The Street

by Ann Petry

  Yes. The women work and the kids go to reform school. Why do the women work? It’s such a simple, reasonable reason. And just thinking about it will make your legs stop trembling like the legs of a winded, blown, spent horse.

  The women work because the white folks give them jobs—washing dishes and clothes and floors and windows. The women work because for years now the white folks haven’t liked to give black men jobs that paid enough for them to support their fam lies. And finally it gets to be too late for some of them. Even wars don’t change it. The men get out of the habit of working and the houses are old and gloomy and the walls press in. And the men go off, move on, slip away, find new women. Find younger women.

  And what did it add up to? She pressed closer to the wall, ignoring the gray dust, the fringes of cobwebs heavy with grime and soot. Add it up. Bub, your kid—flashing smile, strong, straight back, sturdy legs, even white teeth, young, round face, smooth skin—he ends up in reform school because the women work.

  Go on, she urged. Go all the way. Finish it. And the little Henry Chandlers go to YalePrincetonHarvard and the Bub Johnsons graduate from reform school into DannemoraSingSing.

  And you helped push him because you talked to him about money. All the time money. And you wanted it because you wanted to move from this street, but in the beginning it was because you heard the rich white Chandlers talk about it. ‘Filthy rich.’ ‘Richest country in the world.’ ‘Make it while you’re young.’

  Only you forgot. You forgot you were black and you underestimated the street outside here. And it never occurred to you that Bub might find those small dark rooms just as depressing as you did. And then, of course, there wasn’t any other place for you to live except in a house like this one.

  Then she was shouting, leaning against the wall, beating against it with her fists, and shouting, ‘Damn it! Damn it!’

  She leaned further against the wall, seemed almost to sink into it, and started to cry. The hall was full of the sound. The thin walls echoed and re-echoed with it two, three floors below and one floor above.

  People coming home from work heard the sound when they started up the first flight of stairs. Their footsteps on the stairs, slowed down, hesitated, came to a full stop, for they were reluctant to meet such sorrow head-on. By the time they reached the fourth floor and actually saw her, their faces were filled with dread, for she was pounding against the wall with her fists—a soft, muted, dreadful sound. Her sobbing heard close to made them catch their breaths. She held the crisp, crackling white paper in her hand. And they recognized it for what it was—a symbol of doom—for the law and bad trouble were in the long white paper. They knew, for they had seen such papers before.

  They turned their faces away from the sight of her, walked faster to get away from the sound of her. They hurried to close the doors of their apartments, but her crying came through the flimsy walls, followed them through the tight-shut doors.

  All through ‘the house radios went on full blast in order to drown out this familiar, frightening, unbearable sound. But even under the radios they could hear it, for they had started crying with her when the sound first assailed their ears. And now it had become a perpetual weeping that flowed through them, carrying pain and a shrinking from pain, so that the music and the voices coming from the radios couldn’t possibly shut it out, for it was inside them.

  The thin walls shivered and trembled with the music. Upstairs, downstairs, all through the house, there was music, any kind of music, tuned up full and loud—jazz, blues, swing, symphony, surged through the house.

  When Lutie finally stopped crying, her eyes were bloodshot, the lids swollen, sore to the touch. She drew away from the wall. She had to get a lawyer. He would be able to tell her what to do. There was one on Seventh Avenue, not far from the corner. She remembered seeing the sign.

  The lawyer was reading an evening paper when Lutie entered his office. He stared at her, trying to estimate the fee he could charge, trying to guess her reason for coming. A divorce, he decided. All good-looking women invariably wanted divorces.

  He was a little chagrined when he discovered he was wrong. He listened to her attentively, and all the time he was trying to figure out how much she would be able to pay. She had such a good figure it was difficult to tell whether her clothes were cheap ones or expensive ones. And then, as the case unfolded, he began to wonder why she didn’t know that she didn’t need a lawyer for a case like this one. He went on scribbling notes on a pad.

