The Street

by Ann Petry

  And it wasn’t because Junto was white. He didn’t feel the same toward him as he did toward most white men. There was never anything in Junto’s manner, no intonation in his voice, no expression that crept into his eyes, and never had been during the whole time he had known him, nothing that he had ever said or done that indicated he was aware that Boots was a black man.

  He had watched him warily, unbelieving, suspicious. Junto was always the same, and he treated the white men who worked for him exactly the same way he treated the black ones. No, it wasn’t because Junto was white that he didn’t relish the thought of him sleeping with Lutie Johnson.

  It was simply that he didn’t like the idea of anyone possessing her, except of course himself. Was he in love with her? He examined his feeling about her with care. No. He just wanted her. He was intrigued by her. There was a challenge in the way she walked with her head up, in the deft way she had avoided his attempts to make love to her. It was more a matter of itching to lay his hands on her than anything else.

  ‘Suppose I want to lay her myself?’ he said.

  Junto looked directly at him for the first time. ‘I made you. If I were you, I wouldn’t overlook the fact that whoever makes a man can also break him.’

  Boots made no reply. He studied the bubbles that were forming on the side of Junto’s glass.

  ‘Well?’ Junto said.

  ‘I ain’t made up my mind yet. I’m thinking.’

  He fingered the long scar on his cheek. Junto could break him all right. It would be easy. There weren’t many places a colored band could play and Junto could fix it so he couldn’t find a spot from here to the coast. He had other bands sewed up, and all he had to do was refuse to send an outfit to places stupid enough to hire Boots’ band. Junto could put a squeeze on a place so easy it wasn’t funny. And he thought, Pullman porter to Junto’s right-hand man. A long jump. A long hard way to get where he was now.

  Yeah, he thought, Pullmans. The train roaring into the night. Coaches rocking and swaying. A bell that rang and rang and rang, and refused to stop ringing. A bell that stabbed into your sleep at midnight, at one, at two, at three, at four in the morning. Because slack-faced white women wanted another blanket, because gross white men with skins the red of boiled lobster couldn’t sleep because of the snoring of someone across the aisle.

  Porter! Porter this and Porter that. Boy. George. Nameless. He got a handful of silver at the end of each run, and a mountain of silver couldn’t pay a man to stay nameless like that. No Name, black my shoes. No Name, hold my coat. No Name, brush me off. No Name, take my bags. No Name. No Name.

  Niggers steal. Lock your bag. Niggers lie. Where’s my pocketbook? Call the conductor. That porter—Niggers rape. Cover yourself up. Didn’t you see that nigger looking at you? God damn it! Where’s that porter? Por-ter! Por-ter!

  Balance Lutie Johnson. Weigh Lutie Johnson. Long legs and warm mouth. Soft skin and pointed breasts. Straight slim back and small waist. Mouth that curves over white, white teeth. Not enough. She didn’t weigh enough when she was balanced against a life of saying ‘yes sir’ to every white bastard who had the price of a Pullman ticket. Lutie Johnson at the end of a Pullman run. Not enough. One hundred Lutie Johnsons didn’t weigh enough.

  He tried to regret the fact that she didn’t weigh enough, even tried to work up a feeling of contempt for himself. You’d sell your old grandmother if you had one, he told himself. Yes. I’d sell anything I’ve got without stopping to think about it twice, because I don’t intend to learn how to crawl again. Not for anybody.

  Because before the Pullmans there was Harlem during the depression. And he was an out-of-work piano-player shivering on street corners in a thin overcoat. The hunger hole in his stomach had gaped as wide as the entrance to the subways. Cold nights he used to stand in doorways out of the wind, and sooner or later a white cop would come up and snarl, ‘Move on, you!’

  He had known the shuddering, shocking pain of a nightstick landing on the soles of his feet when he slept on park benches. ‘Get the hell outta here, yah bum!’

  Yeah. He was a piano-player out of work, living on hunger and hate and getting occasional jobs in stinking, smoky, lousy joints where they thought he was coked up all the time. And he was. But it was hunger and hate that was the matter with him, not coke.

