The Third Generation

by Chester B Himes

Christmas Eve the children undressed before the fireplace and hung their stockings on the mantel.

  “I’m gonna stay awake and see Santa come down the chimney,” Charles said, dancing up and down with glee.

  “The san’man ’ll throw san’ in your eyes,” William warned him.

  Their mother read them a little story she’d composed for the occasion:

  Word went to heaven of the red chaos which raged upon the earth, and God’s heart so swelled with compassion that heaven overflowed and purity spilled out in lazily drifting snowflakes to cloak the mad fury with a merciful mantle of white. The snow-tipped evergreens came to watch, and were fascinated by the sight, and stood entranced. And the little lights came from the rainbows and the stars and the sunsets and the autumns and perched upon their branches. And the little voices peeped from lips, and suddenly, inspired by the happy sight, began singing carols. Hearing them, fire looked out of the fireplace and danced and crackled with joy. And all the evil people, bound by hate in the darkness of confusion, saw the dancing fire and heard the singing voices and were cheered by the sight of the beautiful tree, and goodness and mercy strengthened their souls and they broke their bonds and escaped into the light and ran to greet their neighbors, shouting aloud: Come see the miracle; come see the miracle! Christ has come to us again in the form of a living tree! And that is how Christmas trees happened.

  The children listened to her light, lovely voice with eyes as big as saucers; and afterwards carried their potties upstairs and went to bed, breathless with excitement.

  Professor Taylor felt such pride in his lovely, talented wife, he could scarcely contain it. These were the moments that he lived for.

  Early the next morning he got up and built a roaring fire and he was waiting when the boys came down to see what Santa had brought them. Presents from their aunts and uncles, an erector set, gloves, scarves, a fire truck, popguns, a set of lovely picture books from their mother, were banked about the tree. But he’d bought them real bicycles. And for his wife he’d gotten a phonograph and a box of recordings. Tom had sent her a silver comb and brush set, inscribed, “For My Lovely Mother.”

  The children were delirious with happiness; and she was flushed with pleasure. This, too, was another of Professor Taylor’s moments. All day long the children reveled in their toys, pedaling their bikes over the hard, uneven yard until their little legs ached. And yet that night they begged to go with their parents to see the big Christmas tree on the campus that was lit with electric lights.

  William clung tightly to his father’s hand as they walked up the pitch-dark hill. He was a natural child, in that he was afraid of the dark and strangeness, and expanded only in the familiar. But Charles was drawn to the unfamiliar darkness, and created fantasies he found more real than what the light revealed. Walking through the pitch-black dark to discover in the distance the lighted Christmas tree beneath which the student choir sang carols was to him a venture into fascination. His mother had divined this side of his nature and thought it was due to the horrible accident he’d seen. She tried in every way she knew to win his confidence. But he shielded his fantasies with all his will and she never really got close to him.

  All of them derived pleasure from the phonograph. Among the recordings were arias by Caruso and ballads by McCormack; and Fritz Kreisler playing the “Flight of the Bumblebee,” which sent the children into ecstasies of glee. But the one they loved best was John Philip Sousa’s band playing ‘The Anvil Chorus.” They would shout and yell and hammer on their imagined anvils as they’d seen their father do. Mrs. Taylor never tired of John McCormack’s bell-clear tenor voice singing “Martha.” Late at night the children would awaken and hear the golden voice coming from below.

  One afternoon while she was playing the Kreisler recording of When A Gypsy Makes A Violin Cry, an old colored beggar came running from the street. He said he thought he’d heard a woman crying. Mrs. Taylor laughed.

  “I was playing a recording of a violin concerto on the phonograph,” she explained.

  He didn’t understand. She invited him in and played the recording for him. He was struck dumb with wonder by the magic box. “An’ summon’s jes’ fiddlin’. Ah swow, it sounded lak uh woman cryin’.”

  Mrs. Taylor was strangely pleased.

