The Third Generation (18 page)

In the end, Mrs. Taylor got them out. She went to Vicksburg and registered in a white hotel. When she came down next morning the manager confronted her.

“You gave a college for your address. What college is this, Madam?”

“The state college.”

“The state college? But that’s in—”

“The state college for Negroes.”

Again the governor had to intervene. He telephoned Professor Taylor at the college.

“Willie, Ah’ll give you forty-eight hours to get that woman out of Mississippi.”

Packing was a nightmare. So many of Mrs. Taylor’s lovely furnishings and beautiful dishes were lost and broken. The wagons came all day, carting away their furniture. They left at twilight and went down the long dark road, as they had come seven years before, to catch a train at nine o’clock. They were going to St. Louis.

Charles cried. It was the first of a long, unending series of good-byes. It was the end of something; the beginning of change. Charles never liked change; he was more sensitive to it than most. He was affected by its imminence and again by its actuality. It required the readjustment of his two worlds; sometimes he made the one without the other, never both, often none. For all its unpleasantness, his life in Mississippi had been simply wonderful. It was the end. He hated the end of anything. He cried for Mississippi.

Professor Taylor bought a huge old house beside a Catholic school in a changing neighborhood. It was a cold, austere house, once pretentious, with dark oak-paneled halls and cracked marble mantelpieces. When it rained or a north wind blew, the dead smell of old coal smoke seeped from its ancient flues. The dim gas jets filled the gloomy rooms with trembling shades.

The children hated the house. They hated its smell of death. They spent most of their time in the backyard and the shed. They could hear the subdued voices of the phantom children behind the high stone wall next door.

In the twilight after supper they sat on the high stone steps. Below on the pavement people passed. The colored people spoke.

“Good evening.”

“Good evening.”

From behind came the strained hushed voices of their parents.

“I’m doing what I can, Lillian, honey. Until something better comes I’ll just have to take it.”

“You’ll not talk me into leaving here again, Mr. Taylor.”

Other parents were sitting on their porches in the cool dim light. The tip of a cigar glowed. Away on Taylor Avenue a street car passed, its trolley striking blue lightning in the dusk. The lighted windows were filled with people. There were so many people in the city. They lived so close together.

The arc light at the corner sputtered and hissed. Down the street, under the distant light, children played wildly. The Taylor children listened tensely to their strange excited voices.

Five…ten…fifteen…twenty…

Are you ready?…

I’m not ready

Twenty-five…thirty…thirty-five…forty…

You’re peeping…

No I’m not

Count again…

Forty-five…fifty…I’m coming, ready or not…

Then the sound of running feet as they peered toward the wild motion; the squeals as one was caught…

You’re it…you’re it…

Five…ten…fifteen…twenty…

They were assailed with loneliness.

“Can we go play, Mother?”

“When you get to meet the children, Mother will let you go and visit them,” she replied absently, her mind on other things. “Mother will take you to meet them as soon as we meet the parents.”

“Let the children go, honey, they can’t hurt anything.”

“I’ll not have my children running like wild animals through the streets.”

Charles stood up. “I’m going to get a drink of water.”

He rushed from the kitchen, flying down the alley. Then he stood in the darkness near the wildly playing children. The white children were playing with the colored. He was taken for one of them in the dark; a hand touched his arm.

“
You’re it!
” a voice cried. “
You’re it!
”

He turned and ran like light up the dark alley and disappeared into his own backyard. He was out of breath when he returned to the porch. His parents didn’t notice.

The summer passed in a strange lonely tension. And suddenly they were gone. The house was closed and they were on the train. Professor Taylor had accepted another post, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Teaching was his way of life. Mrs. Taylor had to face up to it.

13

O
UT AT THE END OF TOWN
, on the flats where the Iron Mountain and Southern Railroads crossed, a group of wooden buildings had been thrown up to house the Negro college.

The Taylors took a house two miles away, along the tracks. Nearby was the Negro business section; out where the pavement ended was the “Patch.” The white world was sealed off. By comparison the colored world seemed shrunken and distorted, as if a specimen had been placed beneath an inverted microscope and had become strangely infinitesimal.

