The Third Generation

by Chester B Himes

  “It isn’t that. I can’t hold it.” He felt his face burn. The doctor laughed with relief, but sight of the desperation in the youth’s face sobered him. He explained that it was not uncommon. “There’s nothing to worry about. If it happens again just wait for a resurgence. At your age it should come back within a half hour.”

  Charles felt juvenile and foolish but immensely relieved. Next day he drew fifty dollars from his account and visited Billie’s early. He slept with Marge until midnight. They had whiskey and food brought to the room. He was ravenous but didn’t drink because the whiskey made him sleepy. He paid her recklessly and she enjoyed lying lazily in bed, drinking, and being paid for it too, and she made him feel competent. She had the body of a debauchee who seemed bursting with love, and her smooth, flawless skin against the pale blue sheets in the pink light had a warm, glowing tint. She was coarse and vulgar and much older than himself, and called him “Daddy” in the immemorial manner, but each time he gave himself he closed his eyes and imagined she was young and virginal and a beautiful princess from the land of dreams. He remained excited the whole time and there were moments when he felt almost completely recovered.

  After that he spent much of his leisure time at Billie’s. With Marge he was hidden and reassured at the same time. He confessed to her how frightened he’d been the first time when he’d believed he’d lost his sexual capacity. He told her many things about himself he’d never told anyone before. Sealed in the strange room, safe from the hard, critical world, secure in her love, he could confess all his hurts and dreams, his fears and disappointments. She sipped her whiskey and pretended to listen, her thought on other things. And then he’d take her furiously.

  “Daddy,” she’d say with professional excitement. “My frantic little daddy. You just had to warm up.”

  And he thought she loved him. Afterwards he could walk down the dismal slum streets and look the critical, staring people in the face, feeling daring and manly because he’d slept with a whore. And if he could think of her as young and virginal, he could wink boldly at the young girls his own age, feeling gallant and experienced.

  His mother would be waiting up for him. She’d look at him accusingly, her mouth hard and grim. He would go up to his room without speaking to her.

  Although he knew he would miss Marge and the sanctuary of her bed, he was relieved when it came time for him to go away to college.

  23

  SO MUCH HAD HAPPENED to him during the past year that college, inescapably, was anti-climax. The flame of confidence that had caught fire the night of his graduation from high school had been extinguished by his accident. To still his fears of lost manhood he’d poured too much of his will into Marge’s receptive body. The hot flow of his ambition had cooled to stumbling blocks, and during his seizures of depression his earth had begun to quake again.

  As a consequence college never got him, never got down inside him; he never became a part of it. He matriculated and went to classes, but he never became a student. He missed entirely the purpose of college, the idea, the realization that it was a place of higher learning. He was always just outside.

  Much of it appealed to him: the artificial sense of freedom that college gives, the beautifully landscaped grounds, the great stone stadium, the impressive buildings surrounding the huge, green oval. And there was a feeling of exclusiveness, like being a member of a superior club.

  Temporarily he had escaped the constraining authority of his parents, his mother’s constant nagging and fear of his father’s defeat. It was as if he’d shed a great burden he’d borne for many years, or got rid of an irritating sore. He could do as he chose, go where he pleased. He felt that he’d grown wings.

  But, paradoxically, many of its appealing aspects also repulsed him. Greater freedom incurred greater self-reliance. The impressive architecture was overawing. It was too big, too impersonal. There were too many students, six thousand of them, of which only five hundred were colored. He felt outnumbered again. And the exclusiveness which at first he’d found so appealing carried its own bitter sting of exclusion.

  So much that he liked was negated by its pattern of segregation. The city itself was segregated in much the same manner as St. Louis had been. But in St. Louis he’d attended a segregated school; he’d been a part, he’d belonged. While in the university he had no part in any life outside the cold and formal classes. Negro students were barred from all the fraternities and sororities whose houses bordered the university grounds, nor were they invited to join any of the student clubs and honorary societies of the university itself. Nor could they patronize any of the privately owned restaurants, cafes and theaters of the neighborhood, which seemed so essential to a sense of ease. From the very first he knew he didn’t really belong, and that he never would.

