The Third Generation Read Free

could have no more than three-fourths white blood at best, and that was highly improbable, Mrs. Taylor had decided. She herself was only one thirty-second part Negro. And in her veins flowed some of the most aristocratic white blood in all the South. Mrs. Taylor thought of racial strains in terms of blood, and of this blood as flowing in her veins.
    Mrs. Taylor had not always been so preoccupied with racial strains. Nor had her sense of being a superior person evoked such bitter disparagement. At first it had been protective, a shield for her wounded pride and outraged sensitivity. Quite often it had been constructive, enabling her to set her sights higher than most Negroes would have dared. It extended the limitations of her ambitions. And it also defended her from despondency and defeat. Whenever she felt the urge to give up, she reminded herself of her parents’ magnificent accomplishment, of how they had come out of slavery and made a home for themselves, and after great hardship had prospered and educated all seven of their children. She had inherited their determination and stamina and their credo—to want something better, to become educated, to be somebody worthwhile. And in remembering what they had done, she always remembered how they looked.
    Her father had been a tall, spare man with light brown hair and a long silky beard. His complexion was as fair as any white person’s. Her mother, though slightly darker, had the coarse black hair and high cheekbones of an Indian. Both would have been accepted as white in a northern state. But it had never occurred to them to leave the South.
    They had three small children when they were freed. Their one asset with which to face a new, strange life had been their ability to read and write. Both had been “body slaves” and after the Civil War their master had tried to persuade them to remain on the plantation.
    “You have never known want, and if you remain with me, you never will,” he had promised them.
    Dr. Jessie Manning was descended from the English peerage, and had once served in the United States Senate. According to his own lights he had tried to be a kind and just master. Both Charles and Lin loved him. But they had refused to stay. Even though the very thought of freedom had terrified them, they had wanted to be free. Deep inside them had been some compelling urge to flee from the shadow of slavery, to rear their children in the sunlight, to provide them with something better, with education and opportunity. They had heard these ideas propounded by their master; they had listened to the reverence in his voice; they had believed.
    For two years they lived in a floorless, one-room cabin with a lean-to on an acre of land they had cleared. Charles had learned brick masonry and did odd jobs in the neighborhood while Lin took in washing and worked as a wet nurse.
    But the proximity of the old plantation had stifled their sense of freedom. They moved to a railroad town in Georgia and took the family name of Manning. For a decade Charles worked as a brick mason. Another son and three daughters were born to them there. Mrs. Taylor’s Christian name was Lillian, and she was second from the youngest.
    Although she was then a little girl, not more than five, Lillian could remember the crisis that had arisen when her father went broke. He had been ill for a long time and one day he had said to Lin, “Hon, we got to sell the house.”
    They had moved to Atlanta and he had worked for a time as a Pullman porter before finally having to quit. For three years he had been ill with tuberculosis, and for a year he had been confined to his bed. It had fallen Lillian’s lot to nurse him. All of the older children had worked desperately to make ends meet. Lillian never forgot the great piles of laundry her mother washed each day. But they had never given up.
    When her father recovered, the family returned to the town in South Carolina where the parents had grown up as slaves. Once