The Street

by Ann Petry

  The girl looked to be about nineteen or twenty. She was very thin. Her black hair, thick with grease, gleamed in the dim light. There was an artificial white rose stuck in the center of the pompadour that mounted high above her small, dark face.

  Lutie recognized her. It was Mary, one of the little girls who lived with Mrs. Hedges. The sailor gave Lutie a quick, appraising look and then turned back to the girl, blotting her out. The girl’s thin arms went back around his neck.

  ‘Mary,’ Lutie said, and stopped right behind the sailor.

  The girl’s face appeared over the top of the sailor’s shoulder.

  ‘Hello,’ she said sullenly.

  ‘It’s so cold out here,’ Lutie said. ‘Why don’t you go inside?’

  ‘Mis’ Hedges won’t let him come in no more,’ Mary said. ‘He’s spent all his money. And she says she ain’t in business for her health.’

  ‘Can’t you talk to him somewhere else? Isn’t there a friend’s house you could go to?’

  ‘No, ma’am. Besides, it ain’t no use, anyway. He’s got to go back to his ship tonight.’

  Lutie climbed the rest of the stairs fuming against Mrs. Hedges. The sailor would return to his ship carrying with him the memory of this dark narrow hallway and Mrs. Hedges and the thin resigned little girl. The street was full of young thin girls like this one with a note of resignation in their voices, with faces that contained no hope, no life. She shivered. She couldn’t let Bub grow up in a place like this.

  She put her key in the door quietly, trying to avoid the loud click of the lock being drawn back. She pushed the door open, mentally visualizing the trip across the living room to her bedroom. Once inside her room, she would close the door and put the light on and Bub wouldn’t wake up. Then she saw that the lamp in the living room was lit and she shut the door noisily. He should have been asleep at least two hours ago, she thought, and walked toward the studio couch, her heels clicking on the congoleum rug.

  Bub sat up and rubbed his eyes. For a moment she saw something frightened and fearful in his expression, but it disappeared when he looked at her.

  ‘How come you’re not in bed?’ she demanded.

  ‘I fell asleep.’

  ‘With your clothes on?’ she said, and then added: ‘With the light on, too? You must be trying to make the bill bigger—’ and she stopped abruptly. She was always talking to him about money. It wasn’t good. He would be thinking about nothing else pretty soon. ‘How was the movie?’ she asked.

  ‘It was swell,’ he said eagerly. ‘There was one guy who caught gangsters—’

  ‘Skip it,’ she interrupted. ‘You get in bed in a hurry, Mister. I still don’t know what you’re doing up—’ Her eyes fell on the ash tray on the blue-glass coffee table. It was filled with cigarette butts. That’s funny. She had emptied all the trays when she washed the dinner dishes. She knew that she had. She looked closer at the cigarette ends. They were moist. Whoever had smoked them had held them, not between their lips, but far inside the mouth so that the paper got wet and the tobacco inside had stained and discolored it. She turned toward Bub.

  ‘Supe was up.’ Bub’s eyes had followed hers. ‘We played cards.’

  ‘You mean he was in here?’ she said sharply. And thought, Of course, dope, he didn’t stand outside and throw his cigarette butts into the ash tray through a closed door.

  ‘We played cards,’ Bub said again.

  ‘Let’s get this straight once and for all.’ She put her hands on his shoulders. ‘When I’m not home, you’re not to let anyone in here. Anyone. Understand?’

  He nodded. ‘Does that mean Supe, too?’

  ‘Of course. Now you get in bed fast so you can get to school on time.’

  While Bub undressed, she took the cover off the studio couch, smoothed the thin blanket and the sheets, pulled a pillowslip over one of the cushions. He seemed to be taking an awfully long time in the bathroom. ‘Hey,’ she said finally. ‘Step on it. You can’t get to heaven that way.’

