by Ann Petry
She never found out what had prompted Jonathan Chandler to kill himself. She wasn’t too interested. But she was interested in the way in which money transformed a suicide she had seen committed from start to finish in front of her very eyes into ‘an accident with a gun.’ It was done very neatly, too. Mrs. Chandler’s mother simply called Mrs. Chandler’s father in Washington. Lutie overheard the tail-end of the conversation, ‘Now you get it fixed up. Oh, yes, you can. He was cleaning a gun.’
And Mr. Chandler talked very quietly but firmly to the local doctor and to the coroner. It took several rye highballs and some of the expensive imported cigars, and Lutie could only conjecture what else, but it ended up as an accident with a gun on the death certificate. Everybody was sympathetic—so tragic to have it happen on Christmas morning right in the Chandlers’ living room.
However, after the accident both Mr. and Mrs. Chandler started drinking far too much. And Mrs. Chandler’s mother arrived more and more often to stay two and three weeks at a time. There were three cars in the garage now instead of two. And Mrs. Chandler had a personal maid and there was talk of getting a bigger house. But Mrs. Chandler seemed to care less and less about everything and anything—even the bridge games and parties.
She kept buying new clothes. Dresses and coats and suits. And after wearing them a few times, she would give them to Lutie because she was tired of looking at them. And Lutie accepted them gravely, properly grateful. The clothes would have fitted her perfectly, but some obstinacy in her that she couldn’t overcome prevented her from ever wearing them. She mailed them to Pop’s current girl friend, taking an ironic pleasure in the thought that Mrs. Chandler’s beautiful clothes Designed For Country Living would be showing up nightly in the gin mill at the corner of Seventh Avenue and noth Street.
For in those two years with the Chandlers she had learned all about Country Living. She learned about it from the pages of the fat sleek magazines Mrs. Chandler subscribed for and never read. Vogue, Town and Country, Harper’s Bazaar, House and Garden, House Beautiful. Mrs. Chandler didn’t even bother to take them out of their wrappings when they came in the mail, but handed them to Lutie, saying, ‘Here, Lutie. Maybe you’d like to look at this.’
A bookstore in New York kept Mrs. Chandler supplied with all the newest books, but she never read them. Handed them to Lutie still in their wrappings just like the magazines. And Lutie decided that it was almost like getting a college education free of charge. Besides, Mrs. Chandler was really very nice to her. The wall between them wasn’t quite so high. Only it was still there, of course.
Sometimes, when she was going to Jamaica, Mrs. Chandler would go to New York. And they would take the same train. On the ride down they would talk—about some story being played up in the newspapers, about clothes or some moving picture.
But when the train pulled into Grand Central, the wall was suddenly there. Just as they got off the train, just as the porter was reaching for Mrs. Chandler’s pigskin luggage, the wall suddenly loomed up. It was Mrs. Chandler’s voice that erected it. Her voice high, clipped, carrying, as she said, ‘I’ll see you on Monday, Lutie.’
There was a firm note of dismissal in her voice so that the other passengers pouring off the train turned to watch the rich young woman and her colored maid; a tone of voice that made people stop to hear just when it was the maid was to report back for work. Because the voice unmistakably established the relation between the blond young woman and the brown young woman.
And it never failed to stir resentment in Lutie. She argued with herself about it. Of course, she was a maid. She had no illusions about that. But would it hurt Mrs. Chandler just once to talk at that moment of parting as though, however incredible it might seem to anyone who was listening, they were friends? Just two people who knew each other and to whom it was only incidental that one of them was white and the other black?
Even while she argued with herself, she was answering in a noncommittal voice, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ And took her battered suitcase up the ramp herself, hastening, walking faster and faster, hurrying toward home and Jim and Bub. To spend four days cleaning house and holding Bub close to her and trying to hold Jim close to her, too, in spite of the gap that seemed to have grown a little wider each time she came home.
She had been at the Chandlers exactly two years on the day she got the letter from Pop. She held it in her hand before she opened it. There was something terribly wrong if Pop had gone to all the trouble of writing a letter. If the baby was sick, he would have phoned. Jim couldn’t be sick, because Pop would have phoned about that, too. Because he had the number of the Chandlers’ telephone. She had given it to him when she first came here to work. Reluctantly she opened the envelope. It was a very short note: ‘Dear Lutie: You better come home. Jim’s carrying on with another woman. Pop.’
It was like having the earth suddenly open up so that it turned everything familiar into a crazy upside down position, so that she could no longer find any of the things that had once been hers. And she was filled with fear because she might not ever be able to find them again. She looked at the letter for a third, a fourth, a fifth time, and it still said the same thing. That Jim had fallen for some other woman. And it must be something pretty serious if it so alarmed Pop that he actually wrote her a letter about it. She thought Pop can’t suddenly have turned moral—Pop who had lived with so many Mamies and Lauras and Mollies that he must have long since forgotten some of them himself. So it must be that Jim had admitted some kind of permanent attachment for this woman whoever she was.
