The Third Generation

by Chester B Himes

  One night he went into his brother’s room. “Will, I think I’m going crazy,” he said.

  William was startled. “What’s the matter, Chuck? What happened?”

  He told of his reaction to his textbooks.

  William was puzzled. “You mean you actually feel nauseated?”

  “That’s it. That’s just how I feel—nauseated.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” William said. “It’s just nerve tension. I used to feel that way when I was in the hospital. Why don’t you just relax, let the studies go. Why don’t you just rest, Chuck.”

  He tried but he couldn’t. For days he remained in complete despair. William tried to comfort him, but after the first confession he could never talk of it again.

  One day his doctor said that he was cured. He dressed immediately after the doctor’s visit and left the house, intending to spend the night with Marge. It was a warm May day. The last of winter’s accumulation of soot-laden snow was thawing and the thick black slime running in the gutters affected him strangely. He felt a strong desire to wade in it and get his clean white shoes filthy. He could barely restrain himself.

  At the bank, on sudden impulse, he drew out three hundred dollars. He wanted to impress Marge with being rich and prosperous. But Billie’s house reminded him of the fiasco at George’s, the living rooms were quite similar, and he was struck by Marge’s resemblance to Rose. All the bitter hurt came back. Suddenly he felt nauseated again. He left abruptly, walking rapidly along the cheap slum street, avoiding the eyes of the whores in the windows. In his mind he was running. He went out Cedar Avenue, but everything he saw reminded him of something he wanted to forget—couples playing tennis on the courts behind the Y, the corner where he’d wrecked his Aunt Bee’s car. When he approached the Robinsons’ house he crossed the street and looked the other way. The three blocks between 97th and 100th Streets, known as “The Avenue,” a congested area of vice and destitution, was a city paradox. Even though it was early afternoon of a working day, crowds of black and yellow people drifted up and down the street, shouting and laughing and cursing, threading in and out the whiskey joints, the gambling clubs, the whorehouses, as if it were a summer Saturday. Sleek fat pimps and hustlers sat in their parked cars, talking about their money, while starved, diseased flotsam shuffled past, living on a prayer.

  Charles had seldom lingered in the vicinity. But now it intruded on his consciousness. A group of mothers with their babies chatted in the sun. A car roared down the street, screamed to a sudden stop. Several youths his age were pitching quarters on the sidewalk. All the different tones of laughter fingered on his mind. A sudden wave of loneliness swept over him. He turned into a pool hall to seek companionship.

  “Give me change for a twenty,” he said to the rack boy.

  All the hustlers and hangers-on saw his roll of money. Suddenly he found himself hemmed in.

  “Play yuh a game of rotation, kid?”

  “Don’t you play that guy, he’s slick.”

  “The kid don’t gamble. You don’t gamble, do you, kid?”

  He was rescued by a big light-complexioned man with curly hair who had once been his barber. “Let that kid alone; he’s a friend of mine. Whatya say, Chuck, long time, no see.”

  “Hello, Dave.”

  “Wanna buy a car?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Come on.” Dave took him outside and showed him a big sporty-looking touring car parked at the curb. The top was down and it had red leather seats. “I’ll take you for a ride.”

  They drove out into the country and Dave increased the speed. “Listen.” He kicked a pedal on the floor. Motor roar spilled out behind like thunder from a speeding plane, the sound enveloping them whenever they passed underneath a tree. “It’s got a voice, eh?” he shouted over the roar. “A four-by-seven cutout.”

  Charles felt as if they were hurtling through space. His blood raced down the black road with the speeding car. “Let me drive,” he shouted.

  They stopped and exchanged seats. He gripped the wheel and pressed down on the accelerator. The big car leapt forward in an open-throated roar, throwing him back against the seat, and the road came up over the hood like a tidal wave. Nothing in all his, life had equalled that sensation. He leaned forward into the onrushing road, his mind sealed shut in a feeling of invincible power, the whole past dropping away behind him, cut off; for the moment every thought he’d ever had was blotted out by the bright blue beautiful unknown sensation ahead, all else gone in his consuming sense of might. He knew then that with that car he could outspeed all his fears and trepidations, his shames and humiliations, the gnawing self-consciousness imposed by his injury, the terrible depression that had settled on his thoughts. With that car he could defy everyone. He could take that goddamned car and drive off the edge of the world. And later, after they’d gotten back to town and he was driving slowly down Cedar Avenue, looking at the passing girls, he knew somehow, without actually thinking it, he could also rescue damsels in distress.

  He bought the car from Dave, paying down two hundred and fifty dollars and having the balance financed for monthly payments. He had to give his age as twenty-one to sign the contract.

  Owning a car gave him a feeling of importance. His mother noticed the change in him immediately. But she didn’t know he’d bought a car. He never took it home. He knew she’d disapprove and he was afraid she might, in some way, force Dave to take it back. So he always parked it on the street beyond the high school and walked home.