  She heard him giggle and smiled at the sound. Then her face sobered. She looked around the living room. One of these days he was going to have a real bedroom to himself instead of this shabby, sunless room. The plaid pattern of the blue congoleum rug was wearing off in front of the studio couch. It was scuffed down to the paper base at the door that led to the small hall. Everything in the room was worn and old—the lumpy studio couch, the overstuffed chair, the card table that served as desk, the bookcase filled with second-hand textbooks and old magazines. The blue-glass top on the coffee table was scratched and chipped. The small radio was scarred with cigarette burns. The first thing she would do would be to move and then she would get some decent furniture.

  Bub got into bed, pulled the covers up under his chin. ‘Good night, Mom,’ he said.

  He was almost asleep when she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. She turned the light on in her bedroom, came back and switched the light off in the living room.

  ‘Sleep tight!’ she said. His only reply was a drowsy murmur—half laugh, half sigh.

  She undressed, thinking of the Super sitting in the living room, of the time when she had come to look at the apartment and he had stood there in that room where Bub was now sleeping and how he had held the flashlight so that the beam of light from it was down at his feet. Now he had been back in there—sitting down, playing cards with Bub—making himself at home.

  What had he talked to Bub about? The thought of his being friendly with Bub was frightening. Yet what could she do about it other than tell Bub not to let him into the apartment again? There was no telling what went on in the mind of a man like that—a man who had lived in basements and cellars, a man who had forever to stay within hailing distance of whatever building he was responsible for.

  The last thing she thought before she finally went to sleep was that the Super was something less than human. He had been chained to buildings until he was like an animal.

  She dreamed about him and woke up terrified, not certain that it was a dream and heard the wind sighing in the airshaft. And went back to sleep and dreamed about him again.

  He and the dog had become one. He was still tall, gaunt, silent. The same man, but with the dog’s wolfish mouth and the dog’s teeth—white, sharp, pointed, in the redness of his mouth. His throat worked like the dog’s throat. He made a whining noise deep inside it. He panted and strained to get free and run through the block, but the building was chained to his shoulders like an enormous doll’s house made of brick. She could see the people moving around inside the building, drearily climbing the tiny stairs, sidling through the narrow halls. Mrs. Hedges sat on the first floor smiling at a cage full of young girls.

  The building was so heavy he could hardly walk with it oil his shoulders. It was a painful, slow, horrible crawl of a walk—hesitant, slowing down, now stopping completely and then starting again. He fawned on the people in the street, dragged himself close to them, stood in front of them, pointing to the building and to the chains. ‘Unloose me! Unloose me!’ he begged. His voice was cracked and hollow.

  Min walked beside him repeating the same words. ‘Unloose him! Unloose him!’ and straining to reach up toward the lock that held the chains.

  He thought she, Lutie, had the key. And he followed her through the street, whining in his throat, nuzzling in back of her with his sharp, pointed dog’s face. She tried to walk faster and faster, but the shambling, slow, painful sound of his footsteps was always just behind her, the sound of his whining stayed close to her like someone talking in her ear.

  She looked down at her hand and the key to the padlock that held the chains was there. She stopped, and there was a whole chorus of clamoring voices: ‘Shame! Shame! She won’t unloose him and she’s got the key!’

  Mrs. Hedges’ window was suddenly in front of her. Mrs. Hedges nodded, ‘If I was you, dearie, I’d unloose him. It’s so easy, dearie. It’s so easy, dearie. Easy—easy—easy—’

  She reached out her hand
toward the padlock and the long white fangs closed on her hand. Her hand and part of her arm were swallowed up inside his wolfish mouth. She watched in horror as more and more of her arm disappeared until there was only the shoulder left and then his jaws closed and she felt the sharp teeth sink in and in through her shoulder. The arm was gone and blood poured out.

  She screamed and screamed and windows opened and the people poured out of the buildings—thousands of them, millions of them. She saw that they had turned to rats. The street was so full of them that she could hardly walk. They swarmed around her, jumping up and down. Each one had a building chained to its back, and they were all crying, ‘Unloose me! Unloose me!’

