The Third Generation

by Chester B Himes

  It was obvious to his parents that he wasn’t getting along well in his studies. They tried to draw him out but he wouldn’t talk about himself. William was preparing for graduation from high school the following month. The house was always filled with his many friends, and he gave a gay New Year’s Eve party. But Charles was uninterested.

  The only reason he returned to the university was because his things were there. By then almost all the students knew he was a goner. Two of the fellows offered to coach him but he resisted all their efforts to help. Toward the end of January he wrecked his car. He’d been to a private party down the street from where he lived. One of the fraternity brothers called him aside.

  “Are you well, Chuck?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Then what the hell you doing here?”

  “It’s not catching,” he protested.

  “No, but dammit, it’s dirty.”

  Anne came up in time to hear the last remark. “What’s dirty?”

  “I am,” Charles said bitterly, and went to get his hat and coat.

  He put the top down so the snow would blow in on him and sped toward the booze joints in The Block. The snow was in his eyes and he drove blindly into the abutment at the end of the viaduct. He was jarred slightly and his ankle sprained. For a long time he sat there in the wrecked car, letting the snow fall on him. His back began to ache. A car drove up and stopped.

  “You hurt, buddy?”

  “No, I’m all right,” he heard himself reply.

  The car didn’t move so he climbed slowly from the wreck. A colored man was driving and offered him a lift. He got in and rode over to the house on Hamilton and drank himself blind. The next day his back ached so badly he couldn’t move. The proprietors put him in their car and drove him home. His gonorrhea took a turn for the worse. For two weeks he was in bed. But he wouldn’t let them notify his parents.

  “It’d kill my mother if she knew I had gonorrhea,” he told Mrs. Miller, the minister’s wife with whom he lived.

  “Poor boy,” she grieved for him. Later she told her husband, “He’s trying so hard to be brave.”

  His professors permitted him to make up for the time he’d lost. For a while he made a valiant effort. He felt as if he were drowning and made this one last desperate attempt to save himself. And for the first time in his life his mind would not respond. He couldn’t concentrate; his memory failed him.

  It was in a state of utter frustration that he attended the Pharaohs’ grand ball, by which they metamorphosed into full-fledged fraternity brothers. Due to the number of guests they gave it in a larger, less fashionable ballroom than the Crystal Slipper, located near the red light district where Charles had become a patron. As he stood on the gallery, watching the couples whirl gaily below, everyone seeming so happy and excited, he felt debased beyond redemption, lost, cut off from all those fresh, clean, pretty people.

  “Cheer up, Chuck. Have a drink,” someone said.

  He took the flask without looking at the donor, emptied it down his throat.

  “Hey! Hey!”

  “I’ll get your some more,” he promised.

  “You know a place?”

  “Right around the corner.”

  “Wait a minute. Maybe some of the fellows want to go.”

  He had drunk a pint of bathtub gin and it built a forest fire in him. Suddenly he was dancing, his despondency burnt away in the alcoholic flame.

  Someone tugged at his sleeve. “You ready now, Chuck?”

  “Sure, anytime.” He looked at the girl with whom he’d been dancing and was surprised to discover that she was Anne. “You want to go with us? We’re going around the corner to buy some grog.”

  She hesitated. “Who all’s going?”

  “A bunch of us,” Jesse said. “Steve and Edith, Randy and Jay, Johnny and his girl too:” The last was a fraternity brother.

  “All right. Wait until I get my coat.”

  The gay little party clad in formal finery tripped lightly through the dirty snow, faces flushed, eyes glowing with excitement. It was a lark.

  “Won’t they object to so many of us?”

  “No, it’s a pad—I mean a place where they sell homebrew too and people sit about and talk. There’s a victrola too.”

  “How does Chuck know about these places?” Edith asked.

  “Don’t ask the mans that,” Anne murmured.

  “My knowledge is wide and varied; I was educated like Gargantua,” Charles said with drunken flippancy.

