The Street (27 page)

The street was full of men like him. She stopped her slow examination of him long enough to wonder if a creature like this was the result of electric light
instead of hot, strong sunlight; the result of breathing soot-filled air instead of air filled with the smell of warm earth and green growing plants and pulling elevators and sweeping floors instead of doing jobs that would develop the big muscles in shoulders and thighs.

‘What you do for a living?' she asked abruptly.

‘Ma'am?'

‘I said what you do for a living?'

‘Well, I—' He balanced the hat on one finger. ‘I ain't exactly working right now at the moment,' he hedged.

‘What'd you when you was working?'

‘I was in a restaurant for a while. Dishwasher. Before that I was a porter in a bar.' He put the hat down on a table near the chair. ‘They wasn't much as jobs go. I got tired of cleaning up after white folks' leavings, so I quit.' There was a hard, resentful, slightly fierce quality in his voice when he said the words ‘white folks.'

‘How you live now?' And when he didn't answer, she said pointedly, ‘How you manage to eat?'

‘Well, I mostly works for the fellow that runs the poolroom a couple of blocks over. He's got a game going in the back. I kind of help around.'

Yes, she thought, and you saw Mary, and you think you're going to get yourself some free loving. Only he wasn't. He was going to have to pay for it. Mary would earn money, and she, Mrs. Hedges, would earn money from Mary's earnings. The more she thought about it, the more pleased she became with the idea, for making money and saving it had become a habit with her.

The street would provide plenty of customers. For there were so many men just like him who knew vaguely that they hadn't got anything out of life and knew clearly that they never would get it, even though they didn't know what it was they wanted; men who hated white folks sometimes without even knowing why; men who had to find escape from their hopes and fears, even if it was for just a little while. She would provide them with a means of escape in exchange for a few dollar bills.

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.

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?'