The Third Generation (15 page)

The week following, Mrs. Taylor and the children left. The boys were grown enough to feel the humiliation and indignity of the Jim-Crow car, one half of the coach containing the white smoker. It became breathlessly hot in the packed quarters beneath the blazing sun. Windows were opened. But black smoke belched inside every time the train turned, first on one side and then on the other. Mrs. Taylor’s new silk dress was ruined. The children squirmed with discomfort as their mother wiped the cinders from their reddened eyes.

No water or toilet was provided for these passengers. Most of them carried their own refreshments—water, lemonade, buttermilk, corn whisky—in jugs and bottles and buckets. When the train stopped for water, the passengers went into the woods and relieved themselves.

On boarding the train they’d looked so fresh and happy, dressed in their clean cotton dresses, starched overalls and candy-striped silk shirts with peg-topped Palm Beach trousers. Their faces had been washed, their hair combed. Their eyes had sparkled as they waved good-bye to friends and relatives. They’d carried their lunches in neat boxes and baskets, and had brushed off the seats where they sat.

Now, after riding in the hot, cramped car, they were greasy and dirty—mean-looking, sweaty black people with red, evil eyes. Paper and bones and scraps littered the floor. Some were half-drunk. They’d become noisy. The car looked like a pigpen. The passengers resembled dirty black pigs. A man emptied his drinking bottle and urinated in it. Mrs. Taylor was disgusted, sick with frustration.

The train crawled slowly through the baked, barren lands of Mississippi. Scrub cotton stood burnt in the parched fields. Lean, lackadaisical rednecks leaned on their plows, while their mules stood with bowed heads, watching the train go by. The croppers’ shacks, with their black rotten walls and curled shingles, stood row on row, blistered and neglected, as poor and downtrodden as the people who leaned in the doorways. The shacks leaned, the people leaned, even the mules leaned; nothing stood straight.

It was evening when they came into Meridian on the Alabama border. Night brought relief. The darkness hid the misery. A brakeman came and lit two gas lights. The train crawled through the darkness, lights flickering through the gusts of smoke coming through the open windows. Snores and stink and smoke, fatigue and pain and discomfort filled the Jim-Crow car.

The children had to urinate. Their mother let them urinate out the window.

“I hope it blows back into those white people’s faces,” Charles said.

“Charles!” his mother reprimanded.

“Hit ain’ blowin’ back in they faces but hit sho is blowin’ back in mine,” a Negroid voice came from behind.

Mrs. Taylor rose in alarm. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, fluttering helplessly.

“Set down, lady,” the voice said. “Hit ain’ de firs’ time.”

A few minutes later when they were going around a bend the children wanted to have another try, but she made them hold it.

“It’s bad enough to be a heathen from necessity,” she told them.

They were so excited they couldn’t sleep. It was their first night ride since they’d come south. Their eyes strained into the night. The train turned, a string of lights hung across the darkness.

“Oh, look!” Charles cried. “Look, Will. Just like the jack-o-lanterns when Tom had his garden party.”

William tugged at his mother’s sleeve. “Look, Mother! Look what Chuck found.”

The lights flickered and spread, became irregular; a tiny village grew into the night. The train roared through without stopping.

Charles thought of the people living there in that little village. It felt weird and strange to be passing through their lives in the night without stopping. Phantom children played silently in the empty streets. The telegraph poles leaped by. Once a man stuck his head out of a train window and got it knocked off by a telegraph pole. He could see the headless man running along beside the train, dodging in and out of the telegraph poles. Thus he amused himself.

Suddenly tracks leaped out from beneath the speeding train. And then more tracks. Dark hulking buildings loomed in the shadows. Dim lights hung at street corners. Gloomy streets tunneled in the distance. And then fire sprang shockingly into the dark night. Round brick structures, like igloos, belched flame from open mouths. Beside them red-hot flames licked up from a row of burning pots, throwing shadowed giants who battled silently in the sky. Souls burned in the vats of brimstone, while naked men and women, doomed into hell, ran screaming soundlessly through the burning pits.

The children held their breath in terror.

