The Third Generation

by Chester B Himes

  “Doan you call me no basta’d, li’l ol’ boy.”

  Charles kicked him on the shin. The student tussled with him, half-jokingly, holding him at arm’s length. “De hammer slipped an’ yo’ pa done knocked yo’ head so flat you got pancake brains.”

  “Confound bastard!” Charles screamed. “Confound bastard!”

  The student threw him down and ran off laughing.

  William told his father. Professor Taylor laughed and said it didn’t matter; the fellows were just jealous of their heads.

  He was an open and natural child, and when hurt went crying to his parents. He told them everything that happened and sought their approval and affection. Charles was stubborn and secretive. When their mother sought the truth she went to William.

  Both had a wild, animal love of the outdoors. They roamed the fields like hunting hounds. There was always something new to be found. They never tired of the wonder of the countryside. Often they disobeyed their parents and went into the deep woods where there was danger of being injured by the wild hogs, “loco” steers and poisonous snakes. No one would know where they were. Their parents took to whipping them quite frequently then, trying to restrain this wildness in their nature. Their father used his razor strap, but Mrs. Taylor made them cut fresh green switches from the trees. William screamed bloody murder when he was whipped. The neighbors, hearing him, thought Mrs. Taylor was unreasonably cruel to her children. But Charles never cried. He gritted his teeth in silence. This made his mother whip him all the harder. Her mouth closed in a grim straight line and her deep-set eyes blazed as she lit into him. And his little mouth tightened and his eyes hardened as he faced her in silence. The grim, white-faced woman and the defiant brown boy looked a great deal alike at such times, and the intensity of their emotion for each other was overpowering. Charles loved his mother heartbreakingly, and yet he hated her. And her love for him was agonizing. She ofttimes beat him unmercifully seeking to control his will. But he stood up to her and never gave in. They tore at each other’s heartstrings, hurting each other terribly. Between them raged this love and hatred which never cooled.

  Mrs. Taylor rarely kissed her youngest son. All of his intense emotion poured out through his kiss and she was shocked by her own passionate response. She didn’t want to favor one child above the others. He was a beautiful child with perfect rose-tan features and deep dimples when he smiled. His dark brown eyes were deep-set like her own, but large and very clear. They were fringed by long black shiny lashes that curled upward. Each time his mother looked at him she could see in his shockingly beautiful face the girl she had waited when he was born. But he was the most uncontrollably violent of all her children.

  Sometimes she let Charles brush her long silky hair. He loved the feel of it on his hands and face. He brushed with long hard strokes until it crackled and sparked.

  “It’s sparking, Mother!” he cried. “It’s sparking. I’m gonna turn out the light so I can see it spark.”

  Laughingly she indulged him. Afterwards he picked up bits of paper with the magnetized comb.

  “Lookit, Mother. Lookit.”

  He loved to watch the quick soft motion of her arms when she plaited her hair: they were firm and white as if carved from ivory. Sometimes she let him file her nails. He fashioned gently rounded points of which he was inordinately proud.

  “Aren’t they pretty, Mother? Didn’ I do a good job?”

  “You did them very nicely, darling.”

  As a girl Mrs. Taylor had been proud of her tiny feet. But she’d worn shoes too small for her and had developed bunions. She was quite ashamed of them, and sometimes they pained her terribly. Then Charles sat before her on the floor and, taking each foot in turn, massaged them with a strange tenderness. He was infinitely patient with her and slowly, gently rubbed in the ointment until the pain disappeared.

  “Does it feel better now, Mother?”

  Her love became so intense she was afraid to look at him. “Yes, darling, the pain’s all gone. Now you run along and play with William.”

  William was never jealous of his little brother. But oft-times he felt neglected and would go and put his head in his mother’s lap and she would stroke it gently.

  Their parents fought a great deal during that time. Hearing their screaming voices, followed by the sounds of scuffling, Charles would crawl to the head of the stairs and crouch, trembling in rage and fear. He didn’t hate his father. But when his parents quarreled he wanted to cut off his father’s head with the chopping axe. He felt violently protective toward his mother.

