The Street

by Ann Petry

  Staring at him with her hard, unwinking gaze, she could see the whole detail of a prosperous, efficient enterprise. She would get several more girls. They would be like Mary—girls that had been married and whose men had deserted them. The street was full of girls like that.

  ‘They’s one or two things you and me got to settle before Mary comes back,’ she said.

  ‘Yes’m?’ His face had turned sullen.

  ‘How much can you afford to pay when you comes here to see Mary?’

  ‘Huh?’ he asked, startled.

  ‘Mary and me don’t live here on air,’ she said coldly. ‘If’n you want to sleep with her, it’s going to cost you.’

  That was how it started. As simply and as easily as that. She explained her plan to Junto, so that he would speak to the people at the precinct and they wouldn’t bother her.

  ‘But this ain’t for white men,’ she warned. ‘You can have them in them Sugar Hill joints you run. But they can’t come here.’

  He laughed out loud, something he rarely did. ‘Mrs. Hedges, I believe you’re prejudiced. I didn’t know you were that human.’

  ‘I ain’t prejudiced,’ she said firmly. ‘I just ain’t got no use for white folks. I don’t want ’em anywhere near me. I don’t even wanta have to look at ’em. I put up with you because you don’t ever stop to think whether folks are white or black and you don’t really care. That sort of takes you out of the white folks class.’

  ‘You’re a wonderful woman, Mrs. Hedges,’ he said softly. ‘A wonderful woman.’

  Yes. She and Mr. Junto had gone a long way. A long, long way. Sometimes she had surprised him and surprised herself at the things she had suggested to him. It came from looking at the street all day. There were so many people passing by, so many people with burdens too heavy for them, young ones who were lost, old ones who had given up all hope, middle-aged ones broken and lost like the young ones, and she learned a lot just from looking at them.

  She told Junto people had to dance and drink and make love in order to forget their troubles and that bars and dance halls and whorehouses were the best possible investments. Slowly and cautiously Mr. Junto had become the owner of all three, though he still controlled quite a bit of real estate.

  It amused her to watch the brawling, teeming, lusty life that roared past her window. She knew so much about this particular block that she came to regard it as slightly different from any other place. When she referred to it as ‘the street,’ her lips seemed to linger over the words as though her mind paused at the sound to write capital letters and then enclosed the words in quotation marks—thus setting it off and separating it from any other street in the city, giving it an identity, unmistakable and apart.

  Looking out of the window was good for her business, too. There were always lonesome, sad-looking girls just up from the South, or little girls who were tired of going to high school, and who had seen too many movies and didn’t have the money to buy all the things they wanted.

  She could pick them out easily as they walked past. They wore bright-colored, short-skirted dresses and gold hoop earrings in their ears. Their mouths were a brilliant scarlet against the brown of their faces. They wobbled a little on the exaggerated high-heeled shoes they wore. They wore their hair combed in high, slick pompadours.

  And there were the other little girls who were only slightly older who had been married and woke up one morning to discover that their husbands had moved out. With no warning. Suddenly. The shock of it stayed on their faces.

  ‘Dearie,’ she would say, and her eyes somehow always lingered on the hair piled high above their small, pointed faces, ‘I been seein’ you go by. And I was wonderin’ if you wouldn’t like to earn a little extra money sometime.’

  She and Mr. Junto had made plenty of money. Only none of it had made her hair grow back. None of it had erased those awful, livid scars on her body.

  Off and on during the years he had made timid, tentative gestures toward transforming their relationship into something more personal—gestures which she had steadfastly ignored. For she never intended to reveal the extent of her disfigurement to anyone—least of all to Junto who knew her so well.

  Apparently he still wasn’t discouraged, because just the other night when he came to see her he brought a wig with him. He tossed it in her lap. The hair was black, long, silky. It was soft under her fingers, curling and clinging and attaching itself to her hands almost as though it were alive. It was the kind of hair that a man’s hands would instinctively want to touch. She pushed it away violently, thinking how the hard, black flesh of her face, the forward thrust of her jaws, the scars on her neck, would look under that silken, curling hair.

  ‘Take it away. I don’t want it.’

  ‘But—’ He started to protest.

  ‘There’s some things that are personal’—she touched the coarse red bandanna with her hand and glared at him fiercely.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He picked the wig up and put it back in the box it had been wrapped in. ‘I thought you’d like to have it.’ He groped for words. ‘We’ve been friends a long time, Mrs. Hedges. And I guess I thought that between friends anything would be understood. If I did any harm bringing this here, I did it with good intentions. But I understand why you don’t want it. I understand better than you think.’

  That same night was the only time she was ever really mean to Mary. She couldn’t get the memory of that soft, fine, clinging hair out of her mind. She kept remembering how Junto said he understood why she didn’t want it. And Mary’s hair was combed high over her small, pointed face. It was heavy with grease from the hairdresser’s. There was a white rose in the center of her pompadour—the rose seemed to nestle there.

  ‘Mrs. Hedges, Tige’s got to go back to his ship tonight,’ Mary had said.

  She had been staring out at the street, thinking about the wig. ‘Who’s Tige, dearie?’ she asked absently.

