The Third Generation (16 page)

They followed him out the building and across the street through a side gate in the high plank fence, and were struck by the confusion of buildings. Boys and girls of all ages streamed across the yard. Several turned to stare at them and many of the girls giggled. The children shrank with shame and trepidation, quivering with a strange kind of fear. They were afraid of other children.

The dining room matron seated them at a long board table with others of their age. They searched frantically for their mother, and then kept their eyes glued to their plates.

“Whar you pigmeat come frum?” a bully across from them asked.

Charles looked up, so tense he could scarcely speak. “Mississippi.”

The boy snorted. “‘Sippi niggers.”

In a flash one of the serving women slapped him. “You shet yo’ mouth, boy. Usin’ dat dirty word.”

The boy subsided sullenly. A snicker ran around the table.

“Ah’ll git you for that,” he threatened Charles when the serving woman left.

Charles felt the blood burning in his face.

Their mother came for them at the end of breakfast. They’d never been so glad to see her.

“Children,” she laughed delightedly, returning their embraces. “You’d think that I’d been gone for ages.”

“We were scared,” William confessed.

“Well, it won’t be long,” she consoled. “Mother will try to get you with her. Now we must go and see Miss Rainy.”

The children were shocked by the sight of the big, black, ox-like woman who greeted them in a deep, gruff voice, “So this is Will an’ Charles.” She had the flat features of the Zulu tribes with short-cropped graying hair, and her gums were a dark, purplish blue. They stared at her.

She patted their heads. “You boys’ll have to toe the line even if your ma does teach here. Ah don’ make no favorites of nobody’s children an’ Ah didn’ make no favorites of my own when they was here.”

“Don’t think I’ve spared the rod,” Mrs. Taylor said. “My boys can’t say I’ve spoiled them.”

“Speak up, speak up, the cat got your tongue?” the headwoman bade.

“Say ‘how do you do’ to Miss Rainy,” their mother urged.

“How do you do, Miss Rainy,” they chorused.

Miss Rainy grinned, her thick dark lips parting over gold-crowned teeth. “Now you boys run along with your ma.” Then to their mother, “When you get settled, sister, Ah’ll take you over the ground.”

Crayne was named after the Senator who had donated the site. Once it had housed the slave quarters of his grandfather’s plantation. He’d thought it singularly befitting that it should become a seat of learning for the progeny of those creatures.

But Cindy Rainy was the institution. She’d never gotten beyond the sixth grade of a backwoods school. As a child she’d served in white homes, and after marriage had mothered white children to earn money to feed her own. But it was her greatest ambition to give other Negro children the education she’d missed. Her iron will had raised the Institute from a shanty schoolhouse to an institution of prominence. She’d built it herself; she’d begged every dime.

She’d been hard on herself and she was hard on her students. In her office were two wooden paddles, one of light seasoned cedar with which she beat the girls, and one of heavy, thick oak she used on the boys.

As with many dark Negro women who’ve struggled to prominence, she had a preference for light-complexioned persons, both as friends and subordinates. Though most of her students were young black folk, a predominance of her teachers were fair. And of these, all but the athletic director, science teachers and chaplain were women.

Mrs. Taylor’s position was that of music instructor. Two of her nieces, Martha and Mary Manning, her brother Tom’s children, were also on the staff. The relationship was quite marked; both were very fair girls with brown wavy hair. And there were also a number of teachers acquainted with some branch or other of the Manning family. She was delighted to be among her own. Her nieces thought her most elegant and refined and were quite devoted.

She was given a couple of rooms on the ground floor of the faculty house across the street, so she could keep her children with her. The boys had a back room with low windows opening onto a narrow alley. They had but to step outside and they were free.

She saw very little of them that winter. It was as if a dam had broken loose within her. She talked and talked, catching up on the family news. She told and retold the events of her marriage. She became quite garrulous, even a nuisance at times. But she couldn’t restrain herself. The words and phrases poured out in an endless stream.

Even the children were astonished. She talked a great deal to them, bringing up bits and sketches of her childhood. That was the winter she told them that their great-great-grandfather, Grandma Charlotte’s sire, was General Beauregard.