  Both children had a complete disregard for physical injury. They were always hurting themselves. Although their father had cautioned them countless times, they’d stand barefoot on the blocks they were splitting. Once William almost chopped off his foot. A half-hour later Charles was back doing the same thing. The difference was his defiance. He challenged danger. He rolled down rocky cliffs as if his body was made of wagon wheels. If he got a few cuts on the face and skinned his hands and knees it didn’t matter. Their knees and elbows were always a mass of iodine-colored scabs. Their mother was constantly worried for fear one of them would lose an eye or limb. Charles was balancing a sharpened hoe on his shoulder and it fell and cut his Achilles tendon. A delicate operation was required to join it together. But even then he refused to stay indoors. His mother ordered crutches from Memphis and he went hopping about. They loved the crutches and played with them long after he was well.

  Their father built a rope swing on the branch of an oak tree in the back pasture. Singly, each of them could loop the loop, but they had to try it double. They fell too short from the top of the turn and struck their heads against the limb.

  “You’ll have to take down that swing, Mr. Taylor,” their mother said at supper. “The children are going to kill themselves.”

  “Now what’ve they done this time, honey?”

  “They’re not satisfied with just swinging; they want to be acrobats.”

  “They’re just boys,” he began. “Just Daddy’s—”

  “They’re going to be dead, and it’ll be you that killed them,” she said harshly. “If you don’t take that swing down the first thing in the morning I’m going to send for Clefus and have him chop down that tree.”

  “Now, honey, I’ll move it where it’ll be safer.”

  But he forgot about it. The next afternoon Charles fell trying to somersault on a backwards swing and struck his head on an old iron hitching block concealed in the grass. He was knocked unconscious. Lizzie and a passing student carried him to the hospital, with his mother trailing in the dust behind. X-rays revealed he had suffered a brain concussion. Mrs. Taylor attacked her husband like a tigress when he arrived at the hospital. She scratched his face and screamed at him while the students tried to hold her.

  “You want to murder them!” she cried. “You want to kill them, then you’ll have me all alone so you can kill me too.”

  “Confound it, woman, control yourself!” he shouted back at her. “He’s my son just as much as he is yours!”

  Charles lay in a nearby room near death. William stood in the corner, cowed and humiliated. Dr. Wiley and his students were painfully embarrassed.

  “Now Professor, now Mrs. Taylor, you’re both just upset—”

  “You murderer!” Mrs. Taylor screamed. “You want to kill all of us!”

  “Now hold her arm,” Dr. Wiley instructed his assistants. “Now everything’s going to be all right, Mrs. Taylor.” And he gave her an injection. “Now if you’ll just lie down a while.”

  She fought them like a wild woman.

  “Now Lillian, honey, now honey—”

  “Take her to a room,” the doctor ordered.

  The black students were loath to struggle with this wild-eyed, white-faced woman.

  “Here, give me a hand, Professor.”

  Finally they got her to bed.

  The next day they brought Charles home. But his mother was determined to take
them away.

  “If it hadn’t been that it’ve been something else,” their father argued. “The boys have to have some outlet. You keep them cooped up like laying hens. You won’t let them go to school like other children. You think they’re too good to play with the country boys their age. They never go anywhere unless they slip off. They have to have something to do.”

  “They don’t have to kill themselves,” she contended unrelentingly, her mouth grim and determined.

  “We’ll just have to watch them closer.”

  “Watch them!” she cried. “That’s all I’ve done. God knows, I’ve tried. But they’re becoming savage. I’m not going to stand for it. I’m taking them back to civilization.”

  “I’ve got something to say about that,” he challenged. “They’re my boys too.”

  “They won’t be yours for long,” she said. “I’m going to divorce you, Mr. Taylor.”

  “You might divorce me, honey,” he replied with maddening calm. “But you’re not going to take these boys one step out of my house.”

  “That we shall see,” she said, her eyes glinting dangerously.

