The Third Generation (27 page)

“Is that your folks’ car, Chuck?”

“No, it’s my aunt’s. But I can drive it whenever I want,” he added proudly.

“Greg, did you see Chuck’s car?”

“It’s just a struggle-buggy, Mother,” he replied indifferently, and then to Charles, “Tadpole, how about sitting for me now.” He was doing a sketch of Charles sitting at the piano. It was quite unflattering and Charles knew he made it so deliberately.

“I haven’t time now,” he called, dashing out.

He drove off fast, passing other cars along the way, and waved to a girl he saw across the street. For an instant she couldn’t place him, then waved excitedly after he had passed. He was laughing exultantly when, looking ahead, he saw a boy on a bicycle cut across his path. The boy licked an ice cream cone and looked off in the opposite direction.

Charles stabbed for the brake. His foot slipped off the narrow strip of shiny metal. He stabbed again, experiencing the sinking sensation of slipping on a banana peeling. In front the boy and bicycle seemed suspended in mid-motion, the picture rushing forward in growing horror. He wrenched the steering wheel to his right, hoping to pass behind the boy. But even as he did so he knew he’d never make it. With the quick reflexes of a healthy youth, he gave a mighty wrench to his left. The car struck the front wheel of the bicycle, unseating the boy who’d never stopped licking his ice cream cone, never looked, now sprawled spread-eagle on the pavement, the car rushing on as if by some evil momentum, Charles’s glance striking on ahead; and then into his vision came the sight of jam-packed men and women, waiting for an approaching streetcar, directly in front of him. Somewhere the horror stopped and never came alive.

The car struck them frontally, knocking them down in a mass of kicking legs and flailing arms, crashed broadside into the connecting wall between the corner drugstore and adjoining meat market, shattering the plate-glass windows of both, caromed back across the sidewalk. Down the hood Charles saw a short squat man, who’d been hit before, struggling to his knees as the car struck him again, passed over him, crashed into another car parked at the curb. And out of all the incipient tragedy, this single grotesquerie became implanted in his mind, and laughter ripped from him. He couldn’t stop it. Funniest thing he ever saw. He didn’t hear the screaming.

The door of the car was flung abruptly open. A butcher jerked him to the street, brandishing a bloody cleaver. He looked up into the hard white face, saw the brutal mouth, merciless gray eyes, and felt his consciousness leaving. He tried to hang on to himself, vaguely aware of a violent scuffle taking place as if he had no part in it. When the picture came again he was closed in by a group of colored men. Now he heard the sobbing of the wounded, strident voices raised in anger, the distant crying of the sirens. As far as he could see in all directions was a mass of jabbering people.

The police cars came, pushing through the mob, lining up beside the accident end to end, seven in a row. Charles was taken by two officers in gold braid and placed in a long, black limousine. He sat there with the police driver and watched remotely all that was taking place. There was no order in his mind, the pictures wouldn’t register; the persons lying sobbing on the pavement had no relationship to tragedy. Only the eyes were felt, the countless staring eyes, shifting to the victims, to the policemen, back to himself. He looked at his hands. The eyes disappeared. His hands were steady.

The two officials came and sat flanking him, and they drove away.

“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” one remarked. “Your car hardly got a scratch. Not even a window cracked.”

“All four tires went flat,” Charles said. The sound of his own voice startled him. He was astonished by the observation. Both of them glanced curiously at him.

He was questioned at great length at the police station and officers were sent to bring down his parents and the Coopers. At first he thought he couldn’t tell them anything. But as he talked the entire picture came alive with startling clarity. He was amazed by his ability to recount in detail sidelights of the accident he had no recollection of having seen.

Over and over he heard himself saying, “The brake pedal was just like grease. Every time I hit it my foot slipped off. The car just wouldn’t stop.”

Afterwards he was placed in a waiting room. He felt as if it was all a dream. The actual tragedy hadn’t gotten him. His mind contained the photographic pictures of the accumulated grotesquerie, but no connection had been made with the resulting pain and awful hurt and terrible consequences. The victims were recalled as adagio dancers executing comic pantomime. Much of it still affected him as funny. The sheer ludicrousness of the poor guy getting knocked down twice. Little sniffs of laughter kept blowing through his nose. There was something monstrous, inhuman, in his mental rejection of the horror. It was as if the dream was known to be a dream, the horror but the artificiality of the dream.

