The Third Generation

by Chester B Himes

  “William, how are you today?” he called in his loud, husky voice that sounded as if his throat was clogged with phlegm.

  “I’m fine, Uncle George.”

  “That’s good, that’s good.”

  “How are you, Uncle George?”

  “I’m fine, William.” He chuckled. “Jes’ soon as I get a little food I’m gonna feel better.” Then he looked about for Charles. “Charles, how are you today?”

  “I’m fine, Uncle George. How are you, Uncle George?”

  “I’m fine, Charles, I’m fine. Jes’ a mite hungry.”

  Mrs. Cooper couldn’t afford to feed him expensive foods. She cooked great quantities of rice and beef lungs. For dessert she made a deep sweet potato cobbler. The rice was gummy, the pie doughy and the lungs gristly. But it was all the same to Mr. Cooper. His wife served him on a turkey platter. He took a quart of rice and covered it with a half-gallon of lungs and juice, and then looked about the table, smiling at everyone, and from then on ate with silent concentration. The talk went on around him.

  Each evening Charles reported dutifully to William how much their Uncle George had eaten, and they’d laugh uproariously in their small back room. Mrs. Cooper resented their laughing, and the close way they stuck together, excluding Freddie. She was always calling them to come downstairs. At every opportunity she set Charles to doing something.

  “You haven’t got any servants working for you.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “An’ you’re big enough to help with some of this housework.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She couldn’t bear Charles. She felt that he was all laughing at her!

  During the days William was away with his mother, visiting the various doctors, Charles bore the brunt of his Aunt Bee’s animosity.

  “And don’t you try to get Freddie to help you, either. He’s just a little boy.”

  “Yes ma’am. He’s a year younger than I am.”

  When Charles entered the neighborhood high school in January, the face of the outside world turned white. He walked down street after street of white residents, the icy blasts from Lake Erie biting into his bones, and was lost in a stream of white faces, rushing up the old stone steps. All of the faculty and all but seven of the pupils were white. He felt strange and out of place, as if he’d gone into another world, a world he’d scarcely ever thought of; and he reacted from emotions he’d never known he had. He felt an unconscious drawing back, a tightening up.

  There, among the white pupils, the seven colored pupils noticed him immediately. Only one of them, a lovely girl with olive skin and long black curls, was in his class. But all of them had white friends and ran with white groups instead of with each other. They seemed antagonistic toward him, as if in some fashion he was intruding. Several times, as he passed one or the other in the corridors, he opened his mouth to speak. It was the custom of his upbringing to speak to other Negroes; it was taken for granted that all Negroes were neighbors. But they would look off as if they didn’t see him, as if they were ashamed to be caught speaking to him. After that he never spoke to anyone unless spoken to first.

  Unlike the other schools he’d attended, here there were many pupils as brilliant as himself, and who applied themselves more diligently. He couldn’t coast along and count on being the smartest in the class. There was a freckled, redheaded girl, Martha, who took great pleasure in correcting his mistakes. He did his best to outdo her. But she’d just laugh at him and wait until he faltered.

  “That’s wrong, Miss Battles. Charles is wrong.”

  It infuriated him. He hated her. “What’s wrong?” he’d challenge, glaring at her.

  And laughingly she’d tell him. He wanted to slap her.

  When the pupils were paired off in the chemistry laboratory she chose him as her teammate. He was so surprised and outraged he refused to work with her. After class she cried. He didn’t know it. But he noticed she was different. She ignored him after that. He was hurt by her lack of interest. It worried him. He felt he’d done something wrong. But he didn’t know exactly what.

  He built up barriers against the pupils and when one crossed the barriers he was strangely outraged and disturbed. He wanted to reject them before they rejected him. But there was a shy, submerged part of him that wanted them as friends. And when they refused to recognize his rejection, and didn’t make friends with him either, he was at a loss, he didn’t know how to act. He went into a shell. There were too many of them and only one of him. He was glad when Sunday came and he could go to church.

  Their father attended the Baptist church far downtown on Scovill Avenue. On Sundays the church folks had this street, but on weekdays it was inhabited mostly by prostitutes and thieves.

  It was very cold in Cleveland that winter. Snow was banked high along the curbs where the plows had been along. Soot rained down from the huge steel mills in the nearby Cuyahoga River valley, turning everything black, the houses and the windows and the curtains and the snow.

  Most of the congregation were southern migrants. There was something tragic about the black faces, ashy cold, crowded in the grim slum street fenced by the high banks of black snow, dressed in their dark Sunday best. They seemed so incongruous, so out of place, so lost, the pearl-gray hats and white cotton gloves spotted by the lumps of soot that floated in the air, crowding about the entrance of the black stone church that had been handed down by white people when they’d moved farther east. Charles always thought of the hot, rocking church of Mississippi, when he saw them standing there. Yet during the service they were warmed by the preacher’s fiery words; their black faces became greasy with sweat, their white teeth gleamed and their eyes flashed with animation. The old, tired, lined faces lit up and glowed with ecstasy.

  Mrs. Taylor attended the Presbyterian church, and sometimes she visited the Episcopalian church where all the fair-skinned Negroes went. That was another thing her husband’s people hated.