  As they clustered on the porch of the house of ill fame, whispering excitedly in the dark, startled eyes peered from darkened windows across the street. Finally a man cracked the door and peered from the darkened vestibule.

  “It’s me, George. I got some friends.”

  “Okay, come on in; there’s nobody here.”

  He opened the door and they groped forward in the dark, striking against each other. Someone gasped. Then the door was opened into the dimly lit parlor. They surged forward in a body, sighing with relief.

  “What’ll it be?” Charles asked grandiloquently.

  “Gin,” Jesse said.

  “A quart of gin and setup, George. You don’t mind if we play some records.”

  “Don’t play it too loud. Rose is sleeping.”

  The couples found seats and snuggled down in the semi-darkness, whispering, here and there a nervous giggle. George brought the drinks and served them. Charles put in a soft needle and played a blues recording. Slowly the girls relaxed, succumbing to that delicious sense of naughtiness as the gin took effect. They began to dance, rubbing their bodies together, giving themselves to the ritual of the sex act. Steve whispered in Edith’s ear and she began to laugh hysterically. The other girls tried to quiet her; the young men’s voices were raised excitedly.

  George came into the room. “Shhh, don’t make so much noise,” he cautioned.

  When Edith’s hysterics subsided she began hiccuping. Everyone suggested a cure.

  “We better go,” Randy said.

  Anne laughed nervously. “I bet Ben’s looking all over for me.”

  Charles put on another record. “You’re in good hands. Just one more dance.”

  They stood locked together, their bodies fused, scarcely moving.

  Rose came into the room. She was dressed in a soiled green kimono and her coarse, straightened hair stood on end. She looked at Charles through narrowed lids. Her eyes glowed like live coals in the dim light. She hadn’t seen him since he became ill. Now seeing him in the arms of a sweet young girl she was scalded with jealousy.

  “What kind of dryfucking shit is this?” she screamed.

  The girls gasped. A shocked silence fell. Slowly Rose looked about the room, her sleep-swollen face puffing with rage. Everything about the scene infuriated her—the air of innocence worn by the girls, the young men’s concern for them, their horror at sight of her. She went berserk, lunged forward and dragged Anne from Charles’s embrace.

  Charles was outraged by her violence and vulgarity. He’d never known her to be like that. The times they’d been together she had been sweet and gentle. He clutched her about the waist and threw her roughly to one side. “Shut up, goddammit, and get out of here!” he shouted.

  She clawed at him. “I guess mine ain’t good enough for you.” He pushed her away. She ran to the victrola, snatched off the record and smashed it.

  The students began a headlong rush toward the exit, carrying their wraps in their hands. They stumbled through the pitch-dark vestibule, surged out on the porch and down the walk and through the dirty snow in panic-stricken flight, ruining their shoes and gowns. They didn’t stop until they’d rounded the corner.

  George came from the kitchen in time to see them leave. He closed the door after them and returned to the parlor. Charles and Rose stood looking at each other with bleak hostility. There was something deadly and debased in the battle of their wills.

  “You quit me, didn’t you?” she accused.


  He didn’t understand her. “Quit you?” He had never gone with her. “I was sick,” he said.

  “I fixed your little red wagon, pretty boy,” she said vindictively.

  A dazed look came into his face. All the sickness of despondency he had momentarily thrown off returned to castrate him. His shoulders sagged; his eyes had the look of death. “Yes,” he admitted wearily, “if that makes you happy.”

  George felt sorry for the lad. “Go up and go to bed,” he ordered Rose.

  She looked at him defiantly. “I’m gonna take baby with me.”

  Charles covered his face in his hands. He couldn’t look at her. His soul felt naked and defenseless. He knew if he looked at her he’d be lost; her brazen stare would conquer him and she could bend him to her will.

  “Go on! Go on!” George said roughly, pushing her from the room.

