The Third Generation

by Chester B Himes

  “Mama,” he faltered. She knew instantly that something was wrong. “I th-think I’ve swallowed a pin,” he stammered.

  His parents bolted upright. Professor Taylor ran for his coat and hat. His mother put her arm about him and raised his chin. He could feel the violent trembling of her body.

  “Is it in your throat?” she asked, trying to control the rising of hysteria.

  William looked at his brother in awe.

  “I don’t know,” Charles said. “I can’t feel it.”

  “Don’t you feel it at all?”

  “No, I can’t feel it anywhere.”

  “Then how do you know you swallowed it?”

  “I-I had it in my mouth and swallowed and it disappeared.”

  He saw her mouth tighten and her face become grim, torn between worry and anger.

  Professor Taylor rushed in, carrying Charles’s coat and cap.

  “I’ll take him to the hospital, honey. Now don’t you worry.”

  “I think he’s just imagining it,” she said.

  He looked at his son. Charles had begun to tremble. But he was more frightened by the scene he’d caused than by having swallowed the pin.

  “Well, the doctor’ll know,” his father said. “Come, get into your coat, son.”

  The hospital had recently installed a fluoroscopy The doctor examined him thoroughly, but could find no sign of a foreign body. Charles was relieved to know that he wasn’t going to die. But now his mother wouldn’t cry and hold him in her arms. She’d think he’d just made it up to get her sympathy and attention. Perhaps she’d whip him. But there’d be no passion in her anger. He dreaded going home.

  She didn’t even scold him. On his return she looked at him with contempt and ignored him. It hurt far worse than had she whipped him.

  The last time Mrs. Taylor whipped her children was for spying on the women’s toilet behind the women’s dormitory. It stood on the high bank of the bayou and in the summer was almost hidden by the trees and underbrush surrounding it. The children played a game of standing on the other bank and seeing who could urinate the farthest. It was fun to watch the clear arched streams of urine falling into the tiny stream below. A couple of students came up and took part in the game. But they were no match for the children.

  “W’en Ah were yo’ age Ah could piss that fur too,” one of them said disgustedly.

  Charles and William looked at one another and giggled. They were proud of their strength.

  The men went down and lay in the weeds and looked up at the toilet. The children followed to see what they were looking for. All they could see were the bottoms of several women relieving themselves.

  “They’re not doing nothing but going to the toilet,” Charles said.

  “What you think!” the student exclaimed. “They be eatin’ dinner or somp’n?” He and the other student laughed.

  Charles didn’t know what he’d expected to see—something exciting, like a fight or a game.

  William felt uneasy. “Let’s go.”

  “Yare, git de hell ‘way frum heah ‘fore you draw ‘tention.”

  They got up and started off. Professor Saunders, who patrolled the spot, saw them and came charging. The students jumped like flushed quail and tore off down the bayou. Professor Saunders rah after them. The children followed, tearing through the weeds and underbrush and stumbling along in high glee. This was more like it; this was fun. The students got away. Professor Saunders sat and caught his breath.

  “They outran us,” Charles said, dancing with excitement.

  “They ran like rabbits,” William echoed.

  “Do you know those students?” Professor Saunders asked the boys.

  “No, sir.”

  “One had a scar on his cheek.”

  “He had a copper penny ‘tached to his belt buckle.”

  “What were you boys doing there?”

  Charles was silent.

  “Just looking,” William said.

  “Looking at what?”

  The boys were ashamed. “Just looking around,” William replied.

  Professor Saunders stood and took them by the arms. “All right, come along with me.”

  Another professor would have taken them to their father. But he disliked Mrs. Taylor, and he took this opportunity to embarrass her. He marched the boys down the road and up to the Taylors’ front door.