In the morning long lines of colored children filed down the railroad tracks, going to the city school. They stood to one side, their ragged clothing flying in the rush of air like the banners of their section, their black faces lifted curiously, eyes intent, as a train went by.

The Taylor children went to college. They loved to walk the rails.

“See, I’m not looking,” Charles would say. “You’re looking but I’m not.”

“I am not looking.”

“You are too.”

They tried to walk the two miles without once stepping off. Often the other children challenged their right of way. One would push the other off. Then there’d be a fight. Excited childish faces would ring the fighters in. The brothers always fought together. They had become savage again.

A train would pass and they’d race the engine, flying recklessly along the shoulder of the bed. All the way to school they threw rocks at the telegraph poles. They stuck close together and delighted in goading the ragged city children. Hardly a week went by without their getting into a rock fight.

Once Charles tried to hop a fast freight. He ran mightily along the gravel bed and leaped for the low iron rung. His hands got hold, but he was flung about, his back striking the side of the box car, and then hurled to the gravel bed. He landed turning from his own momentum, his outstretched legs across the rail. The onrushing heavy steel wheel struck them as they turned, knocked them away from the rail as it sped on. He kept rolling down the steep embankment, came up skinned and breathless in the gulley.

“Whew!” he whistled, laughing. “Whew!”

“You almost got run over!” William screamed in agitation.

Charles laughed at his older brother. “It threw me all right. But I got the trick. You gotta jump on the journal box.”

The next morning he waited for the train and hopped it. A neighbor told their mother.

“I don’t know what’s getting into you children; you’re becoming so ugly,” she scolded.

Their father whipped them, and afterwards made them walk to school with him. To show his defiance, Charles hopped a freight and rode all the way to Little Rock and was gone all day. He took another whipping.

They didn’t like the college. It was bleak and ugly and everything was strange. It made them wild and restless. They were always running away from it; running away from something. They cut classes to go wandering about the town. They loved to pick a street and see where it would end. Carnivals delighted them, opening up a strange new world.

In the twilight after supper they’d ask:

“Can we go down to the corner, Mother?”

“To the corner? What for? What’s happening at the corner?”

“Nothing. We just want to take a walk. It gets so tiresome staying in the house all the time.”

“You have your homework to do.”

“We won’t be gone but a minute. We don’t have to do any homework anyway. We’re way ahead of the class.”

Finally their father would say, “Let them go, honey. There’s nothing they can get into.”

“Well—don’t be gone long,” she’d call as they took off like a flash.

They’d run the two miles to the fairgrounds out on Cherry Street and stand for a minute, out of breath, watching the fascinating spectacle, the crowds of white people, the ferris wheel and the carousel and glittering midway—and then run home again.

“Where did you children go?” their mother would ask anxiously.

“Just down to the railroad tracks.”

“You’ve been running; you’re out of breath.”

“We ran back.”

“I’ve told you time and again to stay away from the railroad tracks.”

“We weren’t on the tracks. We were standing off to one side watching the signal lights.”

“It’s getting so I can’t believe a word you say,” she complained.

It was that way all that fall. Now they’d stay out roaming the streets until nine and ten o’clock. They were always running. Their father whipped them now, but they didn’t care.

Their mother was assailed by her old anxiety. They acted so ugly, she thought. More than just naughty; there was a defiance in their attitude that made their acts seem actually wicked as if knowing right from wrong only bedeviled them. Charles worried her most. There was a vein of violence in his nature that kept her constantly on edge. She lived in constant dread of his killing some other boy, or getting himself killed or maimed for life. She became obsessed with the fear that God was going to punish her for the strange passion she had for him. She brooded for weeks, worrying and fretting between moments of intense anguish. She doubted if he’d live to see his twenty-first birthday. Life would never take his reckless challenge; it would kill him. But what brought her such deep torture was the fear that it would hurt him first. Out of all her sons she dreaded most to see him hurt. He would buck and strain against it and die in abject misery.