  ‘The sailor boy who was here last night.’

  She remembered him then. He was so young that he swaggered when he walked past her window in his tight-fitting, dark blue sailor pants. So young that his eyes were alive with laughter; his sailor’s hat was perched so far back on his head and at such a precarious angle, it looked as though any sudden movement would pitch it off. His hands were thrust deep into the pockets of his short jacket and the bulky wool of the jacket couldn’t conceal how flat and lean his waist was and how it tapered up to his wide shoulders in a taut, slanting line. Very, very young.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  Mary patted a stray hair in place, and her eyes had followed the movement of Mary’s hand and stayed there on the high curve of the pompadour, on the white rose that seemed to nest in the thickness of the hair.

  ‘He spent all his money last night,’ Mary went on. ‘And I want to know can he come in again tonight? He says he’ll mail the money back to you.’ She hesitated, and added shyly, ‘I like him.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she had said sourly. ‘You think I’m in business for my health?’ She couldn’t seem to stop looking at the girl’s hair. ‘You can take him out in the park. Cold night like this will cool you both off.’

  She turned her head away from the sight of Mary’s face. All the life had gone out of it, leaving it suddenly old, drawn, flat. There were deep lines around the mouth. The little fool must be in love with him, she thought.

  The boy came out of the house about an hour later. He was dragging his feet. He looked cold, miserable. They been standing up there in that hall, she thought. He had to go back to his ship tonight. Go back to fighting the white folks’ war for them.

  ‘Sailor!’ she said sharply, just as he reached her window.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Where you and Mary been?’

  ‘We been standing in the hall talking. Where you think we been?’

  ‘How much more time you got?’

  ‘About two hours.’

  ‘Listen, dearie, you go ring the bell and
tell Mary I said it was all right.’

  He moved so quickly she had to yell to catch him before he opened the street door.

  ‘Listen, sailor, you send that money back prompt on the first of the month.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Yes, indeed, ma’am.’ He paused in the doorway to execute a dance step. And then he bowed to her, taking his flat sailor’s hat off in a gesture that made her think again, He’s so young—so crazy young.

  Her thoughts returned to Lutie Johnson. With that thick, soft hair, Lutie offered great possibilities for making money. Mr. Junto would be willing to pay very high for her. Very, very high, because when he got tired of her himself he could put her in one of those places he ran on Sugar Hill. With hair like that—her face twitched, and she got up from the kitchen table and went into the living room where she sat down by the window.

  The window was half open and the air blowing in was cold. The street was silent, empty. As she looked, the wind lifted scraps of paper, bits of rubbish, and set them to swirling along the curb as though an invisible hand with a broom had reached down into the street and was sweeping the paper along before it.

  The wind puffed the white nightgown out around her feet. She moved a little closer to the window. She had never felt really cool since the time she was in the fire.

  11

  DESPITE the lateness of the hour, groups of men were still standing in front of the Junto Bar and Grill, for the brilliant light streaming from its windows formed a barrier against the cold and the darkness in the rest of the street. Whenever the doors opened and closed, the light on the sidewalk, was intensified. And because the men moved slightly, laughing and talking a little louder with each sudden increase in light, they had the appearance of moths fluttering about a gigantic candle flame.

  Boots Smith, who had parked his car at the corner, watched the men without really seeing them. Something must have scared the living daylights out of Old Man Junto to make him send for him at this hour, he thought. He hated to be taken by surprise, and he was still trying to figure out what it was that had upset Junto.

  Finally he shrugged his shoulders, started out of the car, and then paused with his hand on the door. It could be only one thing. Somewhere along the line there had been a leak about how he had stayed out of the army. His hand left the door. Okay, he thought. He wasn’t going to play soldier now any more than he was that day he got the notice to report to his draft board for a physical examination. He took the notice to Junto early in the afternoon and he had been so angered by it that he had talked fluently, easily, quickly—something he rarely did.

  ‘Fix this thing, Junto.’ He had slapped the postcard down on the table in front of Junto.

  ‘What is it?’ Junto peered at it, his turtle neck completely disappearing between his shoulders.

  ‘Notice to report for a physical. First step on the way to the army.’

  ‘You don’t want to fight?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m asking you.’

  He had pulled a chair out and sat down across from Junto. ‘Listen, Junto,’ he said. ‘They can wave flags. They can tell me the Germans cut off baby’s behinds and rape women and turn black men into slaves. They can tell me any damn thing. None of it means nothing.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because, no matter how scared they are of Germans, they’re still more scared of me. I’m black, see? And they hate Germans, but they hate me worse. If that wasn’t so they wouldn’t have a separate army for black men. That’s one for the book. Sending a black army to Europe to fight Germans. Mostly with brooms and shovels.’

  Junto looked at him thoughtfully and then down at the postcard.

  ‘Are you sure that’s it?’ he asked. ‘Are you sure that you’re not afraid to fight?’

  ‘What would I be afraid of? I been fighting all my life. The Germans ain’t got no way of making a man die twice in succession. No way of bringing a man alive and making him die two or three times. Naw, I’m not scared to fight.’