  “Good day, Professor Saunders,” Mrs. Taylor greeted him, wondering what the children had got into now.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Taylor,” he replied, smiling. He was a tall, thin, dark man with a cone-shaped head and large, yellow teeth. There was always a little matter in the corners of his eyes. “I’m sorry to have to report I caught your sons peeking behind the women’s toilet.” He licked his lips as if he relished it. “And there were women students using it at the time.”

  Mrs. Taylor flushed crimson. She felt dirtied and humiliated. “I commend you on doing your duty so meticulously,” she said in a tight, controlled voice, “even to the point of ascertaining what the boys were looking for.”

  Her condescension wiped the oily smirk from his long, horse-shaped face. “I don’ know what they was lookin’ for,” he said roughly, lapsing into his native talk, “but I know what they was lookin’ at. An’ if you don’ whip ‘em I’ll whip ‘em myself.”

  She gathered the boys to her sides. “If you lay a hand on one of my children I’ll horsewhip you,” she said, adding scathingly, “You have the effrontery to call yourself a teacher.”

  Infuriated, he reached for Charles. Mrs. Taylor struck him in the face. He turned ashy with rage and instinctively struck back, the blow glancing off her shoulder. Her face blanched. Without another word she turned back into the house, disdainful of him pursuing her, and went in search of her husband’s shotgun.

  Maddened by her escape, he turned on the boys, cuffing William on the head. Charles clutched him about the legs and tripped him down the steps, while William fled crying underneath the house.

  “You li’l bastard!” Professor Saunders cried as he scrambled to his feet.

  Charles kicked him on the shin and fled after William. Professor Saunders followed them, scuttling on all fours underneath the beams. The boys had crawled to the back of the house where there was only a foot of clearance. Looking about for a stick to strike at them, Professor Saunders saw the skirt of Mrs. Taylor’s dress as she rounded the corner of the house, carrying the double-barreled shotgun. He crawled rapidly to the far side, losing his hat in the process, and began running across the truck garden, his suit dirtied and disheveled.

  “He’s getting away on the other side,” Charles yelled excitedly.

  Deliberately, Mrs. Taylor encircled the house. In his haste, Professor Saunders had stumbled, but he was up, running again, when she came into view. Although he was out of range, Mrs. Taylor, unfamiliar with firearms, raised the gun and fired. The gun kicked her sharply and she uttered a cry of pain. The children dashed from beneath the house to aid her.

  Professor Saunders had been running in the direction of the Pattersons’ field. But the sound of the shot panicked him and, wheeling suddenly, he jumped the picket fence, snagging his coat. As he tore off down the road in a cloud of dust, she raised the gun and fired again, the bird shot kicking up spurts of dust far behind him. He was well out of danger, but at the sound of the second shot he leaped high in the air, as if he’d been hit, and howled in fear.

  “Shoot him again, Mama!” Charles screamed.

  Students were converging from all directions, attracted by the commotion. Ignoring them, Mrs. Taylor marched the children into the house, moving with the slow, taut preciseness of an automaton, and placed the gun in. the parasol rack. The white heat of her fury had cooled. She felt no more compunction than had she shot at a chicken thief. But she still felt a sense of shame and humiliation and was unbearably vexed with her children.

  “What in the world were you doing?” she asked.

  “Just looking,” Willi
am said.

  She turned toward Charles. But he was silent.

  “What possessed you to go to that dirty, filthy place?”

  “We were playing.”

  “Playing what?”

  “Just playing.” William sounded ashamed.

  She glanced at Charles, her mouth tightening.

  “We saw some students looking,” William said apprehensively.

  She wheeled on Charles. “And what were you doing?”

  “I was just looking, too,” he said stubbornly.

  His reply infuriated her. She ran into the yard and cut long switches from the umbrella tree. A crowd of curious students were clustered about the gate, watching the furious woman with fear and apprehension. They didn’t know what she was up to, but several had seen her shooting at Professor Saunders, and someone had already gone for Professor Taylor. But none dared interfere. They stood in awe of the grim, white-faced woman married to Fess Taylor.