  Age and worry and discontent and too much crying had affected her eyelids so that they looked like dead brown skin laced with tiny veins; and when she was angry they dropped half-closed, giving her a particularly malevolent look.

  But her husband wasn’t cowed. “We shall see,” he said.

  She packed a bag and went to Vicksburg to consult a white attorney. She was told she had no grounds for a divorce.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself, Madam,” the attorney said. “You have a fine husband, an intelligent man, a good provider, and according to you he’s been faithful. But you want to divorce him so you can leave Mississippi. Madam, I think you are color-struck, and in this instance your husband has all my sympathy.”

  She never told anyone the outcome of her interview, but afterwards she said no more of getting a divorce.

  Charles was glad. He loved it there; he loved the sights and smells and seasons. He loved the hot dry summers and the rainy falls. He never saw a wagon wheel churning in the hub-deep mud without feeling all inside him the aching hurt of death. Winter was like that, like the ecstasy of pain. His mother whipping him out of her love for him and his love for her aching inside of him with the pain, their love unable to come through the hard bleakness of their hate—was like death. Winter was like death. He loved to play dead, falling in a pretended faint and lying immobile on the ground, feeling the embrace of the earth, its closeness and its chill. Several times he frightened his mother out of her wits. She knew he had never gotten over seeing the woman crushed beneath the wagon wheels, and she was always terribly afraid for him.

  Spring affected him physically. He could feel it rising within himself like a great turbulence and when it boiled out, strangely, he was a flower, a deep red flower, or a green whispering tree. He could change himself into a bird, or he could become a yellow-winged butterfly. It was almost all a dream; he could turn everything into a dream.

  He turned the hill up to the Pattersons into the Alps and he was Hannibal; behind him stretched his elephant train. Once he was Horatio at the clattering wooden bridge across the bayou beyond the barn. He stood before the wagon teams, frightened but undaunted, until the drivers got down and moved him bodily. Then he threw rocks at them. His father strapped him.

  But that didn’t stop him from straying off all day long following a group of students who were searching for strayed sheep. Only he was searching for the Golden Fleece. No one knew where he was.

  “We went across the cornfield by the pine grove,” William told his parents at suppertime. “But I didn’t go into the woods. It was dark in there.”

  “When was that?” his mother asked.

  “This morning.”

  “My God!” she cried, rushing from the table.

  “Wait a minute, honey,” Professor Taylor called, and to his son, “Where were you all day?”

  “I was waiting.”

  “Where?”

  “By the woods.”

  Mrs. Taylor had gone out into the road, walking rapidly up the hill. She met Charles coming down the hill. Professor Taylor had just come out the gate. Charles broke into a run. Wordlessly, his mother seized a broken stick and struck at him. He dodged and ran on home ahead of her and his father let him come inside the house.

  “Where’d you so, son?”

  “Just walkin’.”

  “But where, son?”

  “Just walkin’ in the woods.”

  “You had your mother worried, son. We were all worried. Now tell me where you went.”

  “I was just walkin’,” he replied stubbornly.

  “Just walking. But what were you doing? What were you looking for?”

  “Nothin’. I wasn’t lookin’ for nothin’. I just felt like walkin’.”

  His father couldn’t make him out. Then his mother entered with a freshly cut switch, her face grim and determined. He braced himself for the whipping with relief. Now he wouldn’t have to tell them anything.

  She saw that he was waiting for it. She dropped the switch and fell to her knees before him and took him in her arms. Suddenly she burst into tears. Charles was shocked. He wished he could make his mother happy. He wished he could confide in her and make her laugh her tingling little laugh. She was so beautiful when she was happy. It was her grim, unconquerable look he couldn’t bear. She fought so desperately.

  On summer days when it rained the children played in the attic. They were entranced by the drumming of the rain on the shingled roof. It was a faraway sound, transporting them to magic lands, and then even William could play Charles’s games of dreaming a new existence. There were mud daubers’ nests to crack and see the larvae. Sometimes a bat flew blindly about, coming within a hairsbreadth of their faces. They rushed recklessly about, trying to catch it. From below it sounded as if they were fighting dragons. Their mother came flying, panting breathlessly from the steep stairs.