She thrust the thought away from her and went to tell Mrs. Chandler that she had to go home that very day because the baby was seriously ill. She couldn’t bring herself to tell her what the real trouble was because, if Mrs. Chandler was anything like her mother, she took it for granted that all colored people were immoral and Lutie saw no reason for providing further evidence.
On the train she kept remembering Mrs. Pizzini’s words: ‘Not good for the woman to work when she’s young. Not good for the man.’ Queer. Though she hadn’t paid too much attention at the time, just remembering the words made her see the whole inside of the vegetable store again. The pale yellow color of the grapefruit, dark green of mustard greens and spinach. The patient brown color of the potatoes. The delicate green of the heads of lettuce. She could see Mrs. Pizzini’s dark weather-beaten skin and remembered how Mrs. Pizzini had hesitated and then turned back to say: ‘It’s best that the man do the work when the babies are young.’
She forgot that Jim wasn’t expecting her as she hurried to the little frame house in Jamaica, not thinking about anything except the need to get there quickly, quickly, before every familiar thing she knew had been destroyed.
Still hurrying, she opened the front door and walked in. Walked into her own house to find there was another woman living there with Jim. A slender, dark brown girl whose eyes shifted crazily when she saw her. The girl was cooking supper and Jim was sitting at the kitchen table watching her.
If he hadn’t held her arms, she would have killed the other girl. Even now she could feel rage rise inside her at the very thought. There she had been sending practically all her wages, month after month, keeping only a little for herself; skimping on her visits because of the carfare and because she was trying to save enough money to form a backlog for them when she quit her job. Month after month and that black bitch had been eating the food she bought, sleeping in her bed, making love to Jim.
He forced her into a chair and held her there while the girl packed and got out. When Lutie finally cooled off enough to be able to talk coherently, he only laughed at her. Even when he saw that she was getting into a red rage at the sight of his laughter.
‘What did you expect?’ he asked. ‘Maybe you can go on day after day with nothing to do but just cook meals for yourself and a kid. With just enough money to be able to eat and have a roof over your head. But I can’t. And I don’t intend to.’
‘Why didn’t you say so?�
� she asked fiercely. ‘Why did you let me go on working for those white people and not tell me—’
He only shrugged and laughed. That was all she could get out of him—laughter. What’s the use—what’s the point—who cares? If even once he had put his arms around her and said he was sorry and asked her to forgive him, she would have stayed. But he didn’t. So she called a moving man and had him take all the furniture that was hers. Everything that belonged to her: the scarred bedroom set, the radio, the congoleum rug, a battered studio couch, an easy-chair—and Bub. She wasn’t going to leave him behind for Jim to abuse or ignore as he saw fit.
She and Bub went to live with Pop in that crowded, musty flat on Seventh Avenue. She hunted for a job with a grim persistence that was finally rewarded, for two weeks later she went to work as a hand presser in a steam laundry. It was hot. The steam was unbearable. But she forced herself to go to night school—studying shorthand and typing and filing. Every time it seemed as though she couldn’t possibly summon the energy to go on with the course, she would remind herself of all the people who had got somewhere in spite of the odds against them. She would think of the Chandlers and their young friends—‘It’s the richest damn country in the world.’
Mrs. Chandler wrote her a long letter and Jim forwarded it to her from Jamaica. ‘Lutie dear: We haven’t had a decent thing to eat since you left. And Little Henry misses you so much he’s almost sick—’ She didn’t answer it. She had more problems than Mrs. Chandler and Little Henry had and they could always find somebody to solve theirs if they paid enough.
It took a year and a half before she mastered the typing, because at night she was so tired when she went to the business school on 125th Street she couldn’t seem to concentrate on what she was doing. Her back ached and her arms felt as though they had been pulled out of their sockets. But she finally acquired enough speed so that she could take a civil service examination. For she had made up her mind that she wasn’t going to wash dishes or work in a laundry in order to earn a living for herself and Bub.
Another year dragged by. A year in which she passed four or five exams each time way down on the list. A year that she spent waiting and waiting for an appointment and taking other exams. Four years of the steam laundry and then she got an appointment as a file clerk.
That kitchen in Connecticut had changed her whole life—that kitchen all tricks and white enamel like this one in the advertisement. The train roared into 115th Street and she began pushing her way toward the doors, turning to take one last look at the advertisement as she left the car.
On the platform she hurried toward the downtown side and elbowed her way toward the waiting local. Only a few minutes and she would be at 116th Street. She didn’t have any illusions about 116th Street as a place to live, but at the moment it represented a small victory—one of a series which were the result of her careful planning. First the white-collar job, then an apartment of her own where she and Bub would be by themselves away from Pop’s boisterous friends, away from Lil with her dyed hair and strident voice, away from the riff-raff roomers who made it possible for Pop to pay his rent. Even after living on 116th Street for two weeks, the very fact of being there was still a victory.
As for the street, she thought, getting up at the approaching station signs, she wasn’t afraid of its influence, for she would fight against it. Streets like 116th Street or being colored, or a combination of both with all it implied, had turned Pop into a sly old man who drank too much; had killed Mom off when she was in her prime.