  Professor Taylor liked hog-killing time too. He brought home a lot of meat. Everyone pitched in and helped to make the hoghead cheese and the dark delicious sausage meat that crumbled like cornbread when it was cooked. They rendered the fat into lard, and the children made themselves sick eating the hot, delicious cracklings. Lizzie made crackling bread and Mrs. Taylor made scrapple.

  Professor Taylor had been boasting all that month of how his father cured their meat.

  “Cure us some meat, Daddy, cure us some ham,” the children begged.

  Mrs. Taylor sniffed.

  “You just wait,” he said. “When we start cooking that good old hickory-cured ham it’ll make your mouth water.”

  All day long he was mixing the brine in a rain barrel, adding salt and saltpeter and eggs and spices and vinegar until it was thick enough to float an egg. The children watched in awe. The following day he selected several fat juicy hams and several sides of bacon and soaked the white fresh meat in the dirty-looking brine until it had turned a dark sickly gray. Afterwards he hung the meat from a low beam in a shed and kept a slow fire of green hickory burning underneath. It required a month before they were cured to his satisfaction. He brought them in and plumped them on the kitchen table. There was a dark, smoky cast to the meat.

  “Look at these, honey,” he called proudly to his wife.

  The children came running from their classroom, their mother following, and they stood about and admired the meat to his satisfaction.

  “Just hang em in the storehouse and they’ll keep all year,” he said.

  But that afternoon, when Lizzie sliced some ham for dinner, it was filled with small white worms.

  Professor Taylor was chagrined. “It must have been the eggs,” he said. “I couldn’t remember whether Pa put eggs in his brine or not.”

  The children were sick with disappointment. But at the next killing their father brought them some chitterlings to make up for it. Mrs. Taylor took one look at the tin bucket of chitterlings and carried them far out into the field and buried them.

  “How’d Lizzie cook the chiddlings, honey?” Professor Taylor greeted her when he came in from work that evening.

  “She didn’t cook them,” his wife replied. Her mouth pursed in a grim, straight line. “I’ve stood enough. I’m not going to allow you to bring up the children like savages, teaching them to eat all kinds of filth.”

  “There’s nothing more filthy than a chicken,” he countered.

  “But we don’t eat the chicken’s craw.”

  “We eat the giblets.”

  “Well, I’m not going to let them eat the dirty intestines of a hog.”

  “I’ll just cook them myself,” he said, “and you can take the children and go away until I’ve finished eating them.”

  “I’ll not have them cooked in my house, stinking up everything,” she said.

  “And who’s going to stop me?” he demanded.

  “I am, because I’ve buried them,” she informed him.

  He thrust his face forward. “You buried my chiddlings!”

  She turned and walked away from him.

  But the very next day he brought home another lard tin full and cleaned and cooked them himself. She took the children visiting. All that night he was up with acute indigestion, and she derived a perverted pleasure from his suffering.

  “Your stomach’s going to kill you yet,” his wife said acidly the next day.

  “It’ll be my stomach and not my bile,” he retorted bitterly.

  All of them welcomed winter’s sudden ending. Professor Taylor looked forward to the summer’s burning heat that charred him to a cinder. And Mrs. Taylor longed to be rid of the drafty fires and winter sniff
les. But none were per-pared for the deluge that ushered in the spring.

  It was a lush, semitropical country, bordering on the delta land. Mud dominated the Mississippi spring. Creeks and ravines swelled beneath torrential downpours and bridges were washed out and the Mississippi River rose across the delta, flooding farms and cities and killing men and livestock. The roads became inaccessible except for wagons drawn by teams of oxen. Everything for miles around became bogged down in a relentless mire. Old men who lived in houses along the river bank could count off fifty years by the high-water marks on their living room walls, like grains in a board of wood. Year after year it was the same. The natives stayed on as if chained inexorably to their fate, endured the same property damage, the loss of life, the drowned livestock, planted corn and cotton in the rich silt left by the marauding flood, and bore their children who in turn grew up in the same ignorance and died with the same stubbornness, condemning their offspring to the same fate. It was then that Mrs. Taylor became completely convinced that the people of Mississippi, in addition to everything else, were stone-raving crazy. More than ever she felt the urge to escape.

