The Third Generation (17 page)

Branch on de limb

Limb on de tree

Tree in de hole

Hole in de ground

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

An’ de green grass growin’ all ‘round….

The children squealed with glee. What would be on the tail?

Sting on de tail…

And what would be on the sting?

Pisen on de sting…

They loved the old minstrel. But then, the Taylor children loved most things the other children loved. They loved the same games and pastimes; sucking dill pickles stuffed with wine balls, munching peeled pomegranates, lingering over the unfamiliar delicious taste. They enjoyed the holiday celebrations, the outdoor barbecues, running with the football players in the fall, baseball in the spring, the Maypole dance, the Easter Ramble. Quite often they laughed at the same things. The time Pomp came screaming into Miss Rainy’s office, “O’ Mi Rainy! Mi Rainy! De goat done dead!” It became a classic example of the ungrammatical form. Nor did Miss Rainy show them any favoritism. William escaped; she thought he was a nice, obedient boy. But she paddled Charles several times for fighting, playing hooky, and the hardest of all for calling another boy a “monkey-devil.”

The difference was deeper; the difference of upbringing, of perspective. Taking their napkins to the mess hall in the old worn wooden napkin rings. Saying, “Thank you.” The absence of dialect in their speech. The feeling that their teachers didn’t know everything. Their unacceptance of the common childish conviction that Negroes were the strongest people in the world. The shocked incredulity both always felt at a collection of Negro heads—in class or in chapel when the students were assembled, the black-burred craniums with bald tetter patches and the short straightened hair of the girls with grease running down behind their ears. And on Saturday night the smell of burning hair permeating the very air over the school and the Patch and the entire Negro community, as if there were a witch-burning of incredible numbers. It always gave Charles a queasy stomach, sick enough to vomit. Yet his own hair was kinky; he couldn’t imagine himself without kinky hair; he never thought of it as ugly. It was the atrocities they committed on themselves to be what they were never intended which he couldn’t reconcile. Thin, black girls with white ribbons tied to their crop of short braids always reminded him of Topsy; and the burred white thatch of the old minstrel was Uncle Tom again. But Topsy and Uncle Tom were real people like his mother and himself, and why all the shame?

However, they learned to be with other children, and the names and rules of games. And they learned of their family on their mother’s side. There was little in the classes they hadn’t already learned. But they became accustomed to classroom procedure. And they’d gotten out of Mississippi. If for no more than that, their mother was grateful for that year.

12

T
HE FOLLOWING YEAR THE
children attended school with students twice their age. Their father had missed them the year before. He kept them home that fall and enrolled them in the College. They’d completed the sixth grade at Crayne. Now they were enrolled in the freshman year in college, which was the equivalent of the eighth grade.

Mrs. Taylor fumed and threatened. But she couldn’t leave the children. She was trapped.

All that summer she’d talked incessantly as if she’d been wound up and couldn’t stop. Tom was home briefly before going on to Cleveland. He thought his mother queer. Then it was the little children who felt her insecurity.

“Don’t ever forget that you are Mannings,” she constantly reminded them. Her eyes were vacant, staring off into the past. She frightened them with her ceaseless prattle. Now, with the frustrating of her hope to take them off again, she was assailed by prolonged despair. It was as if she’d returned to the scene of a long and bitter defeat. The old scars and humiliations of battle opened sharply with new hurt. Before she’d been determined to depart. Now she was obsessed with escape. At times her frustration was so heightened she felt that she’d go crazy. Her eyes were often red from crying, and deep lines of discontent began settling in her face.

“You’ve done everything in your power to destroy me,” she charged her husband. “Now you’re trying to destroy me by making monsters of my children. But I shan’t let you.” Her eyes were wild, her hair disordered. She was becoming a little hysterical.

“By God, they’re my children too. And I want ‘em here with me.”

The course of battle ran the same. Only their ages were different; they had grown older. Professor Taylor had developed chronic constipation.

“You’ll regret this, Mr. Taylor. You’ll suffer in hell for what you’re doing to your children.”

The house was sick with fear and hate that morning they entered college. The children spilled their cereal and bolted their eggs. Their mother’s face was grim. Finally their father rose to go.