In that very apartment house in which she was now living, the same combination of circumstances had evidently made the Mrs. Hedges who sat in the street-floor window turn to running a fairly well-kept whorehouse—but unmistakably a whorehouse; and the superintendent of the building—well, the street had pushed him into basements away from light and air until he was being eaten up by some horrible obsession; and still other streets had turned Min, the woman who lived with him, into a drab drudge so spineless and so limp she was like a soggy dishrag. None of those things would happen to her, Lutie decided, because she would fight back and never stop fighting back.
She got off the train, thinking that she never felt really human until she reached Harlem and thus got away from the hostility in the eyes of the white women who stared at her on the downtown streets and in the subway. Escaped from the openly appraising looks of the white men whose eyes seemed to go through her clothing to her long brown legs. On the trains their eyes came at her furtively from behind newspapers, or half-concealed under hatbrims or partly shielded by their hands. And there was a warm, moist look about their eyes that made her want to run.
These other folks feel the same way, she thought—that once they are freed from the contempt in the eyes of the downtown world, they instantly become individuals. Up here they are no longer creatures labeled simply ‘colored’ and therefore all alike. She noticed that once the crowd walked the length of the platform and started up the stairs toward the street, it expanded in size. The same people who had made themselves small on the train, even on the platform, suddenly grew so large they could hardly get up the stairs to the street together. She reached the street at the very end of the crowd and stood watching them as they scattered in all directions, laughing and talking to each other.
3
AFTER she came out of the subway, Lutie walked slowly up the street, thinking that having solved one problem there was always a new one cropping up to take its place. Now that she and Bub were living alone, there was no one to look out for him after school. She had thought he could eat lunch at school, for it didn’t cost very much—only fifty cents a week.
But after three days of school lunches, Bub protested, ‘I can’t eat that stuff. They give us soup every day. And I hate it.’
As soon as she could afford to, she would take an afternoon off from work and visit the school so that she could find out for herself what the menus were like. But until then, Bub would have to eat lunch at home, and that wasn’t anything to worry about. It was what happened to him after school that made her frown as she walked along, for he was either in the apartment by himself or playing in the street.
She didn’t know which was worse—his being alone in those dreary little rooms Or his playing in the street where the least of the dangers confronting him came from the stream of traffic which roared through 116th Street: crosstown buses, postoffice trucks, and newspaper delivery cars that swooped up and down the street turning into the avenues without warning. The traffic was an obvious threat to his safety that he could see and dodge. He was too young to recognize and avoid other dangers in the street. There were, for instance, gangs of young boys who were always on the lookout for small fry Bub’s age, because they found young kids useful in getting in through narrow fire-escape windows, in distracting a storekeeper’s attention while the gang light-heartedly helped itself to his stock.
Then, in spite of the small, drab apartment and the dent that moving into it had made in her week’s pay and the worry about Bub that crept into her thoughts, she started humming under her breath as she went along, increasing her stride so that she was walking faster and faster because the air was crisp and clear and her long legs felt strong and just the motion of walking sent blood bubbling all through her body so that she could feel it. She came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the block because she suddenly remembered that she had completely forgotten to shop for dinner.
The butcher shop that she entered on Eighth Avenue was crowded with customers, so that she had ample time to study the meat in the case in front of her before she was waited on. There wasn’t, she saw, very much choice—ham hocks, lamb culls, bright-red beef. Someone had told Granny once that the butchers in Harlem used embalming fluid on the beef they sold in order to give it a nice fresh color. Lutie didn’t believe it, but like a lot of things she didn’t believe, it cropped up suddenly out of nowhere to leave her wondering and staring at the brilliant scarlet color of the meat. It made her examine
the contents of the case with care in order to determine whether there was something else that would do for dinner. No, she decided. Hamburger would be the best thing to get. It cooked quickly, and a half-pound of it mixed with breadcrumbs would go a long way.
The butcher, a fat red-faced man with a filthy apron tied around his enormous stomach, joked with the women lined up at the counter while he waited on them. A yellow cat sitting high on a shelf in back of him blinked down at the customers. One of his paws almost touched the edge of a sign that said ‘No Credit.’ The sign was fly-specked and dusty; its edges curling back from heat.
‘Kitty had her meat today?’ a thin black woman asked as she smiled up at the cat.
‘Sure thing,’ and the butcher roared with laughter, and the women laughed with him until the butcher shop was so full of merriment it sounded as though it were packed with happy, carefree people.
It wasn’t even funny, Lutie thought. Yet the women rocked and roared with laughter as though they had heard some tremendous joke, went on laughing until finally there were only low chuckles and an occasional half-suppressed snort of laughter left in them. For all they knew, she thought resentfully, the yellow cat might yet end up in the meat-grinder to emerge as hamburger. Or perhaps during the cold winter months the butcher might round up all the lean, hungry cats that prowled through the streets; herding them into his back room to skin them and grind them up to make more and more hamburger that would be sold way over the ceiling price.
‘A half-pound of hamburger,’ was all she said when the butcher indicated it was her turn to be waited on. A half-pound would take care of tonight’s dinner and Bub could have a sandwich of it when he came home for lunch.