“What is it, Mama? What is it?” William asked.

“It’s the blast furnaces, children. They’re making steel.”

They’d come into the steel foundries of Bessemer.

“It looks like Dante’s
Inferno
,” Charles whispered.

“So it does,” their mother said.

Birmingham was next. The passengers stirred. The train pulled into the station. Sitting with their heads hung far out the window the boys watched the strange people rushing past. The Jim-Crow car half emptied. Their mother took them into the colored waiting room and stood while they went to the toilet.

Her skin was blackened and gritty; her hair hung loose. Exhaustion lined her face, pulling down her eyelids like half-closed shutters. She cleaned up as best she could while the boys waited for her. They bought sandwiches to carry. The Jim-Crow car had filled again. Finally the children slept.

The next day they arrived in Atlanta, where they were to change to another train. Gathering their parcels and luggage, they went to look for Tom. Mrs. Taylor had written him when they would be passing through. But he’d not come. She was worried and would have gone out to the university, but was afraid they didn’t have time. Their train was due in an hour. She fretted and fussed, walking to the door to look out. It was Sunday and the streets had that deserted Sunday look. He should’ve come, she thought.

At the street entrance to the white side was a fruit and confectionery stand. Rosy peaches and red pomegranates and shiny yellow bananas were colorfully displayed, the warm fruit scenting the air. Mrs. Taylor and the children were drawn admiringly. They stood on the sidewalk and looked through the doorway at the delicious fruit. Their mouths watered.

“How much are your bananas?” Mrs. Taylor asked, approaching a little closer.

The vendor stared curiously from her to the children. “I can’t sell ‘em to you,” he replied.

Mrs. Taylor bristled. “And why not, I’d like to know?”

“You’re on the wrong side, lady.” He was a dark, curly-haired man. She thought he was Italian. He looked around and then leaned forward and whispered, “Don’t think I don’t want to sell ‘em to you, lady. But they’d fine me and take away my license.”

She sighed. “Oh! Well, I declare.”

They trudged disappointedly back to their side of the waiting room. Their train was hours late. Tom didn’t come. They’d had plenty of time to have gone out to the university. Now they were tired and frustrated. Even the children were getting fretful; their excitement had worn off. It was late afternoon before their train arrived. They carried their parcels aboard and found a seat.

Mrs. Taylor closed her eyes. The rocking motion of the coach put her to sleep. The children looked disconsolately out the window. It was dark before the brakeman came to collect their tickets.

“You’re on the wrong train,” he said. White people called most Negro women “aunty.” They seldom called Mrs. Taylor anything.

“This is the train to Cheraw,” she said sleepily.

“Nope, we go straight through to Charleston.”

“But the trainman called this train for Cheraw,” she contended.

“Nope, you’re dreaming.”

“But I heard him call Cheraw distinctly.”

Her attitude and manner of speaking irritated the brake-man. “Or else you’re lying,” he said nastily.

“Don’t you dare say I’m lying,” she flared.

He flushed angrily. “I’ll stop this train and have you put off right here in these woods,” he threatened.

“And I’ll sue the railroad,” she replied. “You just dare.”

He stalked from the car. Shortly he returned with the conductor. “You’ll have to get off at the next town,” the conductor said.

“Then you’ll have to give me a return ticket,” she demanded.

“I’ll give you nothing!” he shouted.

Her mouth tightened grimly and her eyes glinted. “Then I won’t get off.”

The children sat silent and frightened. The train sped through the night, going to an unknown place. It was like going off the end of the world. They huddled close to their mother, wordlessly. The train slowed and stopped at a darkened station.

“Now get your things together and get off,” the conductor ordered.

Mrs. Taylor refused to budge. He stood for a moment, undecided, then went away. The minutes passed and no one came. No one in the coach spoke. The train waited. They all sat in the fearsome night waiting in the silence. The minutes seemed interminable. Finally the conductor returned with a deputy sheriff.

“Now git yo’ things together an’ come on, les go,” the deputy ordered her.

“I’ll not move until I have a return ticket,” she replied defiantly.

“Then Ah’ll have to arrest you.”