“Now be good boys and don’t give your professors any trouble,” he admonished.

“Professors at their age,” their mother said. “I tell you, Mr. Taylor, it’s criminal.” He went off without replying.

“Children,” she began without preamble, “I want to tell you how babies are born.”

They looked at her from large, startled eyes, squirming uncomfortably. She became embarrassed but went on grimly as if forcing the words from her lips:

“The seed of the male impregnates the womb of the female and the mother becomes pregnant. The baby lies in the womb of its mother for nine months, growing and growing until it is formed, then the mother gives birth. You recall when Mrs. Sherwood was pregnant last year. She was carrying the baby in her womb; her little baby Alice.

“The birth of a baby,” she continued, swallowing painfully, “is very sacred and should never be discussed. Only persons who are married are permitted to conceive babies. But there is nothing secretive about it. It is a very natural function—it is as natural as a bowel movement, although we don’t talk about that either. I want you children to understand this, and when the older men try to tell you about it you tell them that your mother has already told you and that will shut them up.”

She looked away from their huge staring eyes. “Do you want to ask any questions?”

They shook their heads. “No, Mother,” William said.

“Do you understand it?”

“Yes, Mother,” they nodded dumbly.

Charles thought of Mrs. Sherwood carrying the baby in her womb. He’d never seen a newborn baby. The first time he saw the baby it weighed twenty pounds. He wanted to know how it got out. But he was too ashamed to ask.

Their mother’s raw embarrassment had affected them with a strange sense of guilt. They knew less than before, when they’d assumed that babies were born like other animals. Now they were confused. They’d formed no clear association between sexual intercourse and the conceiving of a baby. To them sexual intercourse was still something sly and dirty the grownups did.

The school bell rang. Finally they set off to college in their knee breeches and black cotton stockings, burdened with a vague picture of giant babies in their mothers’ stomachs. But they distrusted even this knowledge and felt flooded with shame whenever they saw men and women embrace.

The sight of them was a shock to their classmates.

“You chillun lost, ain’tcha?”

“Them ain’ chillun, them’s dwarfs.”

The men students resented their presence. The women thought it funny. The professors had a problem also. The students thumped the children’s heads with their knuckles.

“Naw, he ain’ ripe.” They guffawed.

“Bastard nigger!” Charles cursed, charging his tormentors.

The students held him off. “Where you learn to cuss, li’l niggah?”

“He bad, ain’ he. He tough.”

“We take that out ‘im.”

They trudged behind their elders from one dim basement to another.

“
Po’ li’l tadpoles, doan you cry

You’ll be bullfrogs by ‘n by
”—the students teased.

The men prodded each other in the rear. The one prodded would jump and strike out, often embrace a girl.

“Uh goosy good time was had by all,” some wit would whisper.

“You ain’ all that goosy,” the woman would protest.

“Ah’d lak to goose you, sugar pie.”

The children hovered in wide-eyed attention. The woman noticed.

“Y’all shouldn’ be talkin’ so nasty fo’ these li’l boys. Li’l pitchers got big ears.”

The children felt ashamed. The air seemed thick with innuendo. Grown-up speech had double meaning. Only during recitations did they fully understand it. The older students soon discovered their naivete.

“Hey, Charlie, Ah found uh li’l pussy las’ night,” the man at the next desk whispered.

“Where?” asked Charles innocently.

“It war hid way down ‘tween two fine brown legs.” The man winked at his cronies and laughed. Charles blushed.

“I know what you mean,” he said defensively.

Jerry Ramsey walked along with the boys when they were going home one evening. “When Fess Williams calls my name one of you boys tell ‘im Ah’m gone chasing whores.”

The children understood the word to be “hoers.” Jerry’s parents had a farm not far from the college. It didn’t seem strange to the children that he should be going after hoers.

“Where you going, Jerry?”

“You going to Port Gibson?”

“Naw, Ah’m goin’ to a whorehouse in N’Orlins.”

Professor Williams was a thin, dark, solemn man with a stern visage. He was always afraid his students might try to take advantage of him, and as a consequence was very strict. When he came to Jerry’s name during the roll call next morning, William punched Charles. Dutifully Charles stood and said, “He’s gone chasing hoers.”