  ‘Do you think you can do anything for him?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure’—he was still writing. ‘It’ll be simple. I’ll paint a picture of you working hard, the kid left alone. He’s only eight. Too young to have any moral sense. And then, of course, the street.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘What street?’

  ‘Any street’—he waved his hand toward the window in an all-inclusive gesture. ‘Any place where there’s slums and dirt and poverty you find crime. So if the Judge is sympathetic, the kid’ll go free. Maybe get a suspended sentence and be paroled in your care.’ There was sudden hope in her face. ‘My fee’ll be two hundred dollars.’ He saw anxiety, defeat, replace the hope, and added quickly, ‘I can practically guarantee getting him off.’

  ‘When do you have to have the money?’

  ‘Three days from now at the latest.’

  He escorted her to the door, and stood watching her walk down the street. Now why in hell doesn’t she know she doesn’t need a lawyer? He shrugged his shoulders. It was like picking two hundred bucks up in the street.

  ‘And who am I to leave it there kicking around?’ he said, aloud. He picked up the notes he had made, inserted them in an envelope which he placed in an inside pocket, and went back to reading the paper.

  17

  ‘TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS. Two hundred dollars. Two hundred dollars.’ Lutie repeated the words softly under her breath as she left the lawyer’s office.

  If it were in dollar bills and stacked up neatly, it would make a high mound of green-and-white paper. A bundle that size could buy divorces, beds with good springs and mattresses, warm coats, and pair after pair of the kind of shoes that wouldn’t wear out in a hurry. It could send a kid to camp for a couple of summers. And she had to find a stack of bills like that to keep Bub out of reform school.

  She had never known anyone who had that much money at one time. The people that she knew got money in driblets, driblets that barely covered rent and food and shoes and subway fare, but it never added up to two hundred dollars all at once and piled up in your hand.

  Pop wouldn’t have it. His only assets were an apartment filled with seedy roomers and shabby furniture and the rank smell of corn liquor. The corn liquor brought in occasional limp dollar bills. None of it added up to a pile of green-and-white paper that high. He wouldn’t even know where or how to get it if she should ask him for it.

  Neither would Lil. She had never seen a mound of money like that, never needed it because nickels and dimes for beer took care of all her wants, and she had always been able to find someone like Pop to provide her with a place to sleep and eat and keep her supplied with too tight housecoats.

  She walked toward the small open space where St. Nicholas Avenue and Seventh Avenue ran together, forming a triangle which was flanked with benches. She sat on one of the benches and watched pieces of newspaper that were being blown by the wind. The ground under the benches was packed firm and hard and the newspapers skimmed over it, twisting against the trunks of the few trees, getting entangled with the legs of the benches. A large woman waddled past with a dog on a leash. Two children banged on the sides of a garbage can with a heavy stick. Otherwise the streets on both sides of the square were deserted.

  The wind made her turn her coat collar up close around her throat. Even though it was cold, she could think better out here in the open. She didn’t own anything that was worth two hundred dollars. A second-hand furniture dealer might offer ten dollars for the entire conte
nts of her apartment lumped together. But she ought to make certain. Just around the corner on 116th Street there was a group of second-hand stores; their wares edging out to the sidewalk. She could at least inquire as to the price they were asking for things.

  It would be a waste of time. All of it put together—battered studio couch, rungless chairs, wobbly kitchen table, small scarred radio—wouldn’t bring a cent more than ten dollars.

  She thought of the girls who worked in the office with her. She didn’t know any of them intimately. She didn’t really have time to get to know them well, because she went right home after work and there was only a forty-five-minute lunch period. She always took a sandwich along for lunch, and when the weather was good she ate it on a park bench, and when it was rainy or snowing she stayed inside, eating in the rest room and there were confused and incomplete snatches of conversation and that was all.

  None of them would have two hundred dollars even if she knew them well enough to ask them. By the time the income-tax deductions and the war-bond deductions were taken out, there wasn’t much left to take home. Most of them cashed the bonds as soon as they got them just like she did, because it was the only way they could manage on the small pay.