  He would get a meal for playing in the joint and the hard-faced white man who owned it would toss a couple of dollars at him when he left, saying, ‘Here, you!’ He wanted to throw it back, but he had to live, and so he took it, but he couldn’t always keep the hate out of his eyes.

  He had played in dives and honkey-tonks and whorehouses, at rent parties and reefer parties. The smell of cigarette smoke and rotgut liquor and greasy food stayed in his nose.

  He got so he hated the sight of the drunks and dopesters who frequented the places where he played. They never heard the music that came from the piano, for they were past caring about anything or listening to anything. But he had to cat, so he went on playing.

  More frequently than he cared to remember some drunken white couple would sway toward the piano, mumbling, ‘Get the nigger to sing,’ or, ‘Get the nigger to dance.’ And he would despise himself for not lunging at them, but the fact that the paltry pay he would get at the end of the night’s work was his only means of assuaging his constant hunger held him rigid on the piano bench.

  White cops raided the joints at regular intervals, smashing up furniture, breaking windows with vicious efficiency. When they found white women lolling about inside, they would start swinging their nightsticks with carefree abandon.

  He learned to watch the doors with a wary eye, and the instant he entered a place he located a handy exit before he settled down to play.

  When he got the job on the Pullman, he vowed that never again, so help him God, would he touch a piano. And in place of the stinking, rotten joints there were miles of ‘Here boy,’ ‘You boy,’ ‘Go boy,’ ‘Run boy,’ ‘Stop boy,’ ‘Come boy.’ Train rocking and roaring through the night. No longer hunger. Just hate. ‘Come boy,’ ‘Go boy.’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Of course, sir.’

  Naw, Lutie Johnson didn’t weigh that much. Even if she did, he had no way of knowing that he wouldn’t come home some night to find a room full of arrested motion. Even now he never saw the wind moving a curtain back and forth in front of a window without remembering that curious, sick sensation he had when he walked into his own apartment and found the one room alive with motion that had stopped just the moment before he entered it.

  Everything in the room still except for the sheer, thin curtains blowing in the breeze. Everything frozen, motionless; even Jubilee, stiff still in the big chair, her house coat slipping around her body. Only the curtains in motion, but the rest of the room full of the ghost of motion, and he couldn’t move his eyes from the curtains.

  It was a warm night in the spring—a soft, warm night that lay along the train like a woman’s arms as it roared toward New York. It was a bland, enticing kind of night, and he kept thinking about Jubilee waiting for him at the end of the run. He couldn’t wait to get to her. Going uptown on the subway, he thought the train kept slowing down; sitting motionless on the track, waiting at stations, doing every damn thing it could to keep him from getting to her in a hurry.

  The street had that same soft, clinging warmth. It seemed to be everywhere around him. He tore up the stairs and put his key in the door. It stuck in the lock and he cursed it for delaying him. The instant he got the door open, he knew there was something wrong. The room was full of hurried, not quite quickly enough arrested movement. He stood in the doorway looking at the room, seeking whatever it was that was wrong.

  Jubilee was sitting in the big upholstered chair. She had a funny kind of smile on her face. He could have sworn that she had got into the chair when she heard his key click in the lock.

  The thin, sheer curtains were blowing in the breeze that came through the opened windows. Swaying gently back and forth at the fr
ont windows, at the fire-escape window. But the fire-escape window was always closed. Jubilee kept it shut because she said it wasn’t safe to sit in a room in Harlem with a fire-escape window open. That was how people got robbed. Even in hot, sweltering weather it was closed. They had argued about it the summer before:

  ‘Christ, baby! Open the window!’

  ‘I won’t. It isn’t safe.’

  ‘But we’ll sweat to death in here.’

  ‘That’s better than being robbed—’

  He crossed the room quickly, pushed the curtains aside, and looked down. A man was going swiftly down the fire escape. Not looking up, climbing steadily down, down. He had his suit jacket over his arm. Every time the man passed a lighted window, Boots could see him quite clearly. Finally the man looked up. He had his necktie in his hand. And he was white. Unmistakably—white.

  When he turned back into the room, he was so blind with fury he couldn’t see anything for a moment. Then he saw her sitting in the chair, frozen with fear.

