The Third Generation

by Chester B Himes

  “We take that out ‘im.”

  They trudged behind their elders from one dim basement to another.

  “Po’ li’l tadpoles, doan you cry

  You’ll be bullfrogs by ‘n by”—the students teased.

  The men prodded each other in the rear. The one prodded would jump and strike out, often embrace a girl.

  “Uh goosy good time was had by all,” some wit would whisper.

  “You ain’ all that goosy,” the woman would protest.

  “Ah’d lak to goose you, sugar pie.”

  The children hovered in wide-eyed attention. The woman noticed.

  “Y’all shouldn’ be talkin’ so nasty fo’ these li’l boys. Li’l pitchers got big ears.”

  The children felt ashamed. The air seemed thick with innuendo. Grown-up speech had double meaning. Only during recitations did they fully understand it. The older students soon discovered their naivete.

  “Hey, Charlie, Ah found uh li’l pussy las’ night,” the man at the next desk whispered.

  “Where?” asked Charles innocently.

  “It war hid way down ‘tween two fine brown legs.” The man winked at his cronies and laughed. Charles blushed.

  “I know what you mean,” he said defensively.

  Jerry Ramsey walked along with the boys when they were going home one evening. “When Fess Williams calls my name one of you boys tell ‘im Ah’m gone chasing whores.”

  The children understood the word to be “hoers.” Jerry’s parents had a farm not far from the college. It didn’t seem strange to the children that he should be going after hoers.

  “Where you going, Jerry?”

  “You going to Port Gibson?”

  “Naw, Ah’m goin’ to a whorehouse in N’Orlins.”

  Professor Williams was a thin, dark, solemn man with a stern visage. He was always afraid his students might try to take advantage of him, and as a consequence was very strict. When he came to Jerry’s name during the roll call next morning, William punched Charles. Dutifully Charles stood and said, “He’s gone chasing hoers.”

  “To a hoerhouse in New Orleans,” William whispered.

  “To a hoerhouse in New Orleans,” Charles repeated.

  For an instant the room was gripped in a dead silence. Then the students roared with laughter.

  “Shut up!” Professor Williams bellowed.

  The boys were frightened. They looked at each other and looked about to see what they’d done.

  “Come up here, boy,” Professor Williams ordered. His black face was gray with fury.

  Charles went forward and faced him beside the desk.

  “Now where did you say Ramsey was?” the professor asked through clenched teeth. He was a slow-witted man and hadn’t grasped that the boy was the victim of a prank.

  “I said he was gone after hoers in a New Orleans hoerhouse,” Charles replied straightforwardly.

  Professor Williams slapped him. Charles had no awe of the professors. He was a strong boy and now caught up in a violent rage he grabbed the professor about the legs and threw him to the floor. The professor struck wildly with his fists. They struggled and rolled over. The professor beat Charles in the face. Then William ran forward and jumped on the professor’s back, pulling him over. Charles came up, turning over, and began beating the professor in the face. Then the students separated them.

  Professor Williams sent the children home. Shortly their father arrived out of breath; he’d run all the way.

  “It’s what you get for putting them in school with uncouth grown-up savages,” Mrs. Taylor greeted him.

  He ignored her and got the story from the boys.

  “Whores are bad women,” their father told them. “It’s a word you shouldn’t ever use.”

  That afternoon one of the young women asked Charles curiously, “Didn’t you really know what it meant?”

  “Aw, sure I knew,” he muttered, blushing with shame. “I was just teasing Mr. Williams.”

  Still neither of them was quite certain just what a whore was. Bad how? If it meant what the men were always whispering about, why go all the way to New Orleans? There were plenty bad women on the campus; they’d seen them in the weeds.

  Some of the women students often kissed them. Once one pushed her tongue between Charles’s lips. He felt like hitting her. But the children began playing with themselves. At night they’d sit in the outhouse and play with each other. William now experienced a definite sex sensation, but it left them both with a sense of shame and guilt. Afterwards they couldn’t face their mother. It was more fun to urinate in a long, thin arc.

  Often when the children encountered students in the outhouse, the men would shake their penises at them.

  “W’en you git sompn’ lak that you can call yo’self a man.”

  The children had such tiny organs that they felt inferior. Once Charles drank a glass of his urine to show how brave he was.

  But for the most part that year was very vague to both the boys. The days were filled with grown-up strangers whose names they knew but whose habits they never understood. Nor did they ever learn the subtle connotations of grown-up speech, as other children, less self-sufficient, might easily have done. Their almost primitive, incurious innocence was kept intact.

  The deepest impressions came from their mother’s incessant nagging. Her voice, like a stream of bile, flowed endlessly through the house. “Mr. Taylor, I’ll never forgive you for bringing me to this Godforsaken place. God will punish you as surely as you’re sitting there…” Bitterness colored the very atmosphere.

