by Ann Petry
‘Junto’s rich as hell,’ Boots said. ‘What you got to be so particular about? There ain’t a dame in town who wouldn’t give everything they got for a chance at him.’ And he thought, Naw, she ain’t acting right. And she was all that stood between him and going back to portering or some other lousy, stinking job where he would carry his hat in his hand all day and walk on his head, saying ‘Yessir, yessir, yessir.’
She moved away from the fireplace. There wasn’t any point in answering him. Right now she couldn’t even think straight, couldn’t even see straight. She kept thinking about the street, kept seeing it.
All those years, going to grammar school, going to high school, getting married, having a baby, going to work for the Chandlers, leaving Jim because he got himself another woman—all those years she’d been heading straight as an arrow for that street or some other street just like it. Step by step she’d come, growing up, working, saving, and finally getting an apartment on a street that nobody could have beaten. Even if she hadn’t talked to Bub about money all the time, he would have got into trouble sooner or later, because the street looked after him when she wasn’t around.
‘Aw, what the hell!’ Boots muttered. He put his glass down on the table in front of the sofa, got up and by moving swiftly blocked her progress to the door.
‘Let’s talk it over,’ he said. ‘Maybe we can work out something.’
She hesitated. There wasn’t anything to work out or talk over unless he meant he would lend her the money with no strings attached. And if he was willing to do that, she would be a fool not to accept it. Pop was a pretty feeble last resort.
‘Come on, baby,’ he said. ‘Ten minutes’ talk will straighten it out.’ And she went back to stand in front of the fireplace.
‘Ain’t no point in your getting mad, baby. We can still be friends,’ he said softly, and put his arm around her waist.
He was standing close to her. She smelt faintly sweet and he pulled her closer. She tried to back away from him and he forced her still closer, held her hands behind her back, pulling her ever closer and closer.
As he kissed her, he felt a hot excitement well up in him that made him forget all the logical, reasoned things he had meant to say; for her skin was soft under his mouth and warm. He fumbled with the fastenings of her coat, his hand groping toward her breasts.
‘Aw, Christ, baby,’ he whispered. ‘Junto can get his afterward.’ And the rhythm of the words sank into him, seemed to correspond with the rhythm of his desire for her so that he had to say them again. ‘Let him get his afterward. I’ll have mine first.’
She twisted out of his arms with a sudden, violent motion that nearly sent him off balance. The anger surging through her wasn’t directed solely at him. He was there at hand; he had tricked her into staying an extra few minutes in this room with him, because she thought he was going to lend her the money she so urgently needed; and she was angry with him for that and for being a procurer for Junto and for assuming that she would snatch at an opportunity to sleep with either or both of them. This quick surface anger helped to swell and became a part of the deepening stream of rage that had fed on the hate, the frustration, the resentment she had toward the pattern her life had followed.
So she couldn’t stop shouting, and shouting wasn’t enough. She wanted to hit out at him, to reduce him to a speechless mass of flesh, to destroy him completely, because he was there in front of her and she could get at him and in getting at him she would find violent outlet for the full sweep of her wrath.
Words tumbled from her throat. ‘You no good bastard!’ she shouted. ‘You can tell Junto I said if he wants a whore to get one from Mrs. Hedges. And the same thing goes for you. Because I’d just as soon get in bed with a rattlesnake—I’d just as soon—’
And he reached out and slapped her across the face. And as she stood there in front of him, trembling with anger, her face smarting, he slapped her again.
‘I don’t take that kind of talk from dames,’ he said. ‘Not even good-looking ones like you. Maybe after I beat the hell out of you a coupla times, you’ll begin to like the idea of sleeping with me and with Junto.’
The blood pounding in her head blurred her vision so that she saw not one Boots Smith but three of him; and behind these three figures the room was swaying, shifting, and changing with a wavering motion. She tried to separate the three blurred figures and it was like trying to follow the course of heat waves as they rose from a sidewalk on a hot day in August.
Despite this unstable triple vision of him, she was scarcely aware of him as an individual. His name might have been Brown or Smith or Wilson. She might never have seen him before, might have known nothing about him. He happened to be within easy range at the moment he set off the dangerous accumulation of rage that had been building in her for months.