  The colored students had a social life of their own, but it was not the same. They gathered in the garden of the library, flirted and became acquainted and made dates, their sugar-coated laughter floating through the open windows to distract many a serious student bent on research.

  “Oh, introduce us to the pretty mens.”

  “Lucy, Chuck Taylor, Steve Adams—and this little flapper with the gleam in her eyes, boys, is Anne.”

  “It’s not gleaming for you, big boy.”

  “Steve is taken, Little Sister: Edith’s got her brand on him.”

  “Aw, Ben—”

  “And who’s nursing you, pretty mans?”

  Charles blushed. “I—I’m in the field.”

  “Don’t let her rope you, kid; she does it to all the guys. That’s just a wriggle in her jiggle.”

  “Rhymes with pants,” Lucy said.

  “Don’t tell me, honey, let me guess,” Big Ben whispered stagily. “Could it be, by any chance, you mean ants?”

  Their soft orgiastic nuances flowed along the edges of Charles’s mind. He came out of himself at such times; he loved it.

  That bit of the campus, by common consent, had been conceded to the colored students.

  They had their own fraternities and sororities which met in private residences. Charles was tapped for one of these. One night the pledges were blindfolded and taken in a truck to a city park where they were paddled and thrown into a lake. After which they became Pharaohs. They had made the grade and were invited to all the popular parties. They gave dances in the Crystal Slipper on Long Street and wore their black ties as handsomely as any in the university section. Crowds collected from the nearby pool rooms, gambling clubs, barbershops, whiskey joints and greasy restaurants to meddle and admire.

  “Ain’t that purty—the purple one, honey; ain’t that uh purty thing?”

  Or some young pomaded petty pimp leering, “How ‘bout some of you, baby?”

  That section of Long Street was called ‘The Block.” Soda parlors abutted filthy dives, doctors and hoodlums drove the flashiest cars, and prostitutes and school girls walked side by side.

  They had their own restaurants and theaters. On weekend nights they crowded into the Empress, along with the people of the neighborhood, to listen to a prissy young man play provocatively on the piano, while a tall brown handsome man with marcelled hair sang Moonlight on the Ganges in a voice that made the coeds scream. For days following the showing of a romantic picture the coeds went about the campus distorting their faces and wrinkling their noses with all the sex appeal of the heroine on the screen.

  Or they patronized the whiskey joints on the side streets, drank cheap home-brew with salt, and debated points of higher and lower learning, as the brothers in the fraternity houses did.

  And on Sunday they ate in groups at Brassfield’s popular restaurant and afterwards walked their girls along the pebbled paths of Lincoln Park and lay on the dusty grass.

  But all of this took place four miles away from the university, on the other side of town, in another world.

  Charles was in conflict with the university from the day of his arrival. He was at once inspired by the thought of being a studen
t, and dispirited by the knowledge this thought inspired. On the one hand he began to run, not outwardly, but in his emotions, like a dog freed from its leash; while on the other he was fettered by every circumstance of the university life which relegated him to insignificance. He dreaded the classes where no one spoke to him, he hated the clubs he couldn’t join, he scorned the restaurants in which he couldn’t eat.

  He found it irritating and humiliating to discuss his courses with his advisor, to reveal his infirmity and tell about his jigsaw academic background. Although his advisor was a pleasant young professor who kept smiling encouragingly, he was glad when the ordeal was over and he could escape to the Student Union, a four-storied brick building overlooking Mirror Lake. There in the large, cool, dark-paneled lounge, he could sit in a leather chair, puff his pipe and imagine he looked upper-class and relaxed.

