The Street

by Ann Petry

  Then she saw with surprise that there was a light under her door and she stopped thinking about how she felt. ‘Why isn’t he asleep?’ she said, aloud.

  But Bub was asleep, so sound asleep that he didn’t stir when she entered the room. He is afraid here alone, she thought, looking down at him. He was sprawled in the center of the studio couch, his legs and arms flung wide apart. The lamp on the table was shining directly in his face.

  Each time she had come home from the Casino, he had been sleeping with the light on. Yes, he was definitely afraid. Well, she wouldn’t be going out any more at night, leaving him alone. She switched the light off, thinking that it would be years now before he had a bedroom of his own. It was highly doubtful that he would ever have one, and there was still the problem of his having no place to go after school.

  After she undressed and got into bed, she lay staring up at the ceiling for a long time. She thought of Junto, who could so casually, so lightly, perhaps at a mere whim, and not even aware of what he was doing, thrust her back into this place, and of Boots Smith, who might or might not have been telling the truth, who might for purposes of his own have decided that she wasn’t to be paid for singing. And a bitter, angry feeling spread all through her, hardening and congealing.

  She was stuck here on this street, in this dark, dirty house. It was going to take a long time to get out. She thought of the Chandlers and their friends in Lyme. They were right about people being able to make money, but it took hard, grinding work to do it—hard work and self-sacrifice. She was capable of both, she concluded. Furthermore, she would never permit herself to become resigned to living here. She had a sudden vivid recollection of the tragic, re-signed faces of the young girls and the old man she had seen in the spring. No. She would never become like that.

  Her thoughts returned to Junto, and the bitterness and the hardness increased. In every direction, anywhere one turned, there was always the implacable figure of a white man blocking the way, so that it was impossible to escape. If she needed anything to spur her on, she thought, this fierce hatred, this deep contempt, for white people would do it. She would never forget Junto. She would keep her hatred of him alive. She would feed it as though it were a fire.

  Bub woke up before she did. He had put the water for the oatmeal on to boil when she came into the kitchen.

  She kissed him lightly. ‘You go get dressed while I fix breakfast.’

  ‘Okay.’

  And then she remembered the light shining on his face while he was asleep. ‘Bub,’ she said sternly, ‘you’ve got to stop going to sleep with the light on.’

  He looked sheepish. ‘I fell asleep and forgot it.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ she said sharply. ‘I turned it out when I left. If you’re scared of the dark, you’ll just have to go to sleep while I’m here, so you won’t be afraid, because this way the bill will be so big I’ll never be able to pay it. Furthermore, I don’t like lies. I’ve told you that over and over again.’

  ‘Yes, Mom,’ he said meekly. He started to tell her just what it was like to be alone in the dark. But her face was shut tight with anger and her voice was so hard and cold that he decided he’d better wait until some other time.

  It seemed to him that all that week she talked to him about money. She was impatient, she rarely smiled, and she only half-heard him when he talked to her. Every night after dinner she bent over a pile of books placed on the card table and stayed there silent, intent, writing down queer curves and hooks over and over until she went to bed. He decided he must have done something to displease her and he asked her about it.

  ‘Mom, you mad at me?’

  They were eating supper. Lutie was startled by his question. ‘Why, of course not. What made you think I was?’

  ‘You sort of acted like it.’

  ‘No, I’m not mad at you. I couldn’t be.’

  ‘What’s the matter, Mom?’

  She framed her answer carefully, trying not to let the hard, cold anger in her color her reply. She frowned, because her only explanation would have to be that they needed to save more than they were doing. ‘I’ve been worried about us,’ she said. ‘We seem to spend so much money. I’m not able to save very much. And we have to save, Bub,’ she said earnestly, ‘so that we won’t always have to live here.’

  During the next week she made a conscious effort to stop talking to Bub about money. Yet some reference to it inevitably crept into her conversation. If she found two lights burning in the living room, she found herself turning one of them out, saying, ‘We’ve got to watch the bill.’

