The Third Generation (14 page)

But afterwards she realized that she hadn’t answered them. She could tell by the questioning looks she caught sometimes in their eyes. She’d hoped it would never come to the point where she had to explain the difference between them and white people. It came from their living in Mississippi, she concluded. And in the end she blamed it all on Professor Taylor for bringing them there.

But once the question had come alive, now it seemed to emanate from everywhere. It was as if the violence had lain in wait for this development. Professor Taylor had words with a white farmer in his shop. The students had an altercation with the white stationmaster. President Burton appealed to the governor to keep the white people off the campus. Reference to white men seeped insidiously into the Taylors’ conversation. And then, finally, the children were involved.

For some time Professor Taylor had been taking a correspondence course in automobile mechanics in view of adding it to the college curriculum. He bought a secondhand touring car and taught several of his students to drive it. Ofttimes Mrs. Taylor had one of the men drive her and the children out into the country or down to Port Gibson.

Automobiles were still an oddity on those backwoods roads. Entire families would congregate along the road and stare. The livestock would run and the horses and mules buck and snort at the strange, terrifying sound. Dogs would chase the car, snapping viciously. Whenever they met a wagon or buggy on the road, the driver would stop and shut off the motor until the mule-drawn vehicle passed.

On this day a white farmer had stopped his wagon underneath a hickory tree and sat dozing in the shade. The earnest young black man driving the Taylors stopped the car and went forward and told the farmer he’d like to pass.

“Ef’n y’all will just hol’ yo’ mules, sah, Ah’ll drive by easy as Ah ken make her go.”

The farmer was a lank, long-haired, weather-reddened typical Mississippi redneck, dressed in a striped shirt and faded denim overalls. He looked at the solemn Negro student out of sun-faded, pale blue, baleful eyes, and spat a stream of tobacco juice into the hot heavy dust.

The student waited for a moment and then returned to the car. He was worried. “Miz Taylor, w’en Ah ask that man to hoi’ his team he didn’ say nuthin’ ‘tall.”

“Drive on,” Mrs. Taylor directed.

“Ah don’ know, Miz Taylor,” he began hesitantly. “Fess Taylor tol’ me not to make no trouble with these rednecks. An’ that white man look lak—”

“Drive on,” Mrs. Taylor ordered peremptorily.

Suddenly the whites of the young man’s eyes seemed enlarged. He cranked the car and, steering far over to the opposite side of the road, tried to pass the wagon. But the mules bucked in terror and bolted off the road. The farmer reached down and got a rifle from the wagon bed. The driver stopped and shut off the motor. The farmer charged forward and stuck the muzzle of the gun into the young man’s face.

“Git down, niggah, ‘n git mah team back on the road or Ah’ll blow out yo’ brains,” he raved.

The coal-black driver turned gray with fear. William began to whimper. Charles was rigid with rage and terror. But Mrs. Taylor’s eyes glinted and her mouth set in a cold, deadly fury. When the driver got down and went to calm the mules, she took a small revolver from her purse and aimed it at the white man’s back. Charles hated the uncouth, bestial man and hoped his mother would shoot him.

But William begged hysterically, “Don’t, Mama, please don’t, Mama, don’t shoot him, Mama, he’ll kill all of us.”

His mother lowered the pistol and held it in her lap. When the young man had righted the team and backed the wagon onto the road, he came back and cranked the car. The farmer held the rifle aimed at his back. Mrs. Taylor looked straight into the white man’s face, but he didn’t look at her. The driver was barely able to steer the car. A mile down the road he stopped the car beneath a tree and wiped his face and neck. He was wringing wet with sweat.

The incident marked the children in a curious way.

They felt humiliated. For a time they hated the white man. They dreaded recalling the incident. It took the pleasure out of riding in the automobile. But soon it was time to gather chinquapins and hickory nuts. There were golden ripe persimmons on Professor Patterson’s tree. And bushels of big greasy pecans to be gathered from their own back field, the rich yellow meat so fat that oil oozed through the thin brown shells. They’d slip down the front porch roof and climb down the fig tree and run in the cool night dust, and no one was ever the wiser. It was more fun sneaking out at night than riding in an automobile, anyway. And eating the big purple figs when they were ripe, holding them by the stems and sucking the sweet delicious insides right out from the peelings…

Running into a mean old redneck with a rabbit rifle. Charles wished his mother had shot him.