  Some of the white students drove old battered roadsters with rumble seats, painted in bright colors and bearing crude legends of college wit, and wore yellow slickers adorned with names and dates. They seemed to him the true collegians, the only ones who counted, and he emulated them. Beneath his yellow slicker, inscribed with the names of girls taken from the appendix of his college dictionary, he wore a red-and-gray striped blazer, tweed knickers, Argyle hose and yellow brogues. With his black slouch hat pulled low over his eyes, chin jutting forward, jaw muscles knotting as he gripped the long pipe stem between his teeth, he roared about the campus, screeching to a stop, frightening upperclassmen and stepping defiantly on the grass forbidden to freshmen. For the moment he’d feel less lost.

  He’d taken a room in a minister’s home near the campus, and had arranged for his meals at Mrs. Johnson’s, a colored rooming house nearby. Most of the students who lived there waited on tables for the white fraternity and sorority houses in the vicinity. They bunked four and five to a room and twelve in the attic. Only a select few, most of whom roomed elsewhere—Randy Parker, a Chicago politician’s son, Steve Adams, son of a St. Louis undertaker, Jesse Sherwood, whose father was principal of a colored high school in Kentucky—could afford to pay for their meals. The others ate where they worked. But together they formed a strangely loyal and closely knit unit, like members of a rather shabby but furiously animated and happy fraternity.

  Living in such close proximity they had no secrets, no privacy. Their possessions, clothing, financial status, intellectual capacities, social diseases, personal habits, state of cleanliness, size of each other’s genitals; their girls’ reactions—who liked them big and who didn’t—were topics of general discussion. Without provocation they would reveal their most intimate emotions, their most sacred associations, with startling candor. Charles was always shocked and repelled by such raw confessions.

  But strangely enough, he liked them. He enjoyed their bantering and badgering until it turned on him; then he couldn’t bear it. He dreaded their discovering he wore a back-brace, but it was inevitable.

  For the most part they liked him too and, realizing his sensitiveness, seldom teased him as they did one another. He had money to spend and a red roadster, and they found him useful to drive them the four miles to the colored section. They’d pile on, eight or ten at once, and he’d drive them to their favorite whiskey joint.

  He was a reckless driver, turning corners at full speed, and every now and then he’d throw one off.

  “Hey, hold it, Chuck, stop, man, you lost Josh!”

  He’d tramp down on the reverse pedal, killing the motor, the car lurching crazily to one side, throwing others off. John would limp forward, hands and knees bruised, trousers torn, a big swelling on his head.

  “Goddamn, Chuck, take it easy, man,” he’d say, having great difficulty controlling his anger but knowing he must since all of them would also be depending on Charles to pay for their drinks. “Damn, son, you Barney Oldfield or somebody?”

  He’d grin and roar off again. He always drove with the hood up and a floor board removed to provide a current of air to cool the motor, and from his seat behind the wheel he’d watch the exhaust manifold turn white hot.

  Mrs. Johnson allowed them to entertain their girls in the living room. On Saturday nights when they could play the phonograph late the girls came over and they drank bathtub gin and did the slow, belly-rubbing dances in the dim light.

  But the best times for Charles were the hot bright Indian Summer Sunday afternoons when he’d load his red chariot with other lonesome boys and drive up and down The Block, waving at all the pretty girls out in their many-colored glory. He’d park before the soda parlor and the girls would be magnetized. For an instant out of time the scene would catch fire, emotions would burn with the extravagance of youth, wit would spill like blood, as boys and girls engaged momentarily in the immemorial tussle of the sexes. Charles would be caught up in an incontinent excitement. His face would glow with an inner life. He’d feel carefree and wanted and included.

  But he never got started in the academic life. He was like an airplane that crashes before it gets off the ground. He could have, but he wouldn’t try. He contrived all sorts of excuses to keep from trying: the studies were too difficult, the classes too strange and formal; he didn’t have the academic background for the pre-medical courses he’d elected; his see-saw schooling from Georgia to Mississippi, from Arkansas to Missouri, had left him pitifully unprepared for university study.