  “What is it? What’s happened?” Her voice was shrill from strain.

  Innocently they looked at her. “We were just trying to catch a little ol’ bat,” William said.

  She sat on the top step, torn between laughter and tears. She knew her children were lonely and constrained. Their lack of companions their own age was a constant source of worry. She longed for them to experience a happy childhood, such as she had had. But what was she to do? At times such as this she ached for them. What would happen to them, she didn’t know. It was all their father’s fault, she thought. If he only knew what he was doing to his children, bringing them up in that awful environment.

  As they grew older they took their books to the attic to read. Any dream was possible beneath the strangely stirring drumming of the rain.

  In the wintertime they curled up before the downstairs fire, their parents sitting in the easy chairs. Mrs. Taylor had her bag of darning and Professor Taylor held an open book. Soon he dozed, his bifocals slipping down his nose, and his head fell forward, open-mouthed. The fire blazed and crackled in the fireplace. William showed his mother the picture of Agni. Charles was lost to it. He was reading Poe’s “The Raven” with complete absorption. The slow, melancholy beat of the repetitious words spun a sharp hurt through his mind. He felt himself tightening slowly until he couldn’t bear it. Suddenly he cried, “Damn! Damn!” His own voice released him from the sinister spell. He looked straight up toward his mother, and cringed from the profound shock that came into her face. She didn’t speak. His father stirred sleepily. “Whassat? Whassat?”

  “Charles cursed,” William said. “Charles said damn.”

  Professor Taylor came awake but he was still groggy and witless. “That right, son? You curse your brother?”

  “I wasn’t cursing anybody,” Charles replied.

  Mrs. Taylor saw that her husband was confused. She turned to Charles and said sadly, “Go to the kitchen and wash out your mouth with soap.”

&nb
sp; He went without a word. William followed to see that he obeyed. Charles rubbed the strong lye soap on the dishcloth and thoroughly scrubbed inside his mouth. He didn’t know why he had cursed. It was the terror in Poe that fascinated him.

  One cold January evening, while sitting in the outhouse leafing through the pages of the Sears Roebuck catalogue by lantern light, he came across sketches of birds. He was sucking a straight pin. Both of the children had picked up their father’s habit of picking his teeth with pins. Their mother had tried to break them of it, but they did it secretly.

  Suddenly Charles was reminded of the Albatross. The whole sinister world of Poe seemed to envelop him. The dark night closed in, phantoms and murderers crept stealthily through the weeds. He swallowed in terror, and the pin disappeared. He didn’t feel it in his throat, but he couldn’t find it anywhere. If he had swallowed the pin it would puncture his intestines. He sat frightening himself into a trance with thoughts of bleeding inside and dying slowly. No one would know what was wrong with him. He wouldn’t tell them. He would say he couldn’t eat. He’d become pale and weak. He’d nurture his pain in silence. Finally would come the day when he could no longer stand up. He’d lie in bed, dying. His mother would grieve over him. She’d cry. Then he’d tell her how much he’d always loved her. She’d hold him in her beautiful white arms and kiss him.

  Then he’d tell her about all his wonderful dreams. He’d say, “You know, Mama, the time I was away all day and wouldn’t tell where I was. I was Jason, Mama, I was looking for the golden fleece. I planted the dragon teeth, too, Mama. And the fields were full of soldiers.” Then she’d say, “Oh, my darling, you tell me and I will go away with you.” And he’d shake his head sadly and say, “It’s too late now, Mama.” And he’d rest his head on her soft breasts while she held him close in her white ivory arms and he’d die. He was so moved by the fantasy he found himself crying. It shocked him back to reality. Now he was certain he’d swallowed the pin. He was terrified. He ran back to the house, holding his pants by his hands. But at sight of his parents and William sitting so serenely about the fire, he lost his nerve.