The Third Generation Read Free Page B

conceivable. She certainly had a great percentage of white blood, she told herself. And it was quite reasonable it should be the blood of the type of persons who had been friends of the aristocratic Dr. Manning.
    She created the fiction of being only one thirty-second part Negro deliberately. It symbolized her contempt and disdain for all the Negroes she felt had tried to hurt her. It was her final rejection of all the people who would not recognize her innate superiority. Because regardless of how much they hated her, or tried to hurt and belittle her, none of them could possibly be her superior, and but a very, very few her equal, because she possessed the very maximum of white blood a Negro can possess and remain a Negro.
    At the beginning it was a simple mechanism to bolster her morale. But after all the inroads of hurt, discouragement and despondency, it slowly attained the strength of fact. For a time it became the only fact she possessed. She thought of it as a legacy, and she wanted to pass this legacy on to her children. She wanted to impress on them that in their veins flowed the blood of aristocrats.
    For a moment her attention was drawn back to the children. They were pulling at the rosebushes. But she checked the impulse to scold them. She should be thankful, she told herself, that they had not begun that awful shrieking and hammering and slaughtering of palefaces.
    When she looked up the street again, Mrs. Barnes’ carriage had passed from sight. She felt strangely relieved. There were various other professional and business people who lived on the street, but none disturbed her as did the Barneses. Although most of them earned more money than the professors, the professors had the greater prestige.
    Negroes put a great value on education, she meditated. They thought of it as both the source and result of all good things. And she, too, believed in its efficacy. That had been the reason she had married Professor Taylor.
    She recalled how dazzled she’d first been by the dashing young professor from the state college who had courted her. How impressed she’d been by his education. All the fuss and bother; all the fine talk of his dreams and ambition. She’d been thrilled by the thought of the wonderful things they could accomplish together. They would complement each other like no other two people who had ever lived.
    She had come home to live that spring, following her father’s death. For the previous two years she had been teaching music at the seminary. She had loved her father dearly, and for a time had been disconsolate, a lonely lady immersed in sorrow. It had given her a rare beauty, vivid but withdrawn, as if she were lost in reverie.
    Most of the young men thereabouts had felt uncomfortable in her presence. At that time her eyes were hazel in color, with an attractive tilt at the outer edges; but they had been level and challenging. She had seldom worn the brilliant colors that had been fashionable at the time. Her preference had been for light grays and blues; and her favorite dresses had been silk jerseys with lace collars and white, frilly dickies. She had loved fine lace with a rare passion. Her only jewelry had been a string of pearls her brother Tom had given her on her eighteenth birthday. At times she was painfully intense. Music had seemed to be her only passion.
    The young men had thought her cold and unapproachable. Her restraint had dampened their ardor. No one but her mother had known how sensitive and deeply emotional she was inside. Outwardly, she had seemed so conscious of her worth, her beauty and intelligence, that she had repelled most people. She could give little of herself, and only to one she considered an inferior, only in the manner of one bestowing a grace. But she would have been horrified had she known this about herself.
    Professor Taylor had come first to call on her younger sister. But he soon became infatuated with the strange, distant, beautiful girl. He had resolved