be happy, and his sons to grow up carrying the heritage of their race for better or worse. Only his wife was unhappy and hated it. And his sons hadn’t yet learned that they were Negroes.

  But he liked it in spite of this. And he liked that first Christmas they spent there. He worked hard to make it come off and as early as October ordered his Christmas presents. When the week of Christmas came, he and the boys scoured the woods until they found a cedar tree. They gathered arms full of holly with its bright red berries for window wreaths and cut mistletoe to hang from the kitchen ceiling and over the living room hearth. They spent their evenings popping corn to trim the tree. The wonderful scent of hot buttered corn filled the house and the children stuffed themselves. Their mother had ordered tinsel and artificial snow from Chicago. They fastened the colored candlesticks to its branches and clamped the huge gold star atop. And they gathered moss from the old oak trees to make a bed about its trunk.