  Dazedly, Charles put on his coat and hat. Suddenly it struck him that he’d done a terrible thing. Now I’m in for it, he thought.

  George walked with him to the door. “I’ll see you, kid.”

  He turned around and looked at George, and was shocked by the sympathy he saw in the panderer’s face. “Jesus Christ!” he said, thinking: Even this son of a bitch is sorry for me.

  All the next day he kept to his bed. The following morning the postman brought a notice for him to report to the dean’s office. The dean was a shy, crippled man with a thatch of graying hair. His clear blue eyes, always so warm with sympathy, were immeasurably saddened.

  “Mr. Taylor, I have here a report on your misbehavior sent in by one of the students.”

  He read aloud the letter recounting the episode with Rose, which Edith Rand had sent to him. “I have not had this investigated.”

  “You don’t need to, sir. It’s true.”

  “I had so assumed.” He folded his hands, studying Charles’s expression. “You have given me the necessity of making a very difficult decision.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Do you feel that your failure in adjusting to the academic and disciplinary requirement of this university is due, in part, to your ill health?”

  “I—” He groped for the words to explain it. “I suppose I don’t fit.”

  “Because of your injury?”

  “I guess that has something to do with it.”

  “If I permit you to withdraw for the remainder of the term, do you believe your health will be sufficiently improved by fall to enable you to make good?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.” What else could he say, he thought.

  For a time the dean fiddled with the letter opener on his desk, then came to his decision. “I shall permit you to withdraw because of ill health and failing grades.” It was an unprecedented clemency.

  Charles stood up and when the dean extended his hand and said, “Good-bye and good luck, Mr. Taylor,” the warm tone of sympathy and the dry, firm, encouraging clasp tore him apart.

  “Good-bye, sir,” he choked. ‘Thank you. Thank you.”

  For a long time he stood on the stone steps of University Hall, looking across the snow-covered oval. He was saying good-bye again, this time to many things, to all of his mother’s hopes and prayers, to so many of his own golden dreams, to the kind of future he’d been brought up to expect, and to a kind of life, which, on the whole, had been the happiest he’d ever known. But at the time he didn’t realize it. He felt trapped again, pushed into something against his will. Why hadn’t the dean let him go? Why did they keep pushing him? His mother had pushed him all his life and now, goddammit, she’d start pushing him again. Why hadn’t the dean let him go? Then, goddammit, she couldn’t push him. She wouldn’t have anything to push him toward and he’d be done once and for all…

  Sudden tears blotted out the sight.

  He packed early while most of the students were in class and spent the remainder of the day and night in hiding with Rose. He couldn’t face the students. And some strange compulsion had sent him back to the source of his initial hurt. He didn’t know what he expected to get from her.

  The next morning he was on the train going home. He imagined his mother’s shocked expression, her face folding into deep, harsh lines of hurt and bitter disappointment. A flash of hatred burnt through his mind, followed by despair.

  What’s wrong with me? he thought. Why must I always be some kind of disappointment to everyone?

  Came arapping and atapping and atapping and atapping…The strange words kept time with the clacking of the wheels…He looked out the window. A farm sped by, a cow standing disconsolately in the dreary sweep of snow.

  “Gone!” he said involuntarily. “It’s gone!”

  24

  CHARLES WAS SICK AND confined to bed for two months after his return home. Complications had developed from his gonorrhea and his back ached constantly. He had to engage a private doctor and he was always nervous and on edge for fear the Industrial Commission doctors would discover his disease. He was afraid they might stop his compensation.

  It was hard to keep it from his mother. She wondered why he needed so many doctors. Torn between concern for his health and anxiety over his state of mind, she couldn’t keep away from him. He lived in torture for fear of her discovering his disease. He hated for her to come into the room. She wanted to nurse him. He had to invent all sorts of reasons to keep her from touching him. They fought each other in bitter silence, the spoken words that passed between them seldom conveying their true emotions. During the day when everyone was out, or at night when they were asleep, he’d slip into the bathroom and treat himself. Once she almost caught him.