  ‘You double-crossing bitch!’ he said, and pulled her out of the chair and slammed her against the wall.

  He pulled her toward him and slapped her. Then threw her back against the wall. Pulled her toward him and slapped her and threw her back against the wall. Again and again. Her face grew puffed and swollen under his hand. He heard her scream, and it pleased him to know that she was afraid of him because he was going to kill her, and he wanted her to know it beforehand and be afraid. He was going to take a long time doing it, so that she would be very afraid before she finally died.

  But she fooled him. She ducked under his arm and got away from him. He took his time turning around, because there wasn’t any place for her to go. She couldn’t get all the way away from him, and it was going to be fun to play cat and mouse with her in this none too big room.

  When he turned, she had a knife in her hand. He went for her again and she slashed him across the face.

  He backed away from her. Blood oozed slowly down his cheek. It felt warm. And it shocked him to his senses. She wasn’t worth going to the clink for. She was a raggle-tag slut, and he was well rid of her because she wasn’t worth a good god damn.

  He took the knife away from her. She cringed as though she expected him to cut her. He threw it on the floor and laughed.

  ‘You ain’t worth cutting, baby,’ he said. ‘You ain’t worth going to jail for. You ain’t worth nothing.’ He laughed again. ‘Tell your white boy friend he can move in any time he wants to. I’m through, baby.’

  The sound of Jubilee’s sobbing followed him down the hall. As he went past the silent doors that lined the hallway, he thought, It’s funny with all that noise and screaming no one had tried to find out what was going on. He could have killed her easy and no one would even have rapped on the door, and he wondered what went on inside these other apartments to make their occupants so incurious.

  He wanted to laugh at himself and at Jubilee. Him riding Pullman trains day in and day out and hoarding those handfuls of silver, so he could keep her here in this apartment, so he could buy her clothes. Bowing and scraping because the thought of her waiting at the end of a run kept him from choking on those ‘Yes sirs’ and ‘No sirs’ that he said week in and week out. He paused on the stairs thinking that he ought to go back up and finish the job, because leaving it like this left him less than a half man, because he didn’t even have a woman of his own, because he not only had to say ‘Yes sir,’ he had to stand by and take it while some white man grabbed off what belonged to him.

  Killing her wouldn’t change the thing any. But if he’d had a gun, he would have shot that bastard on the fire escape. He went on down the stairs slowly. He never realized before what a thin line you had to cross to do a murder. A thin, small, narrow line. It was less than a pencil mark to get across. A man rides a Pullman and the woman fools around, and the man can’t swallow it because he’s had too much crawling to do, and the man spends the rest of his life behind bars. No. He gives up his life on a hot seat, or did they hang in this state? He didn’t know, because fortunately the woman cut the hell out of him.

  He concealed the slash with his handkerchief, thinking that there was a colored drugstore somewhere around and the guy would fix him up.

  The druggist eyed the blood on his face. ‘Get cut?’ he asked matter-of-factly.

  ‘Yeah. Put somep’n on it, will you?’

  The druggist applied a styptic pencil. ‘You oughtta see a doctor,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have a bad scar.’ And he thought must have been a woman who cut him. Guys built like this one don’t let other guys get close enough to them to carve them with a knife. Probably ran out on the woman and she couldn’t take it.

  ‘A scar don’t mean nothing,’ Boots said.

  ‘What was it—a fight?’

  ‘Naw. A dame. I beat her up and she gave me this for a souvenir.’

  There had been a lot of other women since Jubilee. He didn’t remember any of them except that he had kicked most of them around a bit. Perhaps as vengeance now that he came to think about it. He only thought about Jubilee when he happened to see a pair of curtains blowing in a breeze. The scar on his face had become a thin, narrow line. Most of the time he forgot it was there, though somehow he had got into the habit of touching it when he was thinking very hard.

  He looked across at Junto patiently waiting for an answer. He wasn’t quite ready to answer him. Let him stew in his own juice for a while. There wasn’t any question in his mind about Lutie Johnson being worth the price he would have to pay for her, nor worth the doubts that he would always have about her.