When she remembered there was a heavy iron candlestick on the mantelpiece just behind her, her vision cleared; the room stopped revolving and Boots Smith became one person, not three. He was the person who had struck her, her face still hurt from the blow; he had threatened her with violence and with a forced relationship with Junto and with himself. These things set off her anger, but as she gripped the iron candlestick and brought it forward in a swift motion aimed at his head, she was striking, not at Boots Smith, but at a handy, anonymous figure—a figure which her angry resentment transformed into everything she had hated, everything she had fought against, everything that had served to frustrate her.
He was so close to her that she struck him on the side of the head before he saw the blow coming. The first blow stunned him. And she struck him again and again, using the candlestick as though it were a club. He tried to back away from her and stumbled over the sofa and sprawled there.
A lifetime of pent-up resentment went into the blows. Even after he lay motionless, she kept striking him, not thinking about him, not even seeing him. First she was venting her rage against the dirty, crowded street. She saw the rows of dilapidated old houses; the small dark rooms; the long steep flights of stairs; the narrow dingy hallways; the little lost girls in Mrs. Hedges’ apartment; the smashed homes where the women did drudgery because their men had deserted them. She saw all of these things and struck at them.
Then the limp figure on the sofa became, in turn, Jim and the slender girl she’d found him with; became the insult in the moist-eyed glances of white men on the subway; became the unconcealed hostility in the eyes of white women; became the greasy, lecherous man at the Crosse School for Singers; became the gaunt Super pulling her down, down into the basement.
Finally, and the blows were heavier, faster, now, she was striking at the white world which thrust black people into a walled enclosure from which there was no escape; and at the turn-of-events which had forced her to leave Bub alone while she was working so that he now faced reform school, now had a police record.
She saw the face and head of the man on the sofa through waves of anger in which he represented all these things and she was destroying them.
She grew angrier as she struck him, because he seemed to be eluding her behind a red haze that obscured his face. Then the haze of red blocked his face out completely. She lowered her arm, peering at him, trying to locate his face through the redness that concealed it.
The room was perfectly still. There was no sound in it except her own hoarse breathing. She let the candlestick fall out of her hand. It landed on the thick rug with a soft clump and she started to shiver.
He was dead. There was no question about it. No one could live with a head battered in like that. And it wasn’t a red haze that had veiled his face. It was blood.
She backed away from the sight of him, thinking that if she took one slow step at a time, just one slow step at a time, she could get out of here, walking backward, step by step. She was afraid to turn her back on that still figure on the sofa. It had become a thing. It was no longer Boots Smith, but a thing on a sofa.
She stumbled against a chair and sat down in
it, shivering. She would never get out of this room. She would never, never get out of here. For the rest of her life she would be here with this awful faceless thing on the sofa. Then she forced herself to get up, to start walking backward again.
The foyer door was closed because she backed right into it. Just a few more steps and she would be out. She fumbled for the knob. The door was locked. She didn’t believe it and rattled it. She felt for a key. There was none. It would, she was certain, be in Boots Smith’s pocket and she felt a faint stirring of anger against him. He had deliberately locked the door because he hadn’t intended to let her out of here.
The anger went as quickly as it came. She had to go back to that motionless, bloody figure on the sofa. The stillness in the room made her feel as though she was wading through water, wading waist-deep toward the couch, and the water swallowed up all sound. It tugged against her, tried to pull her back.
The key was in his pocket. In her haste she pulled all the things out of his pocket—a handkerchief, a wallet, book matches, and the key. She held on to the key, but the other things went out of her hand because as she drew away from him she thought he moved. And all the stories she had ever heard about the dead coming back to life, about the dead talking, about the dead walking, went through her mind; making her hands shake so that she couldn’t control them.
As she moved hurriedly away from the couch, she almost stepped on the wallet. She picked it up and looked inside. It bulged with money. He could have given her two hundred dollars and never missed it.
The two hundred dollars she needed was right there in her hand. She could take it to the lawyer tonight. Or could she?
For the first time the full implication of what she had done swept over her. She was a murderer. And the smartest lawyer in the world couldn’t do anything for Bub, not now, not when his mother had killed a man. A kid whose mother was a murderer didn’t stand any chance at all. Everyone he came in contact with would believe that sooner or later he, too, would turn criminal. The Court wouldn’t parole him in her care either, because she was no longer a fit person to bring him up.