  She paid them no attention. Returning to the house, she lit into both boys at once, whipping them indiscriminately, releasing her fear and worry and frustration into each hard blow. William screamed so loud the students thought she was killing him, and milled about the gate, muttering indecisively. Finally he ran outside and escaped her. She turned her rage on Charles because he wouldn’t run. He jumped and danced in pain. There was a fury and jealousy and strange frustration in her punishment of him. It resembled some horrible, silent ritual. At moments in her passion she felt that she would kill him. She received a vicarious pleasure, hating herself.

  Suddenly she was shocked. She dropped the switch and ran up to her room and lay across the bed, sobbing. A strange, shocking doubt gnawed at her thoughts.

  After a time, when his pain had subsided so he could walk, Charles limped upstairs. He went over and stood beside the bed.

  “I won’t do it anymore, Mother,” he said. “I didn’t want to worry you, Mother.”

  She sat up and gathered him into her arms, holding him close. “The things you do hurt Mother so.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Mama. I don’t want to hurt you.” He rarely called her Mama, and only when intensely moved.

  “But you do, darling, and Mother loves you so.”

  Downstairs Professor Taylor rushed in, followed by Professor Saunders and President Burton.

  “Lillian!” he shouted. “Lillian!”

  Sighing resignedly, she arose and went downstairs. Professor Saunders gave her a baleful look, but she didn’t acknowledge his presence.

  “Now you’ve gone too far,” Professor Taylor began. “I know that you don’t like it here and I’ve tried to be patient—”

  “Now, wait a minute, Prof,” President Burton cut in, sweating with discomfort. “We can settle this amicably. Professor Saunders was wrong and he’s willing to apologize. Now if Mrs. Taylor will apologize—nobody was hurt—we’ll let the whole thing drop. Your wife is excitable—we all understand that. And Professor Saunders had no business trying to whip her children—that’s for y’all to do—that’s between you and your wife. Now if your wife will just apologize—”

  Professor Saunders leered vindictively.

  “Apologize to that,” Mrs. Taylor said. “I’ll never! Never!” Turning on her heel, she left the room and went upstairs.

  The three men looked at one another.

  “I’ll get her to apologize,” Professor Taylor promised.

  “For the time being, we’ll just leave it as it is, Prof,” President Burton decided. “We don’t want any trouble ‘tween you and your wife.”

  But Professor Taylor felt outraged and humiliated. Had she been willing to apologize, he would have been able to turn his fury on Professor Saunders for striking her. But now he was put on the defensive and couldn’t assert himself as he felt a husband should. When the others had gone, he rushed upstairs and charged into her room belligerently.

  “Confound it, woman, this is the last time you make a monkey out of me—” he began threateningly.

  She looked at him with scorn and contempt. “If you dare lay a hand on me, Mr. Taylor, I’ll shoot you too,” she said.

  For a moment he stared at her, trembling with rage and frustration. Then he turned and stalked down the stairs and out of the house and walked out his rage down the dusty roads.

  The next day Mrs. Taylor ordered violins for the children. She hoped the music would calm their wildness. The music teacher from the college came three times a week.

  They approached their music as they did their classroom studies; they practiced conscientiously and learned rapidly. But it didn’t get them. It didn’t touch them down inside.

  With the piano it was different. They enjoyed their mother singing in her shallow, weightless soprano voice, cleared of the harsh undertone that had come into her speech. They kept her at it, and when she tired they begged her to continue playing. Chopin’s “Fantasie Impromptu” was Charles’s favorite. Both of them loved Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Charles could ride the liquid, golden arpeggios, doubling back again and again on the mood, as if on a winged steed.

  The violin lessons didn’t make either of them any less wild. Their mother was constantly after them. “God doesn’t like ugly,” she said. They hated the expression. It made them uneasy to have God in it. Why couldn’t it be just between them?

  During that time, following the shooting, their father and mother weren’t speaking again. That worried them too. They wondered if their parents loved each other.