She would come into the children’s room at bedtime and, without preamble, say, “Your cousin, Martha, is just like her grandfather. She likes her coffee scalding hot,” smiling reminiscently. “My mother could never get his coffee hot enough. No matter how hot she’d have it, he’d say, ‘Lin, this coffee is stone cold.’ And she’d have to put it back in the pot and heat it. She got tired of him saying his coffee was cold and one day she put the cup in the oven and got it red hot. Then she filled it with boiling coffee and set it at his place. When he sat down and picked up his cup his mouth was all set to say it was stone cold. But when he put it to his lips we could hear the skin sizzle. My mother was afraid she’d given him an awful burn. It must have hurt him terribly. But your grandfather didn’t bat an eye. He just looked across at my mother and said, ‘Lin, for once in your life you got my coffee hot.’” The memory made her laugh with pleasure.

The children didn’t understand her. She seemed strange. They felt that she was slipping away from them. A vague insecurity threatened them. They became closer to each other.

Their teachers couldn’t separate them. They sat on the same bench. Should one falter in his recitation the other took it up. Their mother had taught them well. They were both brilliant in their classes. But they didn’t make friends. When one got into a fight the other would rush to aid him. Charles did most of his brother’s fighting. But William would help by grabbing his opponent’s legs while Charles pummeled him. After several of these skirmishes the bullies left them alone.

Their studies were so easy they soon were bored and took to playing hooky. They’d slip behind the wooden buildings, skirt the playing field, and climb over the fence behind the scoreboard in the corner. There was a grocery store across the street where many of the day students bought their lunch. The proprietor wasn’t permitted to sell to the students between hours, but he did to those he trusted. They’d buy a loaf of bread, cut a wedge from the top and fill it with molasses or condensed milk or sardines, and after the juice had soaked in plug it up again. They carried their “sog ‘em” to the neighborhood known as the “Blackberry Patch,” and there in the shade of their favorite chinaberry tree on the bank of a creek they feasted.

Although they were fed plenty in the mess hall—black-eyed peas and rice one day, boiled pork and baked sweet potatoes the next, oatmeal and skimmed milk, hominy grits and hot fat for breakfast—they were always hungry. Their mother supplemented their diet with dry cereals and fruit. Both loved the baked fish that was served on Fridays. The big steaming pan of porgies with onion gravy was set in the center of the table. The other children liked fried fish best, so this one day they had all they wanted.

During supper, the school horse, an old gray mare named Maud, was fed a half-dozen ears of dried field corn in her trough beside the kitchen door. It was great sport with the older boys to try to steal an ear when they came from supper. But Maud was on to their game and snapped at them like a vicious dog, her big teeth clacking dangerously. Charles loved dried corn and once he tried to steal an ear and run. But Maud was too quick for him, and bit him across the cheek and nose. For days he wore a bandage and a tiny scar remained. But he learned how to snitch an ear from the other side when her attention was distracted.

One night the children were awakened by the sound of fire engines. They dressed and slipped out through the window.

Toward the Patch was an orange glow in the sky. All about them were running people. A fire engine turned the corner, drawn by four white horses, smoke belching from its stack. All else forgotten, his brother and mother, the night, Charles went flying in its wake.

“Wait, Chuck,” Will called.

But Charles didn’t hear him. The urge to run heedlessly, unrestrainedly, like the mad surge of the beautiful white horses, blew out his other thoughts. Soon he was separated from his brother. He ran with a long, smooth, digging motion, down the dim streets, jostling people, through the muddy gutters on into the Patch. Black and yellow people were panicky in the streets. He followed the engine through the milling crowd, came up at the edge of the fire. Police had thrown up a loose, futile cordon. Beyond the shotgun shacks and flimsy hovels burned an immense bonfire. Black people loomed suddenly from the haze of smoke, lugging a straw mattress, a bundle of clothing, a paper sack of cold corn bread. Beds and furniture and clothing and boxes were scattered like debris down the streets of chaos. Over and above the crackling of the fire and the hissing of the water came the wailing and the moaning and the shouting of the people.