  Remembering bits of the conversation she had heard in the rest room, she knew they had husbands and children and sick mothers and unemployed fathers and young sisters and brothers, so that going to an occasional movie was the only entertainment they could afford. ‘They went home and listened to the radio and read part of a newspaper, mostly the funnies and the latest murders; and then they cleaned their apartments and washed clothes and cooked food, and then it was time to go to bed because they had to get up early the next morning.

  There ought to be more than that to living, she thought, resentfully. Perhaps living in a city the size of New York wasn’t good for people, because you had to spend all your time working to pay for the place where you lived and it took all the rest of the hours in the day to keep the place clean and fix food, and there was never any money left over. Certainly it wasn’t a good place for children.

  If she had been able to get that job singing at the Casino, this wouldn’t have happened. And for the first time in weeks she thought of Boots Smith. He would have two hundred dollars or would know where to get it. She started to get up from the bench and sat back down again. She didn’t have any reason to believe he would lend it to her just because she needed it. It would take her a long time to pay him back and certainly she wasn’t a very good risk.

  Half-angrily she decided he would lend it to her because she would make him. It didn’t matter that she had neither seen nor heard from him since the night he had told her she wouldn’t be paid for singing. It didn’t matter at all. He was going to lend her two hundred dollars because it was the only way to keep Bub from going to reform school and he was the only person she knew who could lay hands on that much money at one time.

  She went into the cigar store across the street, thumbed through the phone book, half-fearful that he wouldn’t have a telephone, or if he had one that it wouldn’t be listed. There it was. He lived on Edgecombe Avenue. She memorized the address, thinking that she would call him and then go up there now, tonight, because she didn’t want to tell him what she wanted over the phone. It was best to go and see him and if he looked as though he were going to refuse, she could talk faster and harder.

  She dialed the number and no one answered. There was only the continual insistent ringing of the phone. He had to be home. She simply would not hang up. The phone rang and rang and rang.

  ‘Yeah?’ a voice said suddenly; and for a moment she was too startled to reply.

  The voice repeated, ‘Yeah?’ impatiently.

  ‘This is Lutie Johnson,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’ His voice was flat, indifferent, sleepy.

  ‘Lutie Johnson,’ she repeated. And his voice came alive, ‘Oh, hello, baby. Christ! where you been?’

  He didn’t understand what she was saying and she had to begin all over again, going slowly, so slowly that she thought she sounded like a record that had got stuck on a victrola. She said she had to see him. It was very important. She had to see him right away. Because it was very important. And instantly he said, ‘Sure, baby. I been wanting to talk to you. Come on up. It’s apartment 3 J.’

  ‘I’ll be right there. I’ll take the bus,’ she said. And thought again that she sounded like a victrola, but not one that had got stuck, like one that had run down, that needed winding.

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘116th Street and Seventh Avenue.’

  ‘Okay, baby. I’ll be waitin’ for you.’

  It took her a few minutes to get the receiver back on the hook. She made futile, fumbling dabs at it, missing it because her hands were taut and tense and unmanageable.

  She waited impatiently for the bus and when it came and she got on it, it seemed to her it crawled up Seventh Avenue; and each time it halted for a red light, she could feel her muscles tighten up. She tried to erase the hopes and fears that kept creeping into her mind and couldn’t. Finally the bus turned and crossed the bridge, and she remembered that it didn’t stop at Edgecombe Avenue. If she wasn’t careful, she’d ride beyond it and have to walk back a long way.

  But there was no mistaking the apartment house where Boots lived. It loomed high above all the other buildings and could be seen for a long distance. She pulled the stopcord hastily and got off the bus.

  As she walked toward the awninged entrance, she recalled the stories she’d heard about the fabulous rents paid by the people who lived here. She remembered when Negroes had first moved into this building and how Pop had rattled the pages of the paper he was reading and muttered, ‘Must have gold toilet seats to charge that much money.’