  Their only escape was into the cold, lamp-lit attic. But even there the voice would search them out. “You children will catch your death of pneumonia up there, and I’ll be the one who’ll have to look after you. Your father’ll run to his shop and chase around what manner of people nobody knows all night long. Come right down out of that cold. If you can’t find anything to do but ruin your eyes reading, blame it on your father. He brought us down here to this Godforsaken place among these heathen savages…”

  However, there were times when Charles escaped and read alone and she seemed to have completely forgotten his existence. In the cold, dimly lit attic he fought a thousand duels and saved as many damsels in distress. He was Ivan-hoe and Richard the Lionhearted, Alexander the Great and the Count of Monte Cristo, Genghis Khan and the Scarlet Pimpernel. It was often his face in the iron mask, and his strong back, instead of Jean Valjean’s, lifting the carriage from the mud. Most often he was Achilles chasing Hector around the walls of Troy. When all else failed—when he ached with loneliness and Caesar’s failed to conquer; when Ivanhoe had bad dreams and Horatio couldn’t hold the bridge and mud was clinging to his mother’s feet—then he was Achilles. There was something poignantly apt about being Achilles in Mississippi.

  In the end, Mrs. Taylor got them out. She went to Vicksburg and registered in a white hotel. When she came down next morning the manager confronted her.

  “You gave a college for your address. What college is this, Madam?”

  “The state college.”

  “The state college? But that’s in—”

  “The state college for Negroes.”

  Again the governor had to intervene. He telephoned Professor Taylor at the college.

  “Willie, Ah’ll give you forty-eight hours to get that woman out of Mississippi.”

  Packing was a nightmare. So many of Mrs. Taylor’s lovely furnishings and beautiful dishes were lost and broken. The wagons came all day, carting away their furniture. They left at twilight and went down the long dark road, as they had come seven years before, to catch a train at nine o’clock. They were going to St. Louis.

  Charles cried. It was the first of a long, unending series of good-byes. It was the end of something; the beginning of change. Charles never liked change; he was more sensitive to it than most. He was affected by its imminence and again by its actuality. It required the readjustment of his two worlds; sometimes he made the
one without the other, never both, often none. For all its unpleasantness, his life in Mississippi had been simply wonderful. It was the end. He hated the end of anything. He cried for Mississippi.

  Professor Taylor bought a huge old house beside a Catholic school in a changing neighborhood. It was a cold, austere house, once pretentious, with dark oak-paneled halls and cracked marble mantelpieces. When it rained or a north wind blew, the dead smell of old coal smoke seeped from its ancient flues. The dim gas jets filled the gloomy rooms with trembling shades.

  The children hated the house. They hated its smell of death. They spent most of their time in the backyard and the shed. They could hear the subdued voices of the phantom children behind the high stone wall next door.

  In the twilight after supper they sat on the high stone steps. Below on the pavement people passed. The colored people spoke.

  “Good evening.”

  “Good evening.”

  From behind came the strained hushed voices of their parents.

  “I’m doing what I can, Lillian, honey. Until something better comes I’ll just have to take it.”

  “You’ll not talk me into leaving here again, Mr. Taylor.”

  Other parents were sitting on their porches in the cool dim light. The tip of a cigar glowed. Away on Taylor Avenue a street car passed, its trolley striking blue lightning in the dusk. The lighted windows were filled with people. There were so many people in the city. They lived so close together.

  The arc light at the corner sputtered and hissed. Down the street, under the distant light, children played wildly. The Taylor children listened tensely to their strange excited voices.

  Five…ten…fifteen…twenty…

  Are you ready?…

  I’m not ready

  Twenty-five…thirty…thirty-five…forty…

  You’re peeping…

  No I’m not

  Count again…

  Forty-five…fifty…I’m coming, ready or not…

  Then the sound of running feet as they peered toward the wild motion; the squeals as one was caught…

  You’re it…you’re it…

  Five…ten…fifteen…twenty…

  They were assailed with loneliness.

  “Can we go play, Mother?”

  “When you get to meet the children, Mother will let you go and visit them,” she replied absently, her mind on other things. “Mother will take you to meet them as soon as we meet the parents.”

  “Let the children go, honey, they can’t hurt anything.”

  “I’ll not have my children running like wild animals through the streets.”

  Charles stood up. “I’m going to get a drink of water.”

  He rushed from the kitchen, flying down the alley. Then he stood in the darkness near the wildly playing children. The white children were playing with the colored. He was taken for one of them in the dark; a hand touched his arm.

  “You’re it!” a voice cried. “You’re it!”

  He turned and ran like light up the dark alley and disappeared into his own backyard. He was out of breath when he returned to the porch. His parents didn’t notice.

  The summer passed in a strange lonely tension. And suddenly they were gone. The house was closed and they were on the train. Professor Taylor had accepted another post, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Teaching was his way of life. Mrs. Taylor had to face up to it.

  13

  OUT AT THE END OF TOWN, on the flats where the Iron Mountain and Southern Railroads crossed, a group of wooden buildings had been thrown up to house the Negro college.

  The Taylors took a house two miles away, along the tracks. Nearby was the Negro business section; out where the pavement ended was the “Patch.” The white world was sealed off. By comparison the colored world seemed shrunken and distorted, as if a specimen had been placed beneath an inverted microscope and had become strangely infinitesimal.