  They didn’t know that the shooting had created a big scandal. Although no action had been taken, everyone knew that a serious thing had happened. The students and faculty alike were stung with curiosity. The faculty wives had it that Professor Saunders was secretly in love with Mrs. Taylor and had become enraged because she had spurned his advances. Few of them, however, took her side. Most wondered what really had happened. There were all sorts of rumors making the rounds. For a time it gave them a subject for gossip. But Mrs. Taylor refused to discuss it with anyone. And they held that against her too.

  9

  IT WAS ABOUT THIS TIME the children became concerned with racial differences. They had always been aware of the absence of white people at the college. And they’d studied all about the races of mankind.

  “Brown, black, yellow and white,” they rattled off in class. They had learned that Negroes were descended from slaves. They knew their father was a Negro. They’d heard their mother call him a “shanty nigger,” but she’d been angry at the time. But they had never thought of the rest of them as Negroes. Tom was yellow, William was brown, Charles was tan, and their mother was white. Only she wasn’t white like other white people, because she lived with Negroes.

  All their lives, except for the brief train trip south, they’d lived within the confines of two Negro colleges, where white people were seldom seen. Their parents never discussed the subject of race within their hearing. They knew that something happened when white and black folks met. But they’d never thought about it until that year.

  The first time they saw this strange thing happen was in their father’s shop. A white man, who was having his mules shod, asked, “How you niggahs gittin’ ‘long down heah, Willie?” The man had sounded friendly. But no one replied.

  Their father went about as if he hadn’t heard. The students stood rigidly, gripped in a sullen silence. The children didn’t understand what was happening. The students often called each other “niggah.” They didn’t realize the man was talking to their father; they thought he addressed a student by the name of “Willie.” But they knew, by everybody’s attitude, that something bad had happened.

  Then their mother got into trouble in Natchez. She’d gone there for dental service. As usual, when alone, she patronized a place reserved for whites. The dentist treated her never doubting that she was white. When he asked her address she gave the railroad station.

  “That’s down near the nigger training school, isn’t it?” he asked conversationally.r />
  “It’s the post-office address for the college,” she replied.

  He thought her choice of words curious, but was not concerned. Leaving his office, she met the brown-skinned wife of Professor Hill.

  “Why, Lillian,” Mrs. Hill exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming to town today? I didn’t see you on the train.”

  “Oh, I just came to have my teeth attended to,” Mrs. Taylor replied.

  The dentist witnessed the scene from his office window.

  He rushed into the street and clutched Mrs. Taylor by the arm. “Are you colored?” he asked abruptly.

  “You release me this instant,” Mrs. Taylor fumed indignantly. “I’m just as white as you are.”

  Mrs. Hill was terrified. She tried to escape, but the dentist took hold of her also. “You called her ‘Lillian,’” he charged. “I heard you. Is she colored?”

  “Why—er—ah—she’s married to Professor Taylor at the college,” Mrs. Hill stammered with fright.

  A crowd of white people were collecting. Mrs. Taylor turned and began walking away determinedly. The dentist ran after her and seized her arm again. She struck at him. “How dare you touch me!” she cried, her voice rising in anger.

  A policeman came up. The dentist charged her with breaking the law which prohibited Negroes from patronizing white places. She demanded an attorney. The officer took her to the police station and locked her in a cell.

  “I’m just as white as you are,” she maintained.

  The policemen became concerned and called in the chief. It was known throughout the state that the Negro college was one of the governor’s special interests. So out of courtesy to the governor, the chief called President Burton at the college. The President sent posthaste for Professor Taylor. He flagged the next through-freight. By that time, word of the incident had reached the governor. When Professor Taylor arrived at the police station, the chief directed him to telephone the governor.

  “You get that yallah woman of yo’s outa Natchez an’ keep her home,” the governor ordered him. “You know better’n tuh let her run ‘round tryna pass herself off.”