  Both of Professor Taylor’s sisters were short and dark and pressed their hair with straightening irons. Mrs. Hart was one of those women who, from lack of choice, take pride in being virtuous. But Mrs. Cooper yearned to be a fashionable lady. They knew that Mrs. Taylor could pass for white, and very often did. They bitterly resented her white complexion and were envious of her long, straight hair.

  Had she been a weaker woman and acknowledged the humiliation of her position they would have liked her better. But she treated them as inferiors even though they had the upper hand. There was no getting along between them. After a time she began taking her meals where she roomed and seldom visited either of her sisters-in-law. Most of her time was spent in taking William to the doctors and looking for a house. The doctors offered little hope of William ever seeing. The corneas of both eyes had sustained permanent scar tissue that could never be removed. They advised her to wait and see what nature did. So William read his books in braille and spent hours writing exercises. All of his father’s relatives liked him far the best.

  The Harts had moved north, out in the Glenville district, and for quite some time had been the only colored family in that section. William went frequently to visit them. His Uncle Casper had been so long in the postal service he was thinking of retiring. Phillip William, their oldest boy, had been away from home for many years. Now Casper Junior had graduated from college and was teaching in a southern school. Only the daughter, Lucinda, was at home. After graduation she’d taught for several years, but had suffered a nervous breakdown. Mrs. Taylor said it had been brought on by her father’s philandering. She hated her father, and hadn’t spoken to him for years. But she and William were great pals. Charles seldom went to visit them. They felt that he was more on the Mannings’ side than theirs. Lucinda never spoke to him. Charles thought that all of them were crazy.

  Professor Taylor took his sister’s part. The children were drawn into the feud against their wishes. Charles came to hate all his father’s relatives and found it difficult to treat them civilly.
Their Aunt Bee picked on him, venting on him her hatred for his mother. William always took his younger brother’s part.

  The Coopers owned an old enormous car, but they had never driven it. They had bought it and brought it home and it had sat there, in the backyard, rusting and rotting ever since. It was the third secondhand car they’d owned. They felt it necessary to their prestige to own a car. They’d never driven any of them. No one in the family could drive. The driveway was extraordinarily narrow, and where the porch extended, angled sharply. Charles wondered how they’d gotten the big car where it was without having taken down the porch. At times when his mother and aunt were fighting and making the house unbearable, he and William went out and sat on its cold, moldy seat.

  Early that summer the Coopers sold this car for junk and bought a secondhand Willys-Knight.

  “What, another!” Charles commented at dinner, thinking they would share the joke.

  “Just for that you don’t get any supper,” Mrs. Cooper flared.

  He gave her a startled look. “I didn’t—Well, all right. I’ll get something at the corner.”

  “Wait a minute,” William said, rising from the table. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Now, William, you don’t have to go,” their Uncle George put in. “Bee, let the boys eat their dinner.”

  “If your father was here I’d make him punish you,” she said to Charles. “For what?”

  “Let’s go,” William said. “I don’t want any dinner.”

  “You’re just like your mother,” Mrs. Cooper continued to rail at Charles. “Taking your blind brother away from his food.”

  “Now what brought that on?” William muttered. The boys had sandwiches and sodas and went for a long walk. After a time they were able to laugh about it.

  “Uncle George is just a fool,” William said. “The way he lets Aunt Bee drive him. It was she who wanted the car.”

  “I don’t see how they can buy all that junk. All those funny dresses she wears, and all those feathers in her hats. She must think God’s going to call her someday and she’s gotta be ready to fly.”

  William laughed. “Uncle George is all right. He’s just dumb.

  “‘William, how are you today?’” he mocked.

  “I’m fine, Uncle George.’”

  “‘Dass good. Dass good.’” They laughed.

  One day while rummaging through the bureau drawers, William had found one of those gilt-lettered axioms that people hung on walls. By holding it close to his good he’d been able to read: A FOOL AND HIS MONEY ARE SOON PARTED.

  When they were preparing for bed that night he got it out and said, “I’m going to put this on the mantle.”

  “Better not let Aunt Bee see it,” Charles cautioned.

  “I want her to see it. It’ll do her good.”

  The next morning their mother called early for William. Charles was spreading the bed when his aunt came into the room. She saw the slogan on the mantel. Her face went ashy.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she cried in the high, whining tone her voice took in the height of passion. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Calling me a fool! The way I’ve put up with you and fed you and given you a place to live.”

  Charles looked at her blankly as if he didn’t understand. “What are you talking about?”

  She stabbed her finger at the mantel. “That dirty, sneaking little thing you stuck up there.” Rage had made her quite ugly.

  “Oh, that’s just something we found and thought—”

  “Don’t you dare try to put it on your brother,” she screamed.

  He became coldly defiant. “I put it there. I found it in the bureau drawer and put it there. It belongs to you. I didn’t write it; I just found it. If you hadn’t wanted it you—”

  “Don’t you dast give me none of your sass,” she shouted. “I’ll slap your face.”