  When she was mending his socks, she caught herself delivering a lecture about being careful and watching out for nails and splinters that might snag them. ‘They have to last a long time and new ones cost money.’

  If he left a cake of soap soaking in the bowl in the bathroom, she pointed out how it wasted the soap and that little careless things ate into their meager budget. When she went to bed, she scolded herself roundly because it wasn’t right to be always harping on the cost of living to Bub. On the other hand, if they didn’t manage to save faster than she had been able to do so far, it would be months before they could move and moving was uppermost in her thoughts. So the next day she explained to him why it was necessary to move, and that they had to be careful with money if they were going to do it soon.

  Her days were spent in working and at night she cooked dinner, washed and ironed clothes, studied. She found that, in spite of her resolve never again to dream about some easier and more remunerative way of earning a living, and in spite of her determination to put all thought of singing out of her mind, she couldn’t control a faint regret that assailed her when she least expected it.

  Coming home on the subway one night, she picked up a Negro newspaper that had been discarded by a more affluent passenger. And because of her reluctance to give up the idea of singing, it seemed to her that an advertisement leaped at her from the theatrical pages: ‘Singers Needed Now for Broadway Shows. Nightclub Engagements. Let Us Train You for High-Paying Jobs.’

  She tore it out and put it in her pocketbook, thinking cautiously that it was at least worth investigating, but not permitting herself to build any hopes on it.

  The next night after work she went to the Crosse School for Singers. It was on the tenth floor of a Forty-Second Street office building. Going up in the elevator, she somehow couldn’t prevent the faint stirring of hope, the beginnings of expectancy.

  A brassy haired blonde was the sole occupant of the small waiting room. She looked up from the book she was reading when Lutie opened the door.

  Lutie produced the advertisement from her purse. ‘I came for an audition.’

  ‘Have a seat. Mr. Crosse will see you in a minute.’

  A buzzer sounded, and the girl stopped reading to say, ‘Mr. Crosse’ll see you now. It’s that door to the left. Just walk right in.’

  Lutie opened the door. The walls of the room inside were covered with glossy photographs of smiling men and women clad in evening clothes. A hasty glance revealed that all the pictures were warmly inscribed to ‘dear Mr. Crosse.’

  She walked toward a desk at the end of the room. It was a large flat-topped desk and Mr. Crosse had his feet on top of it. As she drew closer to him, she saw that the desk was littered with newspaper clippings, photographs, old magazines, even piles of phonograph records, and two scrapbooks whose contents made the covers bulge. A box of cigars, an ash tray that hadn’t been emptied for weeks from the accumulation of soggy cigar butts in it, and an old-fashioned inkwell, its sides well splashed with ink, were right near his feet. A row of dark green filing cabinets stood against the wall behind the desk.

  She was quite close to the desk before she was able to see what the man sitting behind it looked like, for his feet obstructed her view. He was so fat that he appeared to be bursting out of his clothes. His vest gaped with the strain of the rolls of fat on his abdomen. Other rolls of fat completely obliterated his jaw line.
He was chewing an unlit cigar, and he rolled it to one side of his mouth. ‘Hello,’ he said, not moving his feet.

  ‘I came for an audition,’ Lutie explained.

  ‘Sure. Sure. What kind of singing you do?’ He took the cigar out of his mouth.

  ‘Nightclub,’ she said briefly, not liking him, not liking the fact that the end of the cigar he was holding in his hand had been chewed until it was a soggy, shredding mass of tobacco, and that the room was filled with the rank smell of it.

  ‘Okay. Okay. We’ll try you out. Come on in here.’

  One of the doors of his office led to a slightly larger room. She stood in front of a microphone on a raised platform facing the door. A bored, too thin man accompanied her at the piano. He smoked while he played, moving his head occasionally to get the smoke out of his eyes. His hands were limp and flat as they touched the keys. Mr. Crosse sat in the back of the room and apparently went to sleep.