  She woke up and got out of bed. She couldn’t shake loose the terror of the dream. She felt of her arm. It was still there and whole. Her mouth was wide open as though she had been screaming. It felt dry inside. She must have dreamed she was screaming, for Bub was still asleep—apparently she had made no sound. Yet she was so filled with fright from the nightmare memory of the dream that she stood motionless by the bed, unable to move for a long moment.

  The air was cold. Finally she picked up the flannel robe at the foot of the bed and pulled it on. She sat down on the bed and tucked her feet under her, then carefully pulled the robe down over her feet, afraid to go back to sleep for fear of a recurrence of the dream.

  The room was dark. Where the airshaft broke the wall there was a lighter quality to the darkness—a suggestion of dark blue space. Even in the dark like this her knowledge of the position of each piece of furniture made her aware of the smallness of the room. If she should get up quickly, she knew she would bump against the small chest and moving past it she might collide with the bureau.

  Huddled there on the bed, her mind still clouded with the memory of the dream, her body chilled from the cold, she thought of the room, not with hatred, not with contempt, but with dread. In the darkness it seemed to close in on her until it became the sum total of all the things she was afraid of and she drew back nearer the wall because the room grew smaller and the pieces of furniture larger until she felt as though she were suffocating.

  Suppose she got used to it, took it for granted, became resigned to it and all the things it represented. The thought set her to murmuring aloud, ‘I mustn’t get used to it. Not ever. I’ve got to keep on fighting to get away from here.’

  All the responsibility for Bub was hers. It was up to her to keep him safe, to get him out of here so he would have a chance to grow up fine and strong. Because this street and the other streets just like it would, if he stayed in them long enough, do something terrible to him. Sooner or later they would do something equally as terrible to her. And as she sat there in the dark, she began to think about the things that she had seen on such streets as this one she lived in.

  There was the afternoon last spring when she had got off the subway on Lenox Avenue. It was late afternoon. The spring sunlight was sharp and clear. The street was full of people taking advantage of the soft warm air after a winter of being shut away from the sun. They had peeled off their winter coats and sweaters and mufflers.

  Kids on roller skates and kids precariously perched on home-made scooters whizzed unexpectedly through the groups of people clustered on the sidewalk. The sun was warm. It beamed on the boys and girls walking past arm in arm. It made their faces very soft and young and relaxed.

  She had walked along slowly, thinking that the sun transformed everything it shone on. So that the people standing talking in front of the buildings, the pushcart men in the side streets, the peanut vendor, the sweet potato man, all had an unexpected graciousness in their faces and their postures. Even the drab brick of the buildings was altered to a deep rosy pinkness.

  Thus she had come on the crowd suddenly, quite unaware that it was a crowd. She had walked past some of the people before she sensed some common impulse that had made this mass of people stand motionless and withdrawn in the middle of the block. She stopped, too. And she became sharply aware of a somber silence, a curious stillness that was all around her. She edged her way to the front of the crowd, squeezing past people, forcing her way toward whatever it was that held them in this strangely arrested silence.

  There was a cleared space near the buildings and a handful of policemen and cameramen and reporters with pink cards stuck in their hatbands were standing in it looking down at something. She got as close to the cleared space as she could—so close that she was almost touching the policeman in front of her.

  And she saw what they were looking at. Lying flat on the sidewalk was a man—thin, shabby, tall from the amount of sidewalk that his body occupied. There was blood on the sidewalk, and she saw that it was coming from somewhere under him. Part of his body and his face were covered with what looked to be a piece of white canvas.

  But the thing she had never been able to forget were his shoes. Only the uppers were intact. They had once been black, but they were now a dark dull gray from long wear. The soles were worn out. They were mere flaps attached to the uppers. She could see the layers of wear. The first outer layer of leather was left near the edges, and then the great gaping holes in the center where the leather had worn out entirely, so that for weeks he must have walked practically barefooted on the pavement.