  ‘Suppose there wasn’t a separate army. Suppose it was all one army. Would you feel differently?’

  ‘Hell, no. Look, Junto’—he remembered how he had leaned toward him across the table talking swiftly and with an energy and passion that sent the words flooding out of his throat. ‘For me to go leaping and running to that draft board a lot of things would have to be different. Them white guys in the army are fighting for something. I ain’t got anything to fight for. If I wasn’t working for you, I’d be changing sheets on Pullman berths. And learning fresh all over again every day that I didn’t belong anywhere. Not even here in this country where I was born. And saying “yes sir,” “no sir,” until my throat was raw with it. Until I felt like I was dirt. I’ve got a hate for white folks here’—he indicated his chest—‘so bad and so deep that I wouldn’t lift a finger to help ’em stop Germans or nobody else.’

  ‘What makes you think life would be better if the Germans ran this country?’

  ‘I don’t think it would. I ain’t never said I thought so.’

  ‘Then I don’t see—’

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ he interrupted. ‘You never will because you ain’t never known what it’s like to live somewhere where you ain’t wanted and every white son-of-a-bitch that sees you goes out of his way to let you know you ain’t wanted. Christ, there ain’t even so much as a cheap stinking diner in this town that I don’t think twice before I walk into it to buy a cup of lousy coffee, because any white bastard in there will let me know one way or another that niggers belong in Harlem. Don’t talk to me about Germans. They’re only doing the same thing in Europe that’s been done in this country since the time it started.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Lissen’—he stopped Jim to with a wave of his hand. ‘One of the boys in the band come back in uniform the other night. You know what he’s doing?’

  Junto shook his head.

  ‘He’s playing loading and unloading ship in some god-damn port company. That boy can make a fiddle talk. Make it say uncle. Make it laugh. Make it cry. So they figured they’d ruin his hands loading ships. He tried to play when he come by the other night.’ He had picked the postcard notice up, flicked the edge of it with his thumbnail. ‘Jesus! He broke down and cried like a baby.’ It was a long time before he said anything after that.

  Then finally he had said slowly: ‘I’ve done all the crawling a man can do in one lifetime. I don’t figure to do no more. Ever. Not for nobody. I don’t figure to go to Europe on my belly with a broom and a shovel in each hand.’ He shoved the postcard across the table. ‘What you going to do about this thing?’

  Junto had sent him to a doctor who performed a slight, delicate, dangerous operation on his ear.

  ‘You’ll be all right in a month or so,’ said the doctor. ‘In the meantime mail this letter to your draft board.’ The letter stated that Boots Smith was ill and unable to report for a physical examination. And, of course, when he was finally examined, he was rejected.

  Yeah, he thought. That’s what it is. He tried to decide just what would happen to him and to Junto and the doctor. And couldn’t. He opened the car door, stepped out on the sidewalk. Well, at least he knew what it was that Junto wanted.

  When he pushed the Junto’s doors open, his face gave no indication of the fact that he was worried. He glanced at the long bar where men and women were standing packed three deep, observing that the hum of their conversation, the sound of their laughter, almost but not quite drowned out the music of the juke-box.

  It was getting near closing time. The white-coated bartenders were hastily pouring drinks and making change. Waiters darted about balancing heavy trays filled with the last drinks that would be served before the wide doors closed for the night.

  He paused in the doorway for a moment, admiring the way the excited movement around the bar and the movement of the people at the tables and in the booths was reflected and multiplied in the sparkling mirrors. Then he waved at
the bartenders, sought and found Junto sitting at a table near the back, and sat down beside him without saying anything.

  ‘Want a drink?’ Junto asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  Junto beckoned a passing waiter. ‘Bourbon for him. Soda for me.’

  The waiter deposited the glasses on the table and moved off to fill the orders from a near-by table of boisterous, clamoring customers who called out to him to hurry before the bar closed.

  Junto picked up his glass, sipped the soda slowly. He rolled it around in his mouth before he swallowed it as though it were a taste sensation he was anxious to retain as long as possible. Boots watched him in silence, waiting to learn how he was going to introduce the business about the army.

  ‘That girl,’ Junto said. He didn’t look at Boots as he talked; his eyes stayed on the noisy crowd at the bar. ‘That girl—Lutie Johnson—’

  ‘Yeah?’ Boots leaned toward him across the table.

  ‘You’re to keep your hands off her. I’ve got other plans for her.’

  So it wasn’t the army. It was Lutie Johnson. Boots started sliding the glass of bourbon back and forth on the table, wondering if he had managed to conceal his amazement. Then, as the full meaning of Junto’s words dawned on him, he frowned. He had had all kinds of girls: tall, short, wide-fannied, big-breasted, flat-breasted, straight-haired, kinky-haired, dark, light—all kinds.

  But this one—this Lutie Johnson—was the first one he’d seen in a long time that he really wanted. He had even thought that if he couldn’t get her any other way, he’d marry her. He watched Junto roll the soda around on his tongue and was surprised to discover that the thought of Lutie, with her long legs, straight back, smooth brown skin, and smiling eyes, sleeping with Old Man Junto wasn’t a pleasant one.