The Coopers were the first to come, he in his work clothes and she with rings of dried soapsuds about her wrists, their faces gray with terror. They were taken for interrogation before being permitted to speak to him. Then his mother and father arrived. Her bloodless face was etched with apprehension, her body braced rigidly against the surge of panic. His father was a study in alarm. When he told them what had happened, his mother turned against his father with uncontrollable fury.

“You contemptible sneak. God curse the day you ever became the father of my children. After all that woman has done to him you let her make a lackey out of him.”

His father wilted. The Coopers came out gray and shaken. Mrs. Taylor didn’t speak to them. Mr. Cooper wandered about in a daze. Professor and Mrs. Taylor were questioned briefly. Mrs. Taylor demanded that they prosecute her husband for permitting his son, a minor, to drive. The police officials were confused. Then the Harts arrived. The room seemed overly crowded.

“What have you done to us?” Mrs. Cooper lashed at Charles condemningly. “What have you done to us?”

His mother turned on her in a white rage. “Don’t you speak to him. You black evil woman. Don’t you dare speak to him. The way you’ve treated him. You’re the one who should be prosecuted.”

“He should have gone where I sent him,” Mrs. Cooper screamed. “If he wasn’t so hardheaded we wouldn’t be in this trouble.”

“Now, Bee. Now, sister,” Mr. Cooper muttered. “We’re all in this together.”

“My son is not in it,” Mrs. Taylor raved. “My son is just a victim.”

“Now, honey, I’ve called a lawyer,” Professor Taylor interjected. “Let’s just wait until he comes.”

“We don’t know who’s dead,” Mrs. Cooper wailed. “We don’t know who’s dead.”

“You black devil,” Mrs. Taylor screamed. Clutching Charles’s arm, she fled into the corridor.

She sensed that as yet the horror had not affected him. She wanted to keep him in that state of mind. She was afraid for him to experience the full impact of the tragedy. Not then, not all at once. She feared a shock; perhaps his mind would become unbalanced. There was no telling how it might affect him. He was inclined toward morbid introspection anyway. And his capacities for good and evil were so delicately balanced. She feared that this might be the very thing to send him off unless she shielded him from all the terrible consequences. They had no right to do this thing to him, she thought. She wanted to protect him at any cost.

Professor Taylor followed them. He realized her purpose and thought that it was wrong. He felt that Charles should realize the consequences of his actions, and suffer in whatever way God saw to punish him. No matter who was right and who was wrong, his son had been the one who drove the car, and he should be the one to face it, he thought.

“Honey, you can’t do this,” he argued. “The boy must know what he’s done.”

But she stood between them, shielding Charles with her body as well as with her soul. “Don’t you dare come out here and accuse my son of any wrong,” she cried. “You’re the one to blame. You had no right to let him drive that woman’s car. God is going to punish you as surely as I’m standing here for the way you’ve let your relatives abuse and mistreat your son.”

He couldn’t stand up to her.

Finally the attorney arrived and Charles was released in the custody of his parents. The hearing was set for the following day. His mother ordered a taxicab to take them home. They passed the scene of the accident. Charles noticed that the car was gone and the shattered glass removed. He looked curiously at the spot where the injured had fallen. And still it didn’t register; his mind would not accept the pain and horror.

His mother shielded him from all discussion of the accident. She took him out to dinner and remained with him until bedtime. He dreamed as he’d always done, but only of the usual fantasies that made sleeping such a pleasure. It didn’t touch him even in his sleep.

He sat between his parents at the hearing. He felt like a spectator. He’d been charged with reckless driving. When it came his turn to testify, he spoke in a clear, untroubled voice. His father was shocked by his detachment. The court was puzzled. Afterwards policemen testified in his behalf—the boy on the bicycle had ridden thoughtlessly across his path; he had turned to avoid running over him, and the faulty brake mechanism had failed to stop the car. Two of the persons were severely injured, two others were temporarily hospitalized, and the remainder had received superficial bruises. Charles listened to the proceedings in a state of mild amazement, as if they were discussing someone other than himself.