And then, it was as if God sent the smallpox to save them from destruction. The day before Christmas both had sore throats and were running temperatures. Their mother thought they had caught common colds. But when her treatment failed to get results she called the doctor. He was familiar with the dread disease and clamped on a quarantine. Within the hour the house was posted.

Their father rushed home, but wasn’t allowed inside the picket fence. Mrs. Taylor talked to him from the porch. The children had been put to bed.

For three days they were critically ill, drifting in and out of delirium as their fever rose and fell. Their mother waited on them hand and foot. When the pustules came she anointed them constantly with carbolic salve. They lay naked on the slimy bed, the touch of cloth unbearable. Their bodies were covered with eruptions from head to foot, the palms of their hands, beneath their fingernails, the soles of their feet; their faces and lips and ears were a mass of greasy pus. During the long hours when little else could be done, their mother prayed.

“God take my life…give me the disease…please, dear God, spare them…I’ll do anything…I’ll be a good wife…I’ll follow Your teaching…”

The bodies of her sons seemed rotting away before her very eyes.

“God in Heaven, what have they done?” she cried in anguish. “What have my children done that You should punish them like this?”

Professor Taylor came and stood outside the fence. He brought food which he tossed into the yard. Nights he slept in the men’s dormitory. Mrs. Taylor stood in the door and talked to him when she was not too weary. For hours in the settling dusk and on into the night he kept a lonely vigil. Walking back and forth before the picket fence, he also prayed. In their extremity there was only God for both. Both had been reared in a God-fearing tradition; both knew no other light.

“Lord, have mercy, have mercy on my boys,” he would mutter to himself as he walked back and forth, a little, black, bowlegged pigeon-toed man in a dark gray suit, high celluloid collar and a worn derby hat, fading into the gathering darkness.

“God have mercy on my sons.”

Fear didn’t touch the children; they were too sick to know. There was only a cottony haze of unending misery, trancelike in its persistence, almost remote; thirst and the strange sliding into blackness. Charles found it soothing to drift into delirium. When the crisis passed, their mother’s heart sang like a mockingbird. Professor Taylor stood crying in the street, joined by friends and curious neighbors.

But the children were assailed by an unendurable itch; their hours were filled with longing to scratch. Their hands were tied in pillows at their backs as the scabs began to form; but in their itching frenzy they tore the mattress with their teeth. They screamed and raged in misery and frustration.

“If you pick the scabs they’ll leave pockmarks,” their mother said. “You don’t want your faces filled with pock-marks.”

They didn’t care. For the blessed relief of scratching they were willing to pay the price.

Finally the scabs began to fall; the itching passed. They stood in the window and waved to their father and watched the people pass. Soon they were up and about; the quarantine was lifted. Mother and father knelt beside the children and thanked God. Mrs. Taylor felt that God had given her another chance.

Afterwards, she took her husband’s hand and promised solemnly, “I will be a good wife to you, Mr. Taylor.”

The furniture in their room was burned; the house was closed and fumigated. They went to a neighbor’s house and Mrs. Taylor slept; her deep-set eyes were haggard and she was skin and bones. The children found it good to be out in the open again. Both retained slight pocks, almost unnoticeable, on the bridges of their noses. Now they could boast of having had smallpox.

Professor Taylor moved his family from the haunted house out on a hill called Battleville where Negroes lived along untended, weedy roads. Behind them, on a high bluff overlooking a muddy stream, was a skeet trap, and all Sunday long the booming shotgun blasts of white men shooting skeet lay heavily on the singing in the little frame church. Sometimes the children slipped away from home and joined others standing at a distance watching. They loved to climb the bluff, but the shooters made it dangerous.

Although their mother restrained them as she always had, they knew that she was changed. She was thinner and more nervous, but she was kinder, too, and she rarely nagged them anymore. She was more pleasant toward their father, and their home was happier than ever before. “You are big boys now and must stay for church after Sunday school,” she bade them. “You must express your love and thanksgiving toward God for bringing you through alive.”