  Dave was having an affair with a married woman named Cleo and introduced Charles to her younger sister, Peggy, so the four of them could ride around together. Peggy was a soft, voluptuous woman with reddish hair and fair skin, and she had that clinging, insistent femininity of women who want only to bear children. She was twenty-two years old and told Charles he was the second man she’d had. Cleo’s husband worked in a hotel garage and was away on weekends. Peggy lived with them.

  During the afternoons while the husband was at work the four of them drove to nearby towns and rented rooms in various brothels. But on Sundays Dave drove off alone with Cleo while Charles and Peggy stayed at home. For Charles these were the best times. All day long they lay in each other’s arms. Peggy slept on the couch in the living room, but on these days they used her sister’s bed. The shades were drawn and they could hear the voices of the neighbors as they panted in delirium. For a time they’d lie lazily apart.

  “Why don’t you want to marry me, baby?” she’d murmur in her soft southern accent.

  “You know I do,” he’d lie.

  They could hear the children laughing in the yard. It was cool and dim and pleasant in the secret room.

  “Why do you always put it off then?”

  “But we’re just getting to know each other.”

  “What else you want to know? Ain’t it good to you?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  And she’d take him, enfold him in her soft hot body, so that he drowned in ecstasy. She seemed to respond the moment he touched her. Their mouths would be glued together, their tongues fused, their bodies thrashing in a struggle each to consume the other.

  Once she screamed and bit his shoulder. Instantly he was flooding, overflowing, all of himself gushing into her.

  By afternoon the sheet would be spotted with their love. They’d jump up guiltily arid run about the house, naked and laughing, while she washed the sheet, and she’d dress quickly and hang it on the line to catch the last sun. The neighbors watched her curiously, wondering why anyone would wash a single sheet on a late Sunday afternoon.

  Finally his mother knew, not from any telltale evidence, but from something in his look. His tension had gone, he was relaxed but more implacable than ever. He didn’t fly into a rage when she scolded him for staying out so late. He scarcely paid any attention to her at all. She was overcome with a fierce, unreasonable jealousy.

  “You just wait,” she screamed at him. “You�
�re going to end up in the penitentiary or on the gallows yet.”

  She wanted to hurt him, to beat him unmercifully. She told herself it was to save him. Several times when he left home she tried to follow him. But when he got over on the next street he seemed to disappear. She didn’t know he simply got into his car and drove off. She thought the woman lived nearby. It was a white neighborhood. She was shocked. That he would take up with a white woman was unendurable. She couldn’t realize that she wanted to be the only white woman in his life. And she was certain the woman was mature.

  Her fury became uncontrollable.

  “Charles is living with a woman on the next street,” she told her husband, hoping to enrage him to action.

  “Living?”

  “He’s having an affair.”

  He went over next day and found that only white people lived on that street. He was relieved.

  “You’re going crazy,” he told his wife.

  “You may think I’m crazy but I know what I’m talking about.”

  He put down his paper. “Only white people live on that street.”

  She couldn’t bring herself to say the woman was white.

  “Why don’t you quit making up things to nag the boy? Let him alone, he’s coming out all right. He just needs some peace.”

  She left the house; she couldn’t control herself. After that she nagged at Charles whenever he was home. She found herself incapable of charging to his face that he was living with a woman. Instead, she accused him of spending his time in dives and gambling dens. No matter what hour of night he returned home, she would arise and come into his room and turn on the light and stand in the door, her hair in braids and her face greasy with night cream, and nag until he turned his back and drew the covers over his head.

  You’re throwing away your chances…you’re throwing away your chances…The words would slither and crawl through the room like figments of insanity.

  Then one day Peggy told him he’d have to marry her.

  “You’ve made me pregnant, honey.”

  They were returning from a drive, just the two of them, and had parked for a moment in front of her house. He had his arm about her and was leaning down to take her kiss. Abruptly he drew back.

  “Pregnant?” He was frightened.

  “You knew you were doing it, baby. The way you poured it into me.”

  “It’s only been a couple of months.”

  “How long you think it takes?”

  To marry her was beyond his comprehension. It seemed impossible; impossible that she would even think he would. She didn’t know. He just couldn’t marry a common ordinary colored woman like herself. What would his mother think? She’d feel betrayed after all the things she’d told him about his white forebears. She’d really die, he thought.

  It was the first time he’d been faced with such a choice. He knew, at that moment, he could never leave his mother.

  “Well, let’s go inside and talk it over with your sister,” he said.

  She got out. He reached over and closed the door and sped off, driving as if the demons were chasing him.

  The next day Dave said, “Cleo and her husband been lookin’ for you. They asked me where you lived but I told ‘em I didn’t know.”

  “Was Peggy with them?”

  “Not at the time. What happened?”

  “We broke off.”

  “Is Peggy pregnant?”

  “She says she is.”

  Dave looked at him curiously. “That’s rough, kid.”

  “Goddammit, she ought to have been more careful,” Charles flared defensively. “She knew I couldn’t marry her.”

  “Well, you’d better be careful too, and hope they don’t find you.”

  For several days he kept to himself, spending his afternoons at the movies, driving through the parks at night. He told himself he was glad to get out of it. But he couldn’t get over the realization that he’d done something horrible, despite how his mother might have felt. It kept coming back how he must have hurt her. She loved him. The strange part was he loved her too. It haunted him. It was the bitterest good-bye of them all.