The court reprimanded him for driving without a license and prohibited him from driving again. He was released. There was an action against the Coopers, but he didn’t know of it.

His mother took him away immediately. They went to see a motion picture. Afterwards they lunched in a pleasant cafe. They talked of happy things and once he made her laugh. The accident had drawn them closer than they’d been in years. He talked bravely of all the great things he hoped to do. She felt again the intense love she’d always held for him. He was her baby, her beautiful, brilliant baby. And now they’d been through one more crisis and she prayed it was the last. Soon they’d have a house, she promised. And then things would be better again. She promised herself to give him more attention. She’d neglected him dreadfully, but she’d make it up to him.

It hadn’t touched him. Secretly he was glad it had happened. After all, no one had died. And it freed him from the curse of anonymity. Already it had acquired the quality of adventure. People he’d never seen before spoke to him by name.

“How’d you make out, Chuck?”

“Oh, I beat it,” he answered proudly.

They looked at him curiously, wondering whom he knew, what sort of importance his folks had. “You’re lucky, kid.”

Now girls seemed thrilled to meet him. Their eyes widened coyly and they ruffled their tails like pullets. “Oh, you’re the man who was in that accident.”

“Aw, it wasn’t serious. Just a great to-do about nothing.”

“You should have seen all the people standing ‘round. Must have been thousands of them. I don’t know where they all came from.”

“I saw ‘em. You know, people can smell an accident.”

“Weren’t you scared?”

“Scared? What for? I was just sorry for the people I ran over.”

“When that man had that meat cleaver? Mr. Johnson took it away from him. Weren’t you scared he was gonna chop you in the head?”

“Naw, he was only bluffing.”

“No, he wasn’t bluffing, either. The white people were going to lynch you if the colored people hadn’t stopped them.”

“Lynch me!” He was shocked. But it was a pleasant kind of shock since the danger had passed. It added to the mystery that surrounded him.

Afterwards he’d say: “You know, for a moment, I thought those white guys were going to lynch me. They might have tried at that if there hadn’t been so many colored people there.”

Mrs. Robinson was very tender with him after that, and even Greg and the gang seemed awed by his experience.

He never knew that the Coopers had been fined, that they’d lost their home and all their life’s savings to settle the damages of the injured. His mother kept it from him. Even William knew, but she wouldn’t let him tell. Why should he have to know and suffer guilt all his life for what was done to him, she reasoned. His father felt differently. The boy should know; it would teach him to be more careful in the future. But he hadn’t the courage to defy his wife. He was doing no better in Cleveland than he had in St. Louis, still working at odd jobs in carpentry to make ends meet. She’d gotten the upper hand. She dominated him by nagging and disparagement. He couldn’t stand up to it any longer. To fight back had become depletive. It was easier to let her have her way.

Although they had no legal claim, the Coopers held them morally responsible for half the damages. Professor Taylor felt obligated to pay his share. But the money they’d received from the sale of their property in St. Louis was deposited in Mrs. Taylor’s name. She refused to share one cent. Instead she bought a house. Professor Taylor’s people never forgave her.

But she felt that she had saved her son from some dreadful kind of horror.

19

I
T WAS A SEVEN-ROOM
frame house out in the northeast residential section, across from the high school, and they were the only colored family. Its location in a white neighborhood gave them the prestige of suburbanites. Their colored friends were proud to know someone who lived so far away.

Mrs. Taylor loved the hard, waxed floors and gleaming banisters and flower plots out back. She sent to St. Louis for her furniture and everything was polished to a turn. Their first Sunday they celebrated as a family reunion. For his contribution to the dinner, Charles made a wilted lettuce salad they thought delicious. He was proud and delighted by his success, although he never could recall the ingredients he’d used. He never made another salad although they often begged him. He stood on his laurels to the end.

The house did something wonderful for Charles. He was home again. He’d never realized how much he’d missed a home. First he had Harvard Eaton for dinner one evening after school. Then he invited all the gang of boys and girls for tea one Sunday afternoon. They were impressed by the house and loved his mother. She could be charmingly gracious when she chose. It made all the difference with his friends. Now they took him seriously. Even Greg began to call him Chuck and treat him as an equal.