  Their own roof leaked first into one bedroom and, when that was fixed, into another. The yard stayed muddy and the children tracked the mud across the floors and rugs. There was no escape from the mud. The moment they stepped outdoors their feet went down into the mire. It was an ordeal tramping across the muddy yard to the outhouse. Nothing depressed Mrs. Taylor quite as much. Professor Taylor built a board walk, but it soon sank into the mire. The mire drew all things down.

  Then the water became polluted, and before they discovered it all of them took sick. They had to haul drinking water from their neighbors. The rain wate: caught so much filth only occasionally could they drink it.

  The students were used to the climate. They sloughed through the mud, tracking gobs of it into the classrooms and dormitories with no concern. Out in the barns and corrals they tramped barefooted through the wet manure to save their shoes and laughed at the fastidiousness of their professors.

  “Am’ nuttin’ but muleshit, fess. Won’t hurt yuh.”

  Then after the rains the sun grew hot. In the rich steaming soil, seeds germinated like magic. Corn grew three inches overnight. You could sit in the early sun and watch the grass come up.

  “Mo’ rain mo’ rest,” a student joked.

  “W’ut dat you say, boy?” another cued.

  “Mo’ rain mo’ grass grow, massa,” the joke concluded.

  The trees budded and leaved. And as the sunshine heated, the shade grew cool. Fruit trees over the rolling two-hundred-acre orchard blossomed in rotation, apple and plum and peach and cherry, covering the landscape as far as the eye could see with a profusion of pink and white. Brier patches, where all winter long the rabbits had escaped the hunters’ hounds, miraculously became dark green jungles of blackberry bushes, thick with copperheads and rattlesnakes. All day long the young black men, eager, earnest seekers of that vaunted education, could be seen plowing the tireless mules, turning long yellow furrows in the ceaseless race against the swiftly growing weeds.

  Honeysuckle and rambling roses, buttercups and black-eyed Susans, purple irises and swamp lilies grew like wild, and marigolds raised their yellow heads. Dogwood trees in bloom and the marble-white magnolia blossoms added their pristine touches to this fantastic panorama. All of nature ran wild.

  Yet Mrs. Taylor, in her own implacable way, sought to change all this and bring order to this chaos. She ordered packages of flower seeds and planted them in neat rows in her flower garden, and was startled when their sudden lush growth seemed to envelop her. She was exasperated.

  7

  TOM CAME HOME THAT SUMMER, the family met him at the dreary station. When the train came hurtling in, William broke from his father’s grasp and ran screaming. His father caught him halfway across the road and held him in his arms until his trembling stopped. Charles had been as frightened as his brother. But he’d stood rigid in defiance. Both children gave their mother pause, but Charles’s reaction worried her the more. She couldn’t understand what was in the child; what was hurting him, what was he holding himself against?

  Then sight of Tom claimed her attention as he stepped from the Jim-Crow coach. He’d grown as tall as his father and was dressed in city clothes. He looked strange and foreign and aloof in that bleak, dilapidated, sun-baked hamlet. The white men lounging about the station platform stared at him. Then they saw his mother and their eyes drew up short as if they’d been struck blind; their faces got that blank, malignant look that presages violence in a childish mind. But one of them recognized Professor Taylor and called, “Hiya, Willie,” and the tension eased. Professor Taylor lifted a hand in salute.

  Mrs. Taylor hadn’t noticed. She was never a demonstrative person, but now tears flooded her eyes as she embraced her son.

  “Thomas, Thomas, my, how you have grown,” she sang. Her voice was so filled with pride and affection it embarrassed him.

  “Hello, Mother,” he said with self-conscious affectation.

  He shook hands with his father. “How are you, Dad.”

  His father greeted him as man to man. “I’m fine, son, and you look well.”

  The tots were hugging him about the waist. He patted their heads as his father”always did. “And how’re my little brothers?”