Charles was cut loose from reality. The stark raw panic in the black faces transmitted itself to him. He started to run like a crazed horse into the midst of the flames, but was caught up in front of a dark, lonely shack by a woman standing in the door. She was a young mulatto girl, dark hair hanging to her shoulder; a vague shape in a loose nightgown. There was in her posture a strange bitter forlornness more terrible than a Gorgon’s head. He was too young to know that she was a whore watching the fire from morbid curiosity. He saw only the infinite loneliness of a strange lost woman in the one left house. He was ineffably drawn to her; he felt an affinity deeper than kin. He went toward her timidly, filled with the great flaming desire to serve her with his life.

“Can I help you, lady?”

She looked at him startled, then cursed. “Git der hell away from heah an’ mind yo’ own bizness.”

He felt a sharp, brackish shock, turned and fled. For a long time aimlessly he watched the fire, absorbed into the misery of the homeless groups, and afterwards he wandered listlessly in the ruins. But deep inside he was badly hurt, first opened by the suffering of the people, then poisoned by the strange woman’s scorn. He couldn’t understand her viciousness; her rejection cut him to the heart. It was early morning when he crawled back into bed. William was asleep. For a long time Charles lay there crying until the sobbing waked his brother.

“What’s the matter, Chuck?” William asked, alarmed.

“Nothing,” Charles choked.

“What you crying about?”

“Nothing, I tell you.”

“There is something too, you’re crying.”

“I’m not.”

“You are too, and I’m going to tell Mother.”

“I’m not, I’m not! I tell you I’m not!”

“Don’t cry, Chuck,” William consoled.

“I was just crying a little bit,” he confessed. “I’m all right, really I am. I was just crying a little because it’s all so sad.”

“Go to sleep, Chuck,” William said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

“All right, Will. Don’t tell Mama I was gone.”

“I won’t tell.”

As Charles grew older there were many more exciting happenings that he forgot. It was always very hard for him to recall the inside of all the many houses he lived in. But he never forgot the utter loneliness of the woman standing in the darkened doorway, watching the misery of her people, nor the utter viciousness of her rejection.

That year William was very kind to his younger brother. He lied to the teachers when Charles played hooky and never once told on him for slipping out at night. After the first strangeness had worn off and they’d become accustomed to the difference in their mother’s attitude, they liked it there. They liked their newly discovered cousins and the thrilling sound of laughter in the streets in the early evening; and they liked the long walks they took through the city with their mother on Sunday afternoons.

The thing they liked best was an old minstrel who came around the school and fiddled for the students. He was a very old man with a deeply seamed face, the color of saddle leather, and a thatch of dirty, yellowish-white hair. His old brown eyes had the bluish tint of age, and but two brown snags hung loose from bare shrunken gums. His clothes were tattered and he stank like a goat, but his fiddle was wrapped with loving care in a square of fine old velvet. The students loved him, and whenever he appeared a crowd collected.

“Play ‘Hole in de ground,’” they begged.

He played a jig tune and cut a step, then he played a spiritual and mumbled out the words.

“Oh, Mistah Minstrel, please play ‘Hole in de ground.’”

His old lined face beamed with pleasure and his eyes sparkled youthfully. He began chanting the endless ballad, sawing the accompanying sounds:

Oh once ‘pon uh time dare wuz uh hole in de ground

An’ de green grass growin’ all ‘round an ‘round

De green grass growin all ‘round…

In de li’l hole dare wuz uh li’l tree

Tree in de hole

Hole in de ground

An’ de green grass growin’ all ‘round an’ ‘round

De green grass growin’ all ‘round….

“Oh, what was on the tree, Mistah Minstrel? What was on the tree?”

On de li’l tree dare wuz uh li’l limb

Limb on de tree

Tree in de hole

Hole in de ground

An de green grass growin all ‘round an’ ‘round

De green grass growin’ all ‘round…

“Oh, what was on the lim’, Mistah Minstrel? What was on the lim’?”

His old bluish eyes twinkled with delight. And on and on it would go:

An’ on dat li’l tree dare wuz a li’l tail

Tail on de bee

Bee on de leaf

Leaf on de branch