  Her only reaction to the sight of the potted shrubs in the doorway and to the uniformed doorman was that if Boots could afford to live here, then lending her two hundred dollars would present no problem to him.

  Inside there was a wide, high-ceilinged hall. An elevator with gleaming red doors opened into it.

  The elevator boy took her up to the third floor, and in answer to her inquiry said, ‘It’s the fourth door down the hall,’ before he closed the elevator doors.

  She pressed the bell harder than she’d intended and drew her hand away quickly, expecting to hear the loud shrilling of a bell. Instead there was the soft sound of chimes and Boots opened the door. His shirt was open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up.

  ‘Sure is good to see you, baby,’ he said. ‘Come on in.’

  ‘Hello,’ she said, and walked past him into a small foyer. The rug on the floor was thick. It swallowed up the sound of her footsteps.

  The living room was a maze of floor lamps and overstuffed chairs. The same kind of thick, engulfing carpet covered the floor. Logs in an imitation fireplace at the far end of the room gave off an orange-red glow from a concealed electric light. The winking light from the logs was like an evil eye and she looked away from it. Ponderously carved iron candlesticks flanked the mantel.

  She couldn’t go on standing here, taking an inventory of the room. She had to tell him what she wanted. Now that she was here, it was difficult to get started. There was nothing encouraging about his appearance and she had forgotten how tough and unscrupulous his face was.

  ‘Let me take your coat,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, no. I’m not going to stay that long. I can’t.’

  ‘Well, sit down anyway.’ He sat on the arm of the sofa, one leg dangling, his arms folded across his chest, his face completely expressionless. ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘I almost forgot what a warm-looking babe you are.’

  She sat down at the far end of the sofa, trying to think of a way to start.

  ‘What’s on your mind, baby?’ he said.

  ‘It’s about my son—Bub—’

  ‘You got a kid?’ he interrupted.

  ‘Yes. He’s eight years old.’ She talked swiftly, afraid that if she stopped, if
he interrupted her again, she wouldn’t be able to finish. She didn’t look at him while she told him about the letters Bub had stolen and the lawyer and the two hundred dollars.

  ‘Go on, baby,’ he said impatiently when she paused.

  His face had changed while she talked to him. Ordinarily his expression was unreadable; now he looked as though he had suddenly seen something he had been waiting for, seen it spread right out in front of him, and it was something that he wanted badly. She puzzled over it while she repeated what the lawyer had said and then decided the expression on his face was due to surprise. He hadn’t known about Bub. She had forgotten that she hadn’t told him she had a child.

  ‘Can you let me have it? The two hundred dollars?’ she asked.

  ‘Why, sure, baby,’ he said easily. ‘I haven’t got that much on me right now. But if you come by here tomorrow night about this same time I’ll have it for you. Make it a little later than this. About nine.’

  ‘I can’t ever thank you,’ she said, standing up. ‘And I’ll pay you back. It’ll take a little while, but you’ll get every cent of it back.’

  ‘That’s all right. Glad to do it.’ He stayed on the arm of the sofa. ‘You ain’t going so soon, are you?’

  ‘Yes. I have to.’

  ‘How about a drink?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’ve got to go.’

  He walked to the door with her, held it open for her. ‘See you tomorrow night, baby,’ he said, and closed the door gently.

  The thought that it had been very easy stayed with her all the way home. It wasn’t until she opened the door of her apartment and was groping for the light in the hall that it occurred to her it had been too easy, much too easy.

  She turned on all the lights in the house—the ceiling lights in the bedroom and the bathroom, the lamp in the living room. The flood of light helped thrust away the doubts that assailed her, but it did nothing to relieve the emptiness in the rooms. Because Bub wasn’t sprawled in the middle of the studio couch, all the furniture had diminished in size, shrinking against the wall—the couch, the big chair, the card table.