10

I
N THE BACKWOODS OF
Mississippi the major events had a way of passing scarcely noticed. The United States had entered the first World War. At the college, enrollment of male students had slackened. More crops were planted to feed our allies. And the women worked in the fields. Services were said in the chapel for the enlisted men. Prayers were offered for our President, our generals and our allies. Big black headlines in the out-of-town papers screamed the alarming report: Paris was endangered. But the Yanks were coming. “To make the world safe for democracy,” President Burton intoned the classic line.

But, for all that there was scarcely any change.

In the Taylor household nothing was affected by the war. Mrs. Taylor had grown increasingly dissatisfied with the passing years. She nagged at her husband. Tom had been home only once in the past three years. He couldn’t bear his mother’s nagging. He spent his summers in Cleveland, working. Mrs. Taylor knew that she’d lost him. She held it against her husband. One more thing for which he must account. He charged her with driving him away. They quarreled bitterly.

Now she centered all her attention on her younger children. Inadvertently, they were drawn into the strife. Now when the parents fought at night the children crept downstairs and stood beside her. Her discontent and anguish went inside of them; they shared her moods; when she suffered, they suffered with her. Their father was bitter and alone.

During the last summer of the war, he took them to visit the family of one of his students in the delta country. He thought it might help to break their mother’s influence over them.

The Wallaces lived in a section of the country known as Little Africa. The trading post was Alligator. Most of the residents were Negroes who owned their farms. The Wallaces had seventy-nine acres. They lived in a dilapidated, weather-beaten shack. But parked in the backyard, rotting in the hub-deep mud, was a brand-new expensive automobile.

Sudden riches had been dumped into the laps of these poor farmers. Their rich bottom land was planted heavily in cotton that had soared to a dollar per pound. In fertile spots the corn grew eight feet tall; vines of field peas and string beans climbed the tall cornstalks. There was plenty to eat of the food they loved—“Hoppin’ John” with hot crackling bread and a pitcher of cool, freshly made buttermilk. And there was plenty of money to be spent wantonly on things they’d always wanted but couldn’t use—expensive phonographs without needles—electric sewing machines in houses that had never had electricity—pianos which no one had ever learned to play—fine automobiles that no one had ever learned to drive.

On Saturday the Wallace boy dug the automobile out of the mud, and the next morning Professor Taylor drove them all to church. There were two Wallace girls beside the boy, the parents and one grandmother, and the four Taylors, but they all got in somehow. The church was a small frame structure, once painted white, with a tilted, wind-broken spire, half-hidden in a grove of pines. They arrived early so the children could attend Sunday school. Professor Taylor was made honorary superintendent and led the prayers.

The congregation came, some walking the dusty roads, some in wagons and by muleback. The expensive cars owned by others had been left behind for want of drivers. The women sat on the grass and wiped their dusty feet and put on their stockings and shoes. Soon the church was crammed to overflowing. A long black preacher in a frock-tail coat mounted the pulpit. He began his favorite text—“Dry Bones.” His rich, carrying voice was of an indescribable range. He took them with a shuddering whisper down into the deep dark valley of doom, then lifted them with a soaring crescendo to the bright gay streets of heaven, paved in gold.

“Is y’all got yo’ wings?”

“We’s all got our wings?” the congregation chanted the responses, which were as inflexible as Catholic liturgies.

“Ah say, is y’all got yo’ wings?”

“We say, we’s all got our wings.” Lulled into a deep, passionate mourning happiness.

“DRY BONES IN THE VALLEY!” he thundered suddenly, the bull roar of his voice shocking them insensibly.

A woman rose, lifting her arms, and screamed in utter terror. Her companions sought to restrain her. But she struggled violently, panting between screams.

“De sinnahs’ll burn in brimstone. An’ de reek of burnin’ meat’ll rise to warn dose who dilly wid dere neighbors’ wives in de cotton fields…

“YOU HEAR ME?”

“We hear you, reb-um!”

“Ah say, does you hear me?”