“Well then, if I’m under arrest, I suppose I shall have to go to jail,” she said with great dignity. She arose and gathered her parcels. The children carried the luggage, clinging closely. They descended to the dark platform. The train puffed and went down the tracks. The deputy sheriff stood beside them until its red tail light had disappeared in the darkness.

“Now you jes’ set right heah an’ you’ll git a train back in the mawnin’,” he told her.

“I’m going to sue the railroad,” she said determinedly.

“Thass ‘tween you an’ the railroad. If you jes’ doan make me no trouble Ah ain’ gonna do no more ‘bout it.”

She turned away and he ambled off in the darkness. They found seats on the dark platform. Shadows prowled the sinister night. Somewhere near was a sleeping village, but it, too, was entombed in darkness. They sat huddled close together, warming their fear. The indignity and the outrage slowly gave way to horror. Now the whole train ride, all the misery and discomfort, was climaxed in remembered nightmare. In the pitch-black dark that comes before day Charles’s mind cut loose; reality encroached the dream, death danced as a skeleton leading skeletons to the grave. He sat close to his mother, absorbing the horror of the real and the dream, and couldn’t tell them apart.

Down the tracks, across the bright green fields of tobacco, the Carolina sun rose in sheer, majestic beauty. Following their miserable night its wonder gripped and held them.

And then the train came and took them back. They were at the school in Cheraw two weeks. Mrs. Taylor was bitter in her denunciation of the railroad. She wanted to enter a suit, but the Negro attorney in that community advised her against it. She had to content herself with a scathing letter to the president of the line. That fizzling out of her determinations was the major tragedy of Mrs. Taylor’s life.

Most of the time it rained. The weathered wooden buildings stood disconsolate in the rain. Boys and girls scurried through the mud, their black shiny faces remote. In the evening a ghostlike quality settled on the scene. The bullfrogs set up their unceasing chorus. Owls hooted startlingly. Mrs. Taylor was vexed and harassed. The children were frightened and lonely. Their own discontent seemed to drench the place. Then the letter from Crayne Institute in Augusta caught up with her. She packed up the children and left.

11

C
RAYNE INSTITUTE WAS IN
the heart of the colored section. It faced a thoroughfare that ran up a hill, passing through a white business district, and came to a stop at a fort. Originally it had occupied a city square, enclosed by a high plank fence. But a number of the old buildings on the surrounding streets had been added from time to time.

Mrs. Taylor and her children arrived in the night and were driven to the school in an old horse cab. The boys were turned over to a matron who took them to a room on the third floor of an old brick building across the street.

“Chuck, come and look,” William called his brother to the window.

Charles went and stood beside him. The building stood on a height and below lay the city lights. They stared tensely, quivering like wild colts at civilization’s first barrier.

“It looks like Rome,” Charles said.

“I wish Mama was here,” his older brother confessed.

“Mama said we might not stay with her.”

Suddenly William began to cry. Charles went over and sat on the bed beside him.

“Don’t cry, Will.”

A frightened desolate loneliness came over them both. There was no sound from the old gloomy house. They felt abandoned and lost. Charles bit his lips to keep from crying also. Finally they put on their pajamas and knelt side by side and prayed:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Charles lay listening to his brother’s lonely sobbing. He felt torn up by the roots. All was so strange and sad and different. He wished his mother could be happy, then everything would be all right again.

The next morning a boy about their age came for them. “Mi Rainy san ma tu fotch yo fa tu cume brakefost.”

They didn’t understand a word he said. He was a strange skinny child, bony as a skeleton, with slanting red eyes and a huge egg-shaped head that was completely bald. He looked grotesque in old handed-down clothes.

They stared at each other helplessly. “Brakefost,” the boy said. “Brakefost.” He was of a curious racial mixture of African, Indian and Spanish, whom the people in that section called “geechies,” and spoke a patois of these native tongues combined with English. For generations his people had lived in the swamplands of Florida and Georgia and many had been free long before the Civil War.

He saw that these new ones didn’t understand him. “Pomp,” he said, pointing to himself, and then beckoning, “Cum.”