The Third Generation by Chester B. Himes

fire of green hickory burning underneath. It required a month before they were cured to his satisfaction. He brought them in and plumped them on the kitchen table. There was a dark, smoky cast to the meat.
    “Look at these, honey,” he called proudly to his wife.
    The children came running from their classroom, their mother following, and they stood about and admired the meat to his satisfaction.
    “Just hang em in the storehouse and they’ll keep all year,” he said.
    But that afternoon, when Lizzie sliced some ham for dinner, it was filled with small white worms.
    Professor Taylor was chagrined. “It must have been the eggs,” he said. “I couldn’t remember whether Pa put eggs in his brine or not.”
    The children were sick with disappointment. But at the next killing their father brought them some chitterlings to make up for it. Mrs. Taylor took one look at the tin bucket of chitterlings and carried them far out into the field and buried them.
    “How’d Lizzie cook the chiddlings, honey?” Professor Taylor greeted her when he came in from work that evening.
    “She didn’t cook them,” his wife replied. Her mouth pursed in a grim, straight line. “I’ve stood enough. I’m not going to allow you to bring up the children like savages, teaching them to eat all kinds of filth.”
    “There’s nothing more filthy than a chicken,” he countered.
    “But we don’t eat the chicken’s craw.”
    “We eat the giblets.”
    “Well, I’m not going to let them eat the dirty intestines of a hog.”
    “I’ll just cook them myself,” he said, “and you can take the children and go away until I’ve finished eating them.”
    “I’ll not have them cooked in my house, stinking up everything,” she said.
    “And who’s going to stop me?” he demanded.
    “I am, because I’ve buried them,” she informed him.
    He thrust his face forward. “You buried my chiddlings!”
    She turned and walked away from him.
    But the very next day he brought home another lard tin full and cleaned and cooked them himself. She took the children visiting. All that night he was up with acute indigestion, and she derived a perverted pleasure from his suffering.
    “Your stomach’s going to kill you yet,” his wife said acidly the next day.
    “It’ll be my stomach and not my bile,” he retorted bitterly.
    All of them welcomed winter’s sudden ending. Professor Taylor looked forward to the summer’s burning heat that charred him to a cinder. And Mrs. Taylor longed to be rid of the drafty fires and winter sniffles. But none were per-pared for the deluge that ushered in the spring.
    It was a lush, semitropical country, bordering on the delta land. Mud dominated the Mississippi spring. Creeks and ravines swelled beneath torrential downpours and bridges were washed out and the Mississippi River rose across the delta, flooding farms and cities and killing men and livestock. The roads became inaccessible except for wagons drawn by teams of oxen. Everything for miles around became bogged down in a relentless mire. Old men who lived in houses along the river bank could count off fifty years by the high-water marks on their living room walls, like grains in a board of wood. Year after year it was the same. The natives stayed on as if chained inexorably to their fate, endured the same property damage, the loss of life, the drowned livestock, planted corn and cotton in the rich silt left by the marauding flood, and bore their children who in turn grew up in the same ignorance and died with the same stubbornness, condemning their offspring to the same fate. It was then that Mrs. Taylor became completely convinced that the people of Mississippi, in addition to everything else, were stone-raving crazy. More than ever she felt the urge to escape.
    Their own roof leaked first into one bedroom and, when that was fixed, into another. The yard stayed muddy and the children tracked the mud across the floors and rugs. There was no escape from the mud.