  “What’s the matter, son? Does your back ache? Why don’t you let Mother rub it?”

  “Let me alone!” he shouted, wishing she was dead.

  A black pall hung over him which none of them could pierce. William couldn’t gain his confidence. They slept in separate rooms and were almost strangers. Now when they met they treated each other with that delicate diffidence of persons who’ve been close but have lost contact. William kept away.

  No one had told his mother about his episode with the prostitute. But she knew there’d been something more than what was said. She couldn’t conceive of him failing in his studies; he was too brilliant, she thought. He’d done something bad, she knew. Ever since his accident she’d lived in constant apprehension that he’d do something to destroy himself completely. She’d been relieved when he finally went to college. Now she was more apprehensive than before.

  For a time, following his enrollment in college, his father had taken new ambition too. He’d tried for a civil service job. But the years away from teaching, without reading, unthinking because thought hurt, had taken their toll of him. He’d deliberately dulled his memory. Now he found he couldn’t draw upon it anymore. As a consequence he didn’t make an eligible grade. It hurt him more than if he hadn’t tried. When winter came on, his carpentry work had fallen off. He had taken a job as a laborer. That, too, added to Mrs. Taylor’s anxieties.

  Now William was his mother’s only consolation. He’d graduated from high school that January and had received a gold medal from the school board in honor of his high scholastic record. There had been a glowing tribute in the press. He had many nice friends; everyone loved him. She often wondered at the fate that had taken his sight and yet left him so much more ambitious and nobler than his brother. She couldn’t conceive of where Charles would end. He acted so ugly. Disaster seemed to hang above him like a Damoclean sword. At times she felt he’d be better off if he were dead.

  Only his father sympathized with him. Professor Taylor sensed his son’s problem of adjustment, not only to every new phase of his own life, but to every change in theirs, to the over-all uncertainty in which all of them were caught. He knew that the various facets of metropolitan life combined with the strangeness of nonsegregated institutions had put him under a strain. He felt that Charles would have been better off had they remained in the South, or even if he’d been enrolled in
a southern college.

  “Let the boy alone,” he’d say when Mrs. Taylor complained about Charles’s attitude. “Let him alone; you’re killing him.”

  “I’d rather see him dead than ending up in the penitentiary or on the gallows,” she’d reply.

  The sound of their bickering went on night after night, her harsh, nagging voice, his whining rebuttal. Charles would close his door but the voices leaked in. He tried to close his mind, but suddenly he’d hear them shouting at each other, as if it were a dream, a nightmare. He’d struggle to awaken and discover he’d been awake all along.

  One night he dreamed that his mother had slipped from a high precipice and was hanging perilously by one hand.

  He was standing nearby and one part of himself fought furiously to save her, but his body was immobilized. He couldn’t will himself to move. He could only stand there, watching in utter horror, while she slowly lost her grip. The sound of her screams rang in his ears, awakening him. He felt a sharp, burning pain in the region of his disease and discovered he’d had a sexual discharge. Immediately, before he had even cleaned himself, he tried desperately to tear the memory from his mind. He felt utterly debased; he wanted to die. In the bathroom he saw his father’s razor and thought of slashing his wrists. Then he saw the sleeping potions his mother often took. He swallowed six and went to sleep. It was late the next day when he awakened. But all the devastating details of the dream were still with him. He felt defiled, impure. He couldn’t look his mother in the face.

  It was then that strange demons began pursuing him. He never saw them, but he always felt them just behind, closing in on him. At the slightest sound he’d wheel about, his face gripped in the horror of death. He tried to escape in study, suddenly determined to re-enter the university that fall. But he got a queer, unnatural reaction from his textbooks. Sight of the printed text made him physically sick; he wanted to vomit. He couldn’t force himself to read.