  She had stared at the shoes, trying to figure out what it must have been like to walk barefooted on the city’s concrete sidewalks. She wondered if he ever went downtown, and if he did, what did he think about when he passed store windows filled with sleek furs and fabulous food and clothing made of materials so fine you could tell by looking at them they would feel like sea foam under your hand?

  How did he feel when the great long cars snorted past him as he waited for the lights to change or when he looked into a taxi and saw a delicate, soft, beautiful woman lifting her face toward an opulently dressed man? The woman’s hair would gleam and shine, her mouth would be knowingly shaped with lip rouge. And the concrete would have been rough under this man’s feet.

  The people standing in back of her weren’t moving. They weren’t talking. They were simply standing there looking. She watched a cop touch one of the man’s broken, grayish shoes with his foot. And she got a sick feeling because the cop’s shoes were glossy with polish and the warm spring sunlight glinted on them.

  One of the photographers and a newspaperman elbowed through the crowd. They had a thin, dark young girl by the arm. They walked her over to a man in a gray business suit. ‘She thinks it’s her brother,’ the reporter said.

  The man stared at the girl. ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘He went out to get bread and he ain’t home yet.’

  ‘Look like his clothes?’ He nodded toward the figure on the sidewalk.

  ‘Yes.’

  One of the cops reached down and rolled the canvas back from the man’s face.

  Lutie didn’t look at the man’s face. Instead, she looked at the girl and she saw something—some emotion that she couldn’t name—flicker in the girl’s face. It was as though for a fraction of a second something—hate or sorrow or surprise—had moved inside her and been reflected on her face. As quickly as it came, it was gone and it was replaced by a look of resignation, of complete acceptance. It was an expression that said the girl hoped for no more than this from life because other things that had happened to her had paved the way so that she had lost the ability to protest against anything—even death suddenly like this in the spring.

  ‘I always thought it’d happen,’ she said in a flat voice.

  Why doesn’t she scream? Lutie had thought angrily. Why does she stand there looking like that? Why doesn’t she find out how it happened and yell her head off and hit out at people? The longer she looked at that still, resigned expression on the girl’s face, the angrier she became.

  Finally she had pushed her way to the back of the crowd. ‘What happened to him?’ she asked in a hard voice.

  A woman with a bundle of newspapers under her arm answered her. She shifted
the papers from one arm to the other. ‘White man in the baker shop killed him with a bread knife.’

  There was a silence, and then another voice added: ‘He had the bread knife in him and he walked to the corner. The cops brought him back here and he died there where he’s layin’ now.’

  ‘White man in the store claims he tried to hold him up.’

  ‘If that bastard white man puts one foot out here, we’ll kill him. Cops or no cops.’

  She went home remembering, not the threat of violence in that silent, waiting crowd, but instead the man’s ragged soleless shoes and the resigned look on the girl’s face. She had never been able to forget either of them. The boy was so thin—painfully thin—and she kept thinking about his walking through the city barefooted. Both he and his sister were so young.

  The next day’s papers said that a ‘burly Negro’ had failed in his effort to hold up a bakery shop, for the proprietor had surprised him by resisting and stabbed him with a bread knife. She held the paper in her hand for a long time, trying to follow the reasoning by which that thin ragged boy had become in the eyes of a reporter a ‘burly Negro.’ And she decided that it all depended on where you sat how these things looked. If you looked at them from inside the framework of a fat weekly salary, and you thought of colored people as naturally criminal, then you didn’t really see what any Negro looked like. You couldn’t, because the Negro was never an individual. He was a threat, or an animal, or a curse, or a blight, or a joke.

  It was like the Chandlers and their friends in Connecticut, who looked at her and didn’t see her, but saw instead a wench with no morals who would be easy to come by. The reporter saw a dead Negro who had attempted to hold up a store, and so he couldn’t really see what the man lying on the sidewalk looked like. He couldn’t see the ragged shoes, the thin, starved body. He saw, instead, the picture he already had in his mind: a huge, brawny, blustering, ignorant, criminally disposed black man who had run amok with a knife on a spring afternoon in Harlem and who had in turn been knifed.