  His mother knew that it was ended. She could almost imagine how he had ended it. She suffered for him, and yet she was elated. She felt triumphant over the woman he must have hurt.

  One day he ran into Dave downtown. He couldn’t keep from asking, “How’s Peggy?”

  “You sent her back to Georgia, kid. You sent her home.”

  After that he tightened up again. The demons were catching up. He began going out on the country roads, trying to lose himself in speed. But the demons ran along beside the car. Sometimes it was all he could do to keep from taking off from some high precipice and roaring toward the sky. He’d look up, and there’d be Peggy’s naked body straight across the road; or he’d find himself suddenly back in George’s house that night with Rose breaking up the party and the students fleeing out the door. He’d catch himself just in time to keep from running into something. It was as if the current of his life, having passed its crest, was now running downhill. It was swifter, more dangerous, infinitely more destructive as it gained in momentum. It became dangerous for him to drive alone.

  Danger and the loneliness drove him back to town. He began picking up women from the street, taking them to liquor joints, waking up in strange rooms with half-remembered details of drunken orgies. Often he was utterly shocked by the memory of a scene.

  There was a popular cabaret in the downtown colored district where he often went. It had a bar that sold setups for the drinks sold by the bootleggers hustling at the tables, and a bandstand at the end of a big dance floor. On weekend nights the place was crowded with women on the make. Charles smoked cork-tipped cigarettes and wore his white linen suit and black crepe silk shirt and the floating, seeking women began picking him up. When the trumpet player came forward and began blowing the Bugle Blues the women became wild and abandoned, were caught in a hypnotic exhibitionism. Some tried to take off their clothes, screaming, “Let me run naked!” while husbands and lovers struggled to restrain them. Others stood atop the tables with their dresses pulled above their waists and screamed, “Blow it out, daddy, blow it out!” During these moments some predaceous woman or another always captured Charles, throwing her arms about his neck and devouring him with her whore’s look, crooning in her whiskey voice, “Give me those eyes.” He’d go home with whatever one approached him first; sometimes with women who paid the bills, sometimes with those who thought themselves queens, sometimes with others, atrociously ugly, who made up for it by mothering him. Several times he went home with a prizefighter’s wife who’d tremble stagily whenever she saw him. The men never bothered Charles; they called him “Pigmeat” and joshed him about his conquests. Only the older women were infatuated, the young girls were hunting older men. And always, sooner or later, as he lay in bed with them, the expression came up, “With eyes like those you can break any whore’s heart.”

  One night he spoke to the trumpet player who was standing at the bar between two teen-age girls.

  “How do you do it, Pat?”

  The dark man in his ice cream suit with his glossy hair gave him a confidential grin. “Keep ‘em barefooted and knocked up.”

  Charles returned the grin. A woman came and took his arm.

  “You the one got the best go and the mojo,” Pat called after him.

  He became friendly with Pat after that and met the others in the band. Frequently when the place closed he would drive them home, or to some after-hours spot where they met their women.

  When their contract was up at the cabaret the band went on the road. Charles began driving them about the state to the steel-mill towns where they played one-night stands in the local dance halls. Those nights were caught in fantasy. A dreamlike quality descended on the violent dances in the strange, distant cities, the wild abandoned rhythms animating the black figures milling about the floor in the dim light until reason seemed to have fled the ma
d orgiastic weaving of their bodies. Then followed the bloody cuttings, the grotesquely funny shootings in the underbrush, a “brass-lined forty-four on a forty-five frame” blazing in the night, some poor victim dancing an agony of death. And afterwards the mad drive homeward, racing blindly through the early morning fog, riding the sound of the motor roar, like something out of the Inferno; the band boys half drunk and dead tired, draped about each other, another car or two following, and himself crouched over the wheel, foot jammed to the floor, feeling invincible, as if he could drive his goddamned car right straight down through the solid goddamned earth, daring death. Most times he couldn’t see a curve thirty feet ahead.

  “Jesus Christ, kid, take it easy,” some band boy would say, suddenly awakening as the car lurched from disaster.

  “Have we ever had an accident?” he’d challenge.

  “No, but goddammit, the way you driving we ain’t gonna have but one.”

  “Do I charge you anything to use my car?”

  “What the hell’s that got to do with it if we all wake up dead?”

  “Listen—” shouting over the roar. “All I ask you to do is close your eyes. I’ll get you home.”

  Those times he’d completely escaped all his hurt and loneliness.

  His mother kept after him constantly to study for his examinations that fall. But nights he was always gone, coming home drunk to sleep away the day. She didn’t know where he went or what he did. She feared any day they’d bring him home dead, or that she’d be notified he was in jail for some terrible crime. He couldn’t tell her that the sight of his textbooks nauseated him, that demons pursued him, that once he’d dreamed horribly of letting her die—that the only way he could escape these things was by his nighttime odysseys. She began to fear that he didn’t intend to return to college. She felt his life would be irrevocably destroyed unless he did.