  Deep down, where he wouldn’t look at it, he was rebelling. If he couldn’t take part in everything, he wouldn’t take part in anything. He’d always been like that; if he couldn’t have it all there was nothing in it for him.

  Had his mother been there she would have pushed him. Subconsciously he had come to depend on her pushing. He was not complete away from her, not a whole person. He was still joined to her by an artery of emotion. Independently he could only exercise his will against her, never against others. Against others he needed the joining of her will.

  He might have overcome all his aversion to the university, his lack of confidence, his feeling of exclusion, everything, had she made him know how much she depended on his succeeding there. He might have caught fire again. That part of his heart which meant most to himself was dedicated to her. He lived for his mother.

  But by himself he wouldn’t make the effort. He began to feel inferior and became resentful and withdrawn. It was as if the artery of emotion joining them began bleeding at one end.

  His professors were lenient because of his injury and made unconscious allowances because of his race. They considered him a good boy from a nice background and didn’t want to flunk him out. On several occasions his advisor requested his professors to give him another chance and he was often permitted to take tests over in which he had first failed.

  But he never got his academic wings. His studies left him morbidly depressed; his social life excited him unnaturally. He had come out of his shell but it was not healthy. His excitement was sick; he couldn’t control it. There were too many things to do, too many pretty girls, too many wonderful fellows; he had too much money to spend, too much leisure. He became slightly hysterical from so much excitement. As he bogged down more and more in his studies, his resentment toward the university increased. He felt imposed on. He had an awful row with his laboratory instructor. He began cutting lectures. And finally, slowly he withdrew completely to the frenetic escapes of the city.

  He began haunting a house where the students often went to drink home-brew with salt and patronize the girls.

  Instead of studying he spent his nights at the Pythian Theatre where the colored musicals played, sitting in the front row, watching the sensual shimmying of the half-nude bodies with lust-filled eyes, the dark columnar limbs rising above his tortured gaze like gates to infinite ecstasy. Afterwards he’d go backstage and try to date the girls, but always the ones he wanted were already dated. He ended up by finding some prostitute or other.

  On Hamilton Avenue in a house run by the Williams brothers he found a prostitute named Rose who reminded him of Ma
rge. He slept with her so often that she became possessive. She called him her “Mover” and said that he was full of steam.

  He contracted gonorrhea from her and for a time was terrified. One of his friends suggested that he go to the university infirmary where he could receive treatment free of charge, but he was too ashamed and went to a private clinic in The Block.

  The students at Mrs. Johnson’s teased him mildly.

  “Chuck’s got his credentials.”

  “He’s a man now. You’re not a man until you’ve had the clap one time.”

  “Hell, I’ve had the clap for seven years,” Clefus said. “It ain’t no more than a runny nose.”

  The fellows laughed. No one seemed to take it seriously. But Charles found it dirty and disgusting and had to use a syringe and wear a supporter and quit drinking.

  He was sick and morbidly depressed when the quarterly finals came, and was incapable of coping with any intellectual exertions. In German he turned in a blank paper. It didn’t seem to him that he did much better in any of the other courses. But miraculously he was passed by all his professors. It was a question of whether he should feel glad or sorry. Now he’d have to continue; he owed it to his parents. If they had flunked him out he could have gone home in peace. By then he knew he couldn’t make it, he’d never make it. All that had happened was a postponement of the inevitable end.

  He went home for Christmas. He was thin and extremely nervous, always on the go, haunting the cheap cabarets on 55th Street, coming home late, drunk and exhausted. He couldn’t even have the satisfaction of visiting Marge. He knew he shouldn’t drink, but he couldn’t bear his thoughts. Once he was caught in a heavy snowfall and there was no way of getting home. He had to spend the night in the downtown hotel. It was crowded with other stranded people. Some strange men tried to come into his room. He had a fight before the management came to his assistance. Afterwards he propped a chair against his door and sobbed, bitterly. His life had become revolting.