  “We’re not so little,” William said.

  “We’ve grown a lot,” Charles added.

  Their big brother laughed. But they were disappointed. He seemed a stranger with his condescending manner.

  “We got bikes for Christmas,” William informed him.

  “Come, children, let’s go home. Your brother must be tired,” their mother said.

  As before, she sat with Tom on the back seat while the tots sat up front with their father. But this time she chatted gaily all the way. The boys could scarcely get a word in edgewise as they tried to tell him what they’d been doing too. Their father was content to let the others talk. Only when they came to the entrance arch did William make them listen.

  “A lady got run over right here,” he said. Then he looked at Charles queerly.

  “You’ve forgotten I was there,” Tom replied.

  “Chuck was lookin’ right at her,” William persisted. “Blood was comin’ all out of her mouth—”

  “Hush!” his mother cried. “Hush this minute or I’ll slap you.”

  “Now, honey,” their father began placatingly, but she wouldn’t let him speak.

  “We won’t discuss it now.”

  The little children subsided into silence. Charles looked off into the distance.

  Tom was eaten up with curiosity. “What’s it all about?”

  “Charles doesn’t like to hear about it.”

  Soon they came to the top of the hill, and Tom waved merrily to Edith Patterson working in her flower garden. She dropped her hoe and ran into the house to tell her parents that Tom was back.

  But he was very grown-up in his relations with the young folk his own age. He refused to play such childish games as tag, and only on occasion would he condescend to play baseball or go fishing with the boys. Each family tried to outdo the other entertaining him. He enjoyed the picnics and the parties, although he tried to act indifferent. On the eve of Independence Day he had his mother give a garden party such as his Aunt Lou had given for her daughter, and it became the talk of the college.

  He was very devoted to his mother that summer. It was like a part in a play that he had learned in school. She was ecstatic with happiness and grew strangely youthful. She lavished affection and attention on him, and wore her prettiest things for him. She wore her hair up to please him and carried dainty parasols. Sometimes they were as gay as lovers.

  All that winter she’d worried for fear the Harts would alienate his affection. And now she’d won him back. Whatever the outcome of their precarious existence, she felt she could depend on Tom to remain true to her. She had no doubt that he would make so
mething worthwhile out of himself; he was so sure and positive in his manner. She wanted him to become a doctor but he hadn’t decided as yet. But she was certain he would choose a calling of distinction. As for herself, it seemed that she was caught. She seemed to have lost her initiative; she found it quite impossible to take an adamant stand and leave her husband as she’d once planned. She doubted if she’d ever have the strength to leave him now. She’d have to sacrifice for the sake of her children. But she felt confident that someday Tom would grow up and, like a knight in shining armor, rescue his mother from her fate.

  He returned to Cleveland that fall. Before he left she talked to him again in private.

  “You must never forget, my son, that your grandfather was a United States Senator and you are a direct descendant of a famous United States President and of a great Confederate General—and don’t you let anyone ever tell you differently.”

  Again he was embarrassed by her strange intensity and confusing claims. But he promised to be true to her.

  8

  MRS. TAYLOR TAUGHT THE CHILDREN FOR five years. They learned easily, and without effort. William was the slower, but he was conscientious and far less trouble because he was obedient. Charles was bright but mercurial. Both boys had sprung up like weeds and now there seemed little difference in their ages. Their color had darkened beneath the hot Mississippi sun and the humid climate had kinked their hair unmanageably. During the summers they wore their heads shaved clean in the fashion of the students. Many of the natives shaved their skulls but they were mostly grownups.

  The students of unmixed African ancestry had elongated, egg-shaped skulls, and the square, flat-backed heads of the Taylor children drew their derision.

  “Whereat you tadpoles get yo’ heads?” one asked.

  “They pa made em in his blacksmith shop,” another teased.

  The children were furious. “I’m gonna tell my papa,” William cried with rage.

  Charles ran up and spat at them. “Bastards!” he screamed. “Bastards! Bastards!”