“To a hoerhouse in New Orleans,” William whispered.

“To a hoerhouse in New Orleans,” Charles repeated.

For an instant the room was gripped in a dead silence. Then the students roared with laughter.

“Shut up!” Professor Williams bellowed.

The boys were frightened. They looked at each other and looked about to see what they’d done.

“Come up here, boy,” Professor Williams ordered. His black face was gray with fury.

Charles went forward and faced him beside the desk.

“Now where did you say Ramsey was?” the professor asked through clenched teeth. He was a slow-witted man and hadn’t grasped that the boy was the victim of a prank.

“I said he was gone after hoers in a New Orleans hoerhouse,” Charles replied straightforwardly.

Professor Williams slapped him. Charles had no awe of the professors. He was a strong boy and now caught up in a violent rage he grabbed the professor about the legs and threw him to the floor. The professor struck wildly with his fists. They struggled and rolled over. The professor beat Charles in the face. Then William ran forward and jumped on the professor’s back, pulling him over. Charles came up, turning over, and began beating the professor in the face. Then the students separated them.

Professor Williams sent the children home. Shortly their father arrived out of breath; he’d run all the way.

“It’s what you get for putting them in school with uncouth grown-up savages,” Mrs. Taylor greeted him.

He ignored her and got the story from the boys.

“Whores are bad women,” their father told them. “It’s a word you shouldn’t ever use.”

That afternoon one of the young women asked Charles curiously, “Didn’t you really know what it meant?”

“Aw, sure I knew,” he muttered, blushing with shame. “I was just teasing Mr. Williams.”

Still neither of them was quite certain just what a whore was. Bad how? If it meant what the men were always whispering about, why go all the way to New Orleans? There were plenty bad women on the campus; they’d seen them in the weeds.

Some of the women students often kissed them. Once one pushed her tongue between Charles’s lips. He felt like hitting her. But the children began playing with themselves. At night they’d sit in the outhouse and play with each other. William now experienced a definite sex sensation, but it left them both with a sense of shame and guilt. Afterwards they couldn’t face their mother. It was more fun to urinate in a long, thin arc.

Often when the children encountered students in the outhouse, the men would shake their penises at them.

“W’en you git sompn’ lak that you can call yo’self a man.”

The children had such tiny organs that they felt inferior. Once Charles drank a glass of his urine to show how brave he was.

But for the most part that year was very vague to both the boys. The days were filled with grown-up strangers whose names they knew but whose habits they never understood. Nor did they ever learn the subtle connotations of grown-up speech, as other children, less self-sufficient, might easily have done. Their almost primitive, incurious innocence was kept intact.

The deepest impressions came from their mother’s incessant nagging. Her voice, like a stream of bile, flowed endlessly through the house. “Mr. Taylor, I’ll never forgive you for bringing me to this Godforsaken place. God will punish you as surely as you’re sitting there…” Bitterness colored the very atmosphere.

Their only escape was into the cold, lamp-lit attic. But even there the voice would search them out. “You children will catch your death of pneumonia up there, and I’ll be the one who’ll have to look after you. Your father’ll run to his shop and chase around what manner of people nobody knows all night long. Come right down out of that cold. If you can’t find anything to do but ruin your eyes reading, blame it on your father. He brought us down here to this Godforsaken place among these heathen savages…”

However, there were times when Charles escaped and read alone and she seemed to have completely forgotten his existence. In the cold, dimly lit attic he fought a thousand duels and saved as many damsels in distress. He was Ivan-hoe and Richard the Lionhearted, Alexander the Great and the Count of Monte Cristo, Genghis Khan and the Scarlet Pimpernel. It was often his face in the iron mask, and his strong back, instead of Jean Valjean’s, lifting the carriage from the mud. Most often he was Achilles chasing Hector around the walls of Troy. When all else failed—when he ached with loneliness and Caesar’s failed to conquer; when Ivanhoe had bad dreams and Horatio couldn’t hold the bridge and mud was clinging to his mother’s feet—then he was Achilles. There was something poignantly apt about being Achilles in Mississippi.