The Street (41 page)

‘You—you—' he began, but the rest of the words, the words saying exactly what he thought of her, refused to come out. He might as well go inside. His feet were tired. He felt tired all over from the excitement, from the satisfaction of having her where he wanted her. His head ached a little, too, because of the way the blood had pounded through it.

‘Bub's kind of late today, ain't he?' Mrs. Hedges hailed him as he went past her window.

‘I dunno,' he said gruffly. She couldn't know anything. He'd never talked to Bub out here on the street. And just now, when he talked with the white men, he had been well out of earshot. It was impossible for her to know what he had done.

Perhaps he had been right in the beginning and she could really read his mind. The thought frightened him so that he stumbled in his haste to get inside, away from that queer speculative look in her eyes. No matter what she knew, he couldn't leave here until he saw Lutie Johnson all broken up by what had happened to her kid. He just wouldn't stand outside on the street any more. That way he'd be safe, because it was a sure thing Mrs. Hedges couldn't read his mind through the walls of the house.

Mrs. Hedges stopped Lutie as she came home from work. ‘Dearie,' she said, ‘they're waitin' for you.'

‘Who?' Lutie said.

‘Detectives. Two of 'em. Upstairs.'

‘What do they want?' she asked.

‘It's about Bub, dearie.'

‘What about him?' she said sharply. ‘What about him?'

‘Seems he's been taking letters from mail boxes. They caught him at it this afternoon, dearie.'

‘Oh, my God!' she said.

And then she was running up the stairs, going up flight after flight, not pausing to catch her breath, not stopping on the landings, but running, running, running, without thought, senselessly, up and up the stairs, with her heart pounding as she forced herself to go faster and faster, pounding until there was a sharp pain in her chest. She didn't think as she ran, but she kept saying, Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! over and over in her mind.

The two men standing outside the door of her apartment talked as they waited.

‘Every time I come in one of these dumps, I can't help thinking they're not fit for pigs to live in, let alone people.'

The other shrugged. ‘So what?' They were both silent, and the one who had shrugged his shoulders continued, ‘Mebbe you don't know that a white man ain't safe in one of these hallways by himself.'

‘What's that got to do with it?'

‘I dunno.'

They were silent again. And then one of them said,
‘Wonder what the mother looks like,' idly, aimlessly, passing the time.

‘Probably some drunken bitch. They usually are.'

‘Hope she doesn't start screaming and bring the whole joint down on our ears.' He looked uneasily at the battered wood of the closed doors that lined the hall.

When Lutie reached the top floor, she was panting so that for a moment she couldn't talk. ‘Where is he?' she demanded. She looked around the hall. ‘Where is he? Where is he?' she asked hysterically.

‘Take it easy, lady. Take it easy,' one of them said.

‘Don't get excited. He's down at the Children's Shelter. You can see him tomorrow,' said the other, as he extended a long, white paper. It crackled as he placed it in her hand.

Then they left, jostling against each other in their haste to get down the stairs.

She tried to read what it said on the paper and the print wavered and changed shape, grew larger and then smaller. The stiff paper refused to stay still because her hands were shaking. She flattened it against the wall, and looked at it until she saw that it said something about a hearing at Children's Court.

Children's Court. Court. Court. Court meant lawyer. She had to get a lawyer. She started down the stairs, walking slowly, stiffly. Her knees refused to bend, her legs refused to go fast. Her legs felt brittle. As though whatever had made them work before had suddenly disappeared, and because it was gone they would break easily, just snap in two if she forced them to go quickly.

She had thought Bub would be waiting there at the top of the stairs. But he was in the Children's Shelter. She tried to visualize what kind of place it could be and gave up the effort.

Bub would go to reform school. She stopped on the fourth-floor landing to look at the thought, to examine it, to get used to it. Bub would go to re-form school. And she reached out and touched the wall with her hand, then leaned the weight of her body against it because her legs were trembling, the muscles quivering, knees buckling.

Her thoughts were like a chorus chanting inside her head. The men stood around and the women worked. The men left the women and the women went on working and the kids were left alone. The kids burned lights all night because they were alone in small, dark rooms and they were afraid. Alone. Always alone. They wouldn't stay in the house after school because they were afraid in the empty, silent, dark rooms. And they should have been playing in wide stretches of green park and instead they were in the street. And the street reached out and sucked them up.

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.

‘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 contents 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.