The Street (21 page)

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.

She had gone past the bakery shop again the next afternoon. The windows had been smashed, the front door had apparently been broken in, because it was boarded up. There were messages chalked on the sidewalk in front of the store. They all said the same thing: ‘White man, don't come back.' She was surprised to see that there were men still standing around, on the nearest corners, across the street. Their faces were turned toward the store. They weren't talking. They were just standing with their hands in their pockets—waiting.

Two police cars with their engines running were
drawn up in front of the store. There were two cops right in front of the door, swinging nightsticks. She walked past, thinking that it was like a war that hadn't got off to a start yet, though both sides were piling up ammunition and reserves and were now waiting for anything, any little excuse, a gesture, a word, a sudden loud noise—and pouf! it would start.

Lutie moved uneasily on the bed. She pulled the robe more tightly around her. All of these streets were filled with violence, she thought. You turned a corner, walked through a block, and you came on it suddenly, unexpectedly.

For it was later in the spring that she took Bub to Roundtree Hospital. There was a cold, driving rain and she had hesitated about going out in it. But Bub had fallen on the sidewalk and cut his knee. She had come home from work to find him sitting disconsolately in Pop's kitchen. It was a deep, nasty cut, so she took him to the emergency room at Roundtree in order to find out just how bad it was.