She couldn’t stop the quivering that started in her stomach, that set up a spasmodic contracting of her throat so that she felt as though her breath had been cut off. The only thing she could do was to go away and never come back, because the best thing that could happen to Bub would be for him never to know that his mother was a murderer. She took half the bills out of the wallet, wadded them into her purse, left the wallet on the sofa.
Getting back to the foyer door was worse this time. The four corners of the room were alive with silence—deepening pools of an ominous silence. She kept turning her head in an effort to see all of the room at once; kept fighting against a desire to scream. Hysteria mounted in her because she began to believe that at any moment the figure on the sofa might disappear into one of these pools of silence and then emerge from almost any part of the room, to bar her exit.
When she finally turned the key in the door, crossed the small foyer, and reached the outside hall, she had to lean against the wall for a long moment before she could control the shaking of her legs, but the contracting of her throat was getting worse.
She saw that the white gloves she was wearing were streaked with dust from the candlestick. There was a smear of blood on one of them. She ripped them off and put them in her coat pocket, and as she did it she thought she was acting as though murder was something with which she was familiar. She walked down the stairs instead of taking the elevator, and the thought recurred.
When she left the building, it was snowing hard. The wind blew the snow against her face, making her walk faster as she approached the entrance to the Eighth Avenue subway.
She thought confusedly of the best place for her to go. It had to be a big city. She decided that Chicago was not too far away and it was big. It would swallow her up. She would go there.
On the subway she started shivering again. Had she killed Boots by accident? The awful part of it was she hadn’t even seen him when she was hitting him like that. The first blow was deliberate and provoked, but all those other blows weren’t provoked. There wasn’t any excuse for her. It hadn’t even been self-defense. This impulse to violence had been in her for a long time, growing, feeding, until finally she had blown up in a thousand pieces. Bub must never know what she had done.
In Pennsylvania Station she bought a ticket for Chicago. ‘One way?’ the ticket man asked.
‘One way,’ she echoed. Yes, a one-way ticket, she thought. I’ve had one since the day I was born.
The train was on the track. People flowed and spilled through the gates like water running over a dam. She walked in the middle of the crowd.
The coaches filled up rapidly. People with bags and hatboxes and bundles and children moved hastily down the aisles, almost falling into the scats in their haste to secure a place to sit.
Lutie found a seat midway in the coach. She sat down near the window. Bub would never understand why she had disappeared. He was expecting to see her tomorrow. She had promised him she would come. He would never know why she had deserted him and he would be bewildered and lost without her.
Would he remember that she loved him? She hoped so, but she knew that for a long time he would have that half-frightened, worried look she had seen on his face the night he was waiting for her at the subway.
He would probably go to reform school. She looked out of the train window, not seeing the last-minute passengers hurrying down the ramp. The constriction of her throat increased. So he will go to reform school, she repeated. He’ll be better off there. He’ll be better off without you. That way he may have some kind of chance. He didn’t have the ghost of a chance on that street. The best you could give him wasn’t good enough.
As the train started to move, she began to trace a design on the window. It was a series of circles that flowed into each other. She remembered that when she was in grammar school the children were taught to get the proper slant to their writing, to get the feel of a pen in their hands, by making these same circles.
Once again she could hear the flat, exasperated voice of the teacher as she looked at the circles Lutie had produced. ‘Really,’ she said, ‘I don’t know why they have us bother to teach your people to write.’
Her finger moved over the glass, around and around. The circles showed up plainly on the dusty surface. The woman’s statement was correct, she thought. What possible good has it done to teach people like me to write?
The train crept out of the tunnel, gathered speed as it left the city behind. Snow whispered against the windows. And as the train roared into the darkness, Lutie tried to figure out by what twists and turns of fate she had landed on this train. Her mind balked at the task. All she could think was, It was that street. It was that god-damned street.
The snow fell softly on the street. It muffled sound. It sent people scurrying homeward, so that the street was soon deserted, empty, quiet. And it could have been any street in the city, for the snow laid a delicate film over the sidewalk, over the brick of the tired, old buildings; gently obscuring the grime and the garbage and the ugliness.
THE END
About the Author
ANN PETRY (1912–1997) is also the author of The Narrows, Country Place, and Miss Muriel and Other Stories. The Street was her first novel.