  At the end of her first song, he opened his eyes. ‘Okay, okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll go back to the office now.’

  He lowered his bulk into the swivel chair behind his desk, put his feet up. ‘Sit down,’ he said, indicating a chair near the desk. ‘You’ve got a good voice. Very good voice,’ he said. ‘I can practically guarantee you a job. About seventy-five dollars a week.’

  ‘What’s the catch in it?’ she asked.

  ‘There’s no catch,’ he said defensively. ‘Been in business here for twenty years. Absolutely no catch. Matter of fact, I don’t usually listen to the singers myself. But just from looking at you I thought, That girl is good. Got a good voice. So I decided to audition you myself.’ He put the cigar in his mouth and chewed it vigorously.

  ‘When do I start working at this seventy-five dollar a week job?’ she asked sarcastically.

  ‘About six weeks. You need some training. Things like timing and how to put a song over. Called showmanship. We teach you that. Then we find you a job and act as your agent. We get ten per cent of what you make. Regular agents’ fee.’

  ‘What does the training cost?’

  ‘Hundred and twenty-five dollars.’

  She got up from the chair. One hundred and twenty-five dollars. She wanted to laugh. It might as well be one thousand and twenty-five dollars. One was just as easy to get as the other.

  ‘I’m sorry to have taken your time. It’s out of the question.’

  ‘They all say that,’ he said. ‘All of ’em. It sounds out of the question because most people really don’t have what it takes to be singers. They don’t want it bad enough. They see somebody earning hundreds a week and they never stop to think that person made a lot of sacrifices to get there.’

  ‘I know all that. In my case it’s impossible.’

  ‘You don’t have to pay it all at once. We arrange for down payments and so much a week in special cases. Makes it easier that way.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I just don’t have the money,’ she turned away, started past his desk.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ He put his feet on the floor, got up from the swivel chair and laid a fat hand on her arm.

  She looked down at his hand. The skin was the color of the underside of a fish—a grayish white. There were long black hairs on the back of it—even on the fingers. It was a boneless hand, thick-covered with fat. She drew her arm away. He was so saturated with the smell of tobacco that it seeped from his skin, his clothing. The cigar in his flabby fingers was rank, strong. Seen close to, the sodden mass of tobacco where he had chewed the end of it sent a quiver of revulsion through her.

  ‘You know a good-looking girl like you shouldn’t have to worry about money,’ he said softly. She didn’t say anything and he continued, ‘In fact, if you and me can get together a coupla nights a week in Harlem, those lessons won’t cost you a cent. No sir, not a cent.’

  Yes, she thought, if you were born black and not too ugly, this is what you get, this is what you find.

  It was a pity he hadn’t lived back in the days of slavery, so he could have raided the slave quarters for a likely wench any hour of the day or night. This is the superior race, she said to herself, take a good long look at him: black, oily hair; slack, gross body; grease spots on his vest; wrinkled shirt collar; cigar ashes on his suit; small pig eyes engulfed in the fat of his face.

  She remembered the inkwell on the desk in back of him. She picked it up in a motion so swift that he had no time to guess her intent. She hurled it full force in his face. The ink paused for a moment at the obstruction of his eyebrows, then dripped down over the fat jowls, over the wrinkled collar, the grease-stained vest; trickled over his mouth.

  She slammed the door of the office behind her. The girl in the reception room looked up, startled at the sound.

  ‘Through so quick?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ She walked past the girl. Hurry, she told herself. Hurry, hurry, hurry!

  ‘Didya fill out a application?’ the girl called after her.

  ‘I won’t need one’—she said the words over her shoulder.