“Oh, we hear…we hear…”

He threw back his head and let forth his mighty roar:

“DRY BONES IN THE VALLEY!”

All over the church men and women screamed as if panic had been let loose in their midst. They shouted and moaned and cried and fought. Mrs. Taylor caught her children by the hands and ran.

Women were standing on the pews, eyes glazed, tearing the riotous colored clothes from their strong dark bodies, shouting to their God.

“Ah is pure. Look on me, God. Ah is pure.”

Raising strong black arms to heaven, full black breasts lifting, buxom black bodies tautening, their shocking black buttocks bare as at birth.

“Mah soul is white as snow!”

Men were turning somersaults in the aisle, dancing the buck and jig, bobbing to the strains of an unheard banjo playing somewhere deep inside their opened souls.

Mrs. Taylor got the children out. Her hat was gone, her dress torn. “Whew!” she exclaimed, then laughed with relief.

The children were in a state of uncontrollable excitement. They wanted to go back and dance and yell with the others. But she made them sit quietly in the car. It was pleasant in the shade. About them, in the grove, the placid mules were tied to the scarred trees. The little church sat on wooden piers. From inside came the shouting and the screaming and the dancing and the moaning. Over and above was the stentorian roar:

“DRY BONES IN THE VALLEY!”

They sat and watched the little church rock on the wooden piers. They’d never been so excited.

The following week was spent in Mound Bayou, visiting Professor Moseley, principal of the high school. Mound Bayou was the only city in the country inhabited exclusively by Negroes. All of the public officers as well as the businessmen and the proprietor of the cotton gin were Negroes. Only the express agent was white, and he lived in another city. There seemed an unwritten understanding to let the Negroes have this city, of which the governor was as proud as if h? had founded it.

“Miss’ippi is the only state in the Union where Negras have their own city,” he was wont to boast.

Professor Moseley owned a large brick house. The children were awed by so much splendor. Mrs. Taylor reminded them of the pleasant little house in Missouri where they were born. But they could not recall it.

One afternoon they were coming from the post office. “Is where we were born as large as this city, Mama?” William asked, scuffing his shoes on the strange pavement.

“Oh, much, much larger,” his mother replied, a little startled by the question.

“Dunce!” his brother sneered.

“What do you know about it?” William said. “You weren’t even walking when we were there.”

“I was too walking,” Charles said angrily. “And I remember it better’n you do.”

They were walking on each side of their mother. “Children, it isn’t nice to shout.”

“He’s a liar,” William said. “He’s always telling some kind of lie.”

Charles reached around his mother and hit William.

“Children!” she cried. “You behave this instant.”

“Liar!” William shouted.

“Liar back!” Charles yelled, striking William in the face.

“Children!” their mother screamed.

William grappled with his brother. Before she could stop them they were fighting savagely in the dusty street. Several men ran out of a grocery store and pried them apart.

Seeing them fighting on this strange village street, their mother was profoundly shocked. It struck her suddenly that this was the first time they’d stayed outside the campus overnight in five years. Away from the home perspective, amid these strangers and strange scenes, she saw how they’d grown.

“These boys is wild, lady,” said one of the men who was holding them apart.

They were big, strapping boys of nine and ten, with their sheared skulls looking as savage as Indian bucks. The animal in them was shockingly apparent; fearful was the violence she had suddenly seen. Their father had to come and take them home.

Mrs. Taylor was panicky. What had she done to her children? “God in Heaven, if You’ll just give me strength I’ll get them out of this savage country,” she prayed. On their return to the college she was overcome with haste. She wrote a score of letters, applying for a post in some boarding school. It was already the middle of August. Finally she received an offer from a tiny church school in South Carolina. She accepted it.

Tom was entering a Negro university in Atlanta that fall. He came home for a week before school opened. But his mother was too filled with her own plans to give him much attention. The children had grown very vague toward their older brother. They could hardly realize the kinship. He was a tall, gangling youth, head and shoulders over either of his parents. Mrs. Taylor said he’d taken after her father, who was over six feet. But his manner was very strange. His speech was different, and his complexion was sallow and pimpled. The darkly bronzed children were both proud and ashamed of him, but with no real blood affection. His short stay left scarcely an impression.