  “What am I supposed to do, just stand here and let you say—”

  “If you were my son I’d beat you within an inch of your life. Taking that sneaky way of insulting me. After all I’ve done for you. You’re just like your mother. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  Watching the contortions of her face, he thought she resembled a black witch singing incantations. He suppressed an impulse to laugh. “I’ll take it down, if that’ll make you any happier,” he said sarcastically.

  “You get your things together and get out of my house,” she raged. “The idea. I’ve put up with enough from you. I don’t want to ever see you again.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Slowly he bundled his clothes and carried them up the street to the house where his parents lived. It required two trips. She watched him like a hawk as if afraid he might steal something. He wouldn’t let himself think about it. He moved woodenly, his face blank. It was bad enough without thinking about it. Now there’d be an awful fuss.

  His father came home at noon. Charles told him that Mrs. Cooper had put him out of her house.

  A deep frown bit into his father’s old, lined face. “Now what have you done, son?”

  “It wasn’t nothing—not much. I found an old saying on a piece of cardboard—it was in the drawer—and I just put it on the mantel.”

  “What was the saying, son?”

  “It just said, ‘A fool and his money are soon parted.’”

  Professor Taylor looked suddenly exhausted, as if he couldn’t bear any more. For a moment, he floundered about, gesturing aimlessly. Then he put on his hat and went down to see his sister.

  He was still there when Mrs. Taylor and William returned to the rooming house. Charles told her what had happened.

  “Why, I put that there myself,” William said. “Chuck didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” their mother said. “The idea, a grown woman taking insult from a little thing like that.”

  She went down the street and called to Mrs. Cooper from the sidewalk, “I want to talk to you, Mrs. Cooper, but I won’t step foot in your filthy house.”

  Faces appeared in the curtains all down the street.

  Mrs. Cooper charged onto the porch, brandishing a broom. “I’ll fix you!” she screamed incoherently. “I’ll fix you!”

  Professor Taylor came running out behind and struggled to restrain her. They wrestled down the steps and to the sidewalk. His sister fought in a blinding rage to get at his wife. A neighbor called the police. Mrs. Taylor retreated across the street and continued to berate them both.

  “The idea, a grown woman behaving like a maniac. And you’re no better than she is, Mr. Taylor, I’ll tell you that. Letting her persecute your own children.”

  The police squad car came while they were struggling. Mrs. Taylor turned and walked away and left them to explain. Later she returned and demanded that Mrs. Cooper bring William’s belongings down to the street.

  “I’ll get even with you—you dirty, half-white bitch!” Mrs. Cooper screamed.

  Another row was in the making. Professor Taylor quickly intervened and packed William’s things himself. Mrs. Taylor waited on the sidewalk. He followed her like a whipped dog, his arms bulging with clothing. The neighbors snickered at the spectacle of the little dejected man trailing behind the grim, determined woman. It was more than just the humiliation. He felt hurt and betrayed by his sister’s vengeful act. He could find no excuses for her.

  That evening both of his sisters called on them and tried to draw his wife into another fuss. But Mrs. Taylor wouldn’t see them. She locked herself in her room. They stood out in the hallway and called through the closed door.

  “You may as well come on out and talk, sister,” Mrs. Hart, said, assuming the role of peacemaker.

  “Let’s get this settled once an’ for all,” Mrs. Cooper whined. “You ain’t paid me yet for those boys’ board.”

  Mrs. Taylor refused to answer. Now her husband had to take her part. She felt triumphant and vindicated.

  The boy
s were given temporary lodging with their parents. Through the walls they could hear their parents’ bitter bickering.

  “I should have known better than to let my children ever live with that woman,” Mrs. Taylor said.

  “It’s as much your fault as hers,” Professor Taylor charged. “You’ve always been hostile toward my sisters. The boys wouldn’t be so disrespectful if you hadn’t encouraged them.”

  “Disrespectful indeed! How could anyone respect that woman?”

  “Maybe she was wrong this time—but you can’t excuse Charles either.”

  “Charles has always been very courteous to her—more courteous than she deserved,” his mother defended.

  But inside she was deeply concerned for him. She knew he’d been lonely and unhappy since William’s accident. He needed other companions, but it was so hard for him to make friends. She had hoped he would take up with the white children in his high school, but for some reason he didn’t seem to like them. It was a bitter disappointment.

  She had been so pleased when he’d been assigned to a white school. Perhaps next term he would feel more at home. But that would have to work out by itself, she reflected. The problem was what to do now.

  Before going to sleep she decided to separate her sons. School would be opening soon, and until they had a home of their own again she would board them out. It would be hard on both of them for a time. But they were old enough now to be apart. Charles had celebrated his sixteenth birthday the past month. It was time he was on his own. In the end it would be the best thing for both of them. Charles would never learn how to live with other people as long as William was about. He felt too protective toward his brother. Of the two, William was far better off in this respect, she had long since realized. Perhaps his being blind had something to do with it. He could mix with people and make friends, whereas Charles was always self-conscious and aloof.

  Through her minister she found a home for Charles on Cedar Avenue. Mrs. Robinson was a colored woman married to a white man and they had a cultured, well-mannered son who was going to college. She thought Gregory would have a wonderful influence on Charles.