  She boarded a Sixth Avenue train at Forty-Second Street. It was crowded with passengers. She closed her eyes to shut them out, gripping the overhead strap tightly. She welcomed the roar of the train as it sped toward Fifty-Ninth Street, welcomed its lurching, swaying motion. She wished that it would go faster, make more noise, rock more wildly, because the tumultuous anger in her could only be quelled by violence.

  She sought release from the urgency of her rage by deliberately picturing the train plunging suddenly off the track in a fury of sound—the metal coaches rushing headlong on top of each other in a whole series of thunderous explosions.

  The burst of anger died away slowly and she began to think of herself drearily. She was running around a small circle, around and around like a squirrel in a cage. All this business of saving money in order to move added up to less than nothing, because she had forgotten or blithely overlooked the fact that she couldn’t find any better place to live, not for the amount of rent she could pay.

  She thought of Mr. Crosse with a sudden access of hate that made her bite her lips; and then of Junto, who had prevented her from getting the job at the Casino. She remembered the friends of the Chandlers who had thought of her as a nigger wench; only, of course, they were too well-bred to use the word ‘nigger.’ And the hate in her increased.

  The train stopped at Fifty-Ninth Street, took on more passengers, then gathered speed for the long run to 125th Street.

  Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North’s lynch mobs, she thought bitterly; the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place. And she began thinking of Pop unable to get a job; of Jim slowly disintegrating because he, too, couldn’t get a job, and of the subsequent wreck of their marriage; of Bub left to his own devices after school. From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in and the wall had been built up brick by brick by eager white hands.

  When she got off the local at 116th Street, she didn’t remember having changed trains at 125th Street. She was surprised to find that Bub was waiting for her at the subway entrance. He didn’t see her, and she paused for a moment, noting the anxious way he watched the people pouring into the street, twisting his neck in his effort to make certain he didn’t miss her. She was so late getting home that he had evidently been worried about her; and she tried to imagine what it would be like for him if something had happened to her and she hadn’t come.

  At this hour there were countless children with doorkeys tied around their necks, hovering at the corner. They were seeking their mothers in the homecoming throng surging up from the subway. They’re too young to be familiar with worry, she thought, for their expressions were exactly like Bub’s—apprehensive, a little frightened. They’re behind the same wall already. She walked over to Bub.

  ‘Hello, hon,’ she said gently. She put her arm around his shoulders as they walked toward home.

  He
was silent for a while, and then he said, ‘Mom, are you sure you’re not mad at me?’

  She tightened her grip on his shoulder. ‘Of course not,’ she said. She was neatly caged here on this street and tonight’s experience had increased the growing frustration and hatred in her. It probably shows in my face, she thought, dismayed, and Bub can see it.

  ‘I’m not mad at you all. I couldn’t be’—she caressed his cheek. ‘I’ve been worried about something.’

  She thought of the animals at the Zoo. She and Bub had gone there one Sunday afternoon. They arrived in time to see the lions and tigers being fed. There was a moment, before the great hunks of red meat were thrust into the cages, when the big cats prowled back and forth, desperate, raging, ravening. They walked in a space even smaller than the confines of the cages made necessary, moving in an area just barely the length of their bodies. A few steps up and turn. A few steps down and turn. They were weaving back and forth, growling, roaring, raging at the bars that kept them from the meat, until the entire building was filled with the sound, until the people watching drew back from the cages, feeling insecure, frightened at the sight and the sound of such uncontrolled savagery. She was becoming something like that.

  ‘I’m not mad at you, hon,’ she repeated. ‘I guess I was mad at myself.’

  Because she was late getting home and she knew that Bub was hungry, she tried to hurry the preparation of dinner. And when she tried to light the gas stove, there was a sudden, flaring burst of flame that seared the flesh of her hand and set it to smarting and burning. Bub was leaning out of the kitchen window intently watching the dogs in the yard below.

  ‘Damn it,’ she said. She covered her hand with a dishtowel, holding the towel tightly to keep the air away from the burn. It wasn’t a bad burn, she thought; it was a mere scorching of surface skin.