  Riding back and forth between New York and Chicago he used to look forward to dropping into Junto’s place. He was perfectly comfortable, wholly at ease when he was there. The white men behind the bar obviously didn’t care about the color of a man’s skin. They were polite and friendly—not too friendly but just right. It made him feel good to go there. Nobody bothered to mix a little contempt with the drinks because the only thing that mattered was whether you had the money to pay for them.

  One time when he stopped in for a drink, he was filled up to overflowing with hate. So he had two drinks. Three drinks. Four drinks. Five drinks. To get the taste of ‘you boy’ out of his mouth, to shake it out of his ears, to wash it off his skin. Six drinks, and he was feeling good.

  There was a battered red piano in the corner. The same piano that was there right now. And he was feeling so good that he forgot that he had vowed he’d never play a piano again as long as he lived. He sat down and started playing and kept on until he forgot there were such things as Pullmans and rumpled sheets and wadded-up blankets to be handled. Forgot there was a world that was full of white voices saying: ‘Hustle ’em up, boy’; ‘Step on it, boy’; Hey, boy, I saw a hot-looking colored gal a couple of coaches back—fix it up for me, boy.’ He forgot about bells that were a shrill command to ‘come a-running, boy.’

  Someone touched him on the shoulder. He looked up frowning.

  ‘What do you do for a living?’

  The man was squat, turtle-necked. White.

  ‘What’s it to you?’ He stopped playing and turned on the piano bench, ready to send his fist smashing into the man’s face.

  ‘You play well. I wanted to offer you a job.’

  ‘Doing what?’ And then, angered because he had answered the man at all, he said, ‘Sweeping the joint out?’ And further angered and wanting to fight and wanting to show that he wanted to fight, he added, ‘With my tongue, mebbe?’

  Junto shook his head. ‘No. I’ve never offered anyone a job like that,’ saying it with a seriousness that was somehow impressive. ‘There are some things men shouldn’t have to do’—a note of regret in his voice. ‘I thought perhaps you might be willing to play the piano here.’

  He stared at Junto letting all the hate in him show, all the fight, all the meanness. Junto stared back. And he found himself liking him against his will. ‘How much?’

  ‘
Start at forty dollars.’

  He had turned back to the piano. ‘I’m working at the job right now.’

  It had been a pleasure to work for Junto. There hadn’t been any of that you’re-black-and-I’m-white business involved. It had been okay from the night he had started playing the piano. He had built the orchestra slowly, and Junto had been pleased and revealed his pleasure by paying him a salary that had now grown to the point where he could afford to buy anything in the world he wanted. No. Lutie Johnson wasn’t that important to him. He wasn’t in love with her, and even if he had been she didn’t weigh enough to balance the things he would lose.

  ‘Okay,’ he said finally. ‘It doesn’t make that much difference to me.’

  Junto’s eyes went back to an examination of the bar. There was nothing in his face to indicate whether this was the answer he had expected or whether he was surprised by it. ‘Don’t pay her for singing with the band. Give her presents from time to time.’ He took his wallet out, extracted a handful of bills, gave them to Boots. ‘All women like presents. This will make it easier for you to arrange for me to see her. And please remember’—his voice was precise, careful, almost as though he were discussing the details of a not too important business deal—‘leave her alone. I want her myself.’

  Boots pocketed the money and stood up. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘That babe will be as safe with me as though she was in her mother’s arms.’

  Junto sipped his soda. ‘Do you think it will take very long?’ he asked.

  ‘I dunno. Some women are’—he fished for a word, shrugged his shoulders and went on—‘funny about having anything to do with white men.’ He thought of the curtains blowing back from the fire escape window and the white man going swiftly down, down, down. Not all women. Just some women.

  ‘Money cures most things like that.’

  ‘Sometimes it does.’ He tried to decide whether it would with Lutie Johnson. Yes. She had practically said so herself. Yet there was something—well, he wasn’t sure a man would have an easy time with her. She had a streak of hell cat in her or he didn’t know women, and he felt a momentary and fleeting regret at having lost the chance to conquer and subdue her.