  In the morning long lines of colored children filed down the railroad tracks, going to the city school. They stood to one side, their ragged clothing flying in the rush of air like the banners of their section, their black faces lifted curiously, eyes intent, as a train went by.

  The Taylor children went to college. They loved to walk the rails.

  “See, I’m not looking,” Charles would say. “You’re looking but I’m not.”

  “I am not looking.”

  “You are too.”

  They tried to walk the two miles without once stepping off. Often the other children challenged their right of way. One would push the other off. Then there’d be a fight. Excited childish faces would ring the fighters in. The brothers always fought together. They had become savage again.

  A train would pass and they’d race the engine, flying recklessly along the shoulder of the bed. All the way to school they threw rocks at the telegraph poles. They stuck close together and delighted in goading the ragged city children. Hardly a week went by without their getting into a rock fight.

  Once Charles tried to hop a fast freight. He ran mightily along the gravel bed and leaped for the low iron rung. His hands got hold, but he was flung about, his back striking the side of the box car, and then hurled to the gravel bed. He landed turning from his own momentum, his outstretched legs across the rail. The onrushing heavy steel wheel struck them as they turned, knocked them away from the rail as it sped on. He kept rolling down the steep embankment, came up skinned and breathless in the gulley.

  “Whew!” he whistled, laughing. “Whew!”

  “You almost got run over!” William screamed in agitation.

  Charles laughed at his older brother. “It threw me all right. But I got the trick. You gotta jump on the journal box.”

  The next morning he waited for the train and hopped it. A neighbor told their mother.

  “I don’t know what’s getting into you children; you’re becoming so ugly,” she scolded.

  Their father whipped them, and afterwards made them walk to school with him. To show his defiance, Charles hopped a freight and rode all the way to Little Rock and was gone all day. He took another whipping.

  They didn’t like the college. It was bleak and ugly and everything was strange. It made them wild and restless. They were always running away from it; running away from something. They cut classes to go wandering about the town. They loved to pick a street and see where it would end. Carnivals delighted them, opening up a strange new world.

  In the twilight after supper they’d ask:

  “Can we go down to the corner, Mother?”

  “To the corner? What for? What’s happening at the corner?”

  “Nothing. We just want to take a walk. It gets so tiresome staying in the house all the time.”

  “You have your homework to do.”

  “We won’t be gone but a minute. We don’t have to do any homework anyway. We’re way ahead of the class.”

  Finally their father would say, “Let them go, honey. There’s nothing they can get into.”

  “Well—don’t be gone long,” she’d call as they took off like a flash.

  They’d run the two miles to the fairgrounds out on Cherry Street and stand for a minute, out of breath, watching the fascinating spectacle, the crowds of white people, the ferris wheel and the carousel and glittering midway—and then run home again.

  “Where did you children go?” their mother would ask anxiously.

  “Just down to the railroad tracks.”

  “You’ve been running; you’re out of breath.”

  “We ran back.”

  “I’ve told you time and again to stay away from the railroad tracks.”

  “We weren’t on the tracks. We were standing off to one side watching the signal lights.”

  “It’s getting so I can’t believe a word you say,” she complained.

  It was that way all that fall. Now they’d stay out roaming the streets until nine and ten o’clock. They were always running. Their father whipped them now, but they didn’t care.

  Th
eir mother was assailed by her old anxiety. They acted so ugly, she thought. More than just naughty; there was a defiance in their attitude that made their acts seem actually wicked as if knowing right from wrong only bedeviled them. Charles worried her most. There was a vein of violence in his nature that kept her constantly on edge. She lived in constant dread of his killing some other boy, or getting himself killed or maimed for life. She became obsessed with the fear that God was going to punish her for the strange passion she had for him. She brooded for weeks, worrying and fretting between moments of intense anguish. She doubted if he’d live to see his twenty-first birthday. Life would never take his reckless challenge; it would kill him. But what brought her such deep torture was the fear that it would hurt him first. Out of all her sons she dreaded most to see him hurt. He would buck and strain against it and die in abject misery.

  And then, it was as if God sent the smallpox to save them from destruction. The day before Christmas both had sore throats and were running temperatures. Their mother thought they had caught common colds. But when her treatment failed to get results she called the doctor. He was familiar with the dread disease and clamped on a quarantine. Within the hour the house was posted.

  Their father rushed home, but wasn’t allowed inside the picket fence. Mrs. Taylor talked to him from the porch. The children had been put to bed.

  For three days they were critically ill, drifting in and out of delirium as their fever rose and fell. Their mother waited on them hand and foot. When the pustules came she anointed them constantly with carbolic salve. They lay naked on the slimy bed, the touch of cloth unbearable. Their bodies were covered with eruptions from head to foot, the palms of their hands, beneath their fingernails, the soles of their feet; their faces and lips and ears were a mass of greasy pus. During the long hours when little else could be done, their mother prayed.

  “God take my life…give me the disease…please, dear God, spare them…I’ll do anything…I’ll be a good wife…I’ll follow Your teaching…”

  The bodies of her sons seemed rotting away before her very eyes.

  “God in Heaven, what have they done?” she cried in anguish. “What have my children done that You should punish them like this?”