Ann Petry

by Ann Petry

  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.

  She and Bub sat on the long bench in the center of the waiting room. There were two people ahead of them, and she waited impatiently because she should have been at home fixing dinner and getting Bub’s clothes ready for school the next day.

  Each time the big doors that led to the street swung open, a rush of wet damp air flushed through the room. She took to watching the people who came in, wondering about them. A policeman came in with a tired-looking, old man. The man’s suit was shabby, but it was neatly pressed. He was wearing a stiff white collar.

  The policeman guided him toward the bench. “Sit here,” he said. The man gave no indication that he had heard. “Sit here,” the policeman repeated. “Naw,” as the old man started to move away. “Just sit down here, Pop.” Finally the old man sat down.

  She had watched him out of the corner of her eyes. He stared at the white hospital wall with a curious lack of interest. Nurses walked past him, white-coated internes strode by. There was a bustle and flurry when a stocky, gray-haired man with pince-nez glasses emerged from the elevator. “How are you, Doctor?” “Nice to see you back, Doctor.”

  The old man remained completely oblivious to the movement around him. The focus of his eyes never shifted from the expanse of wall in front of him.

  Bub moved closer to her. “Hey, Mom,” he whispered, “what’s the matter with him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said softly. “Maybe he’s just tired.”

  Right across from where they were sitting was a small room filled with volunteer ambulance drivers. They were lounging in the chairs, their shirt collars open, smoking cigarettes. The blue haze of the smoke drifted out into the waiting room. The cop went into the room to use the telephone.

  She heard him quite clearly. “I dunno. Picked him up on Eighth Avenue. Woman at the candy store said he’d been sittin’ there all day. Naw. On the steps. Yeah. Psychopathic, I guess.”

  The old man didn’t move, apparently didn’t hear. She found him strangely disturbing, because there was in his lack-luster staring the same quality of resignation that she had seen in the face of the girl on Lenox Avenue earlier in the spring. She remembered how she had tried to tie the two together and reach a conclusion about them and couldn’t because the man was old. She kept thinking that if he had lived that long, he should have been able to develop some inner strength that would have fought against whatever it was that had brought him to this aimless staring.

  The telephone in the room across from them rang and she forgot about the old man. The woman who answered it said, “Okay. Right away.” She turned to one of the drivers, gave him an address on Morningside Avenue, and said, “Hustle! They say it’s bad.”

  Lutie had h
oped that she would be able to get Bub into the emergency room before the ambulance came back, so that he wouldn’t be sitting round-eyed with fear when he saw whatever it was they brought back that was “bad.” She kept telling herself she shouldn’t have brought him here, but the fee was so low that it was almost like free treatment.

  The big street doors opened suddenly and the stretcher came through. The men carrying it moved quickly and with such precision that the stretcher was practically on top of them before Lutie realized it. The room was full of a low, terrible moaning, and the young girl on the stretcher was trying to sit up and blood was streaming out of the center of her body.

  A gray-haired woman walked beside the stretcher. She kept saying, “Cut to ribbons! Cut to ribbons! Cut to ribbons!”—over and over in a monotonous voice. It was raining so hard that even in getting from the street to the waiting room the woman had been soaked and water dripped from her coat, from her hatbrim.

  There was a long, awful moment while they maneuvered the stretcher past the bench and the girl moaned and tried to talk, and every once in a while she screamed—a sharp, thin, disembodied sound. The policeman looked at the girl in astonishment, but the old man never turned his head.

  Lutie had grabbed Bub and covered his face with her face so that he couldn’t see. He tried to squirm out of her arms and she held him closer and tighter. When she lifted her head, the stretcher was gone.

  Bub stood up and looked around. “What was the matter with her?” he asked.

  “She got hurt.”

  “How did she get hurt?”

  “I don’t know. It was an accident, I guess.”

  “Somebody cut her, didn’t they?” And when she didn’t answer, he repeated, “Didn’t they?”

  “I guess so, but I really don’t know.”

  “One of the kids at school got cut up like that,” he said, and then, “Why wouldn’t you let me look, Mom?”

  “Because I didn’t think it was good for you to look. And when people are hurt badly like that, it doesn’t help them to have someone stare at them.”

  While the interne dressed Bub’s knee, she thought about the girl on the stretcher. Just a kid. Not much over sixteen, and she had that same awful look of resignation, of not expecting anything better than that of life. She was like the girl on Lenox Avenue who had looked down at her brother lying on the sidewalk to say, “I always thought it’d happen.”

  Lutie sat motionless staring into the dark. She was cold and yet she didn’t move. She thought of the old man, the young girls. What reason did she have to believe that she and Bub wouldn’t become so accustomed to the sight and sound of violence and of death that they wouldn’t protest against it—they would become resigned to it; or that Bub finally wouldn’t end up on a sidewalk with a knife in his back?

  She felt she knew the steps by which that girl landed on the stretcher in the hospital. She could trace them easily. It could be that Bub might follow the same path.

  The girl probably went to high school for a few months and then got tired of it. She had no place to study at night because the house was full of roomers, and she had no incentive, anyway, because she didn’t have a real home. The mother was out to work all day and the father was long gone. She found out that boys liked her and she started bringing them to the apartment. The mother wasn’t there to know what was going on.

  They didn’t have real homes, no base, no family life. So at sixteen or seventeen the girl was fooling around with two or three different boys. One of them found out about the others. Like all the rest of them, he had only a curious supersensitive kind of pride that kept him going, so he had to have revenge and knives are cheap.

  It happened again and again all through Harlem. And she saw in her mind’s eye the curious procession of people she had met coming out of 121st Street. They were walking toward Eighth Avenue.

  She had been to the day-old bakery on Eighth Avenue and she stopped on the corner for the stop light. Down the length of the block she saw this group of people. They formed at first glance what appeared to be a procession, for they were walking slowly, stiffly. There was a goodish space between each one of them as though they didn’t want to be too close to each other and yet were held together in a group by shock. They were young—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen—and they were moving like sleepwalkers.

  Then she saw that they had set their pace to that of the girl walking in the very front. Someone was leading her by the arm, and she was walking slowly, her body was limp, her shoulders sagged.

  She had cringed away from the sight of the girl’s face. She couldn’t collect her thoughts for a moment, and then almost automatically the toneless reiterated words of the gray-haired woman in Roundtree Hospital came back to her: “Cut to ribbons! Cut to ribbons!”

  She couldn’t really see the girl’s face, because blood poured over it, starting at her forehead. It was oozing down over her eyes, her nose, over her cheeks, dripped even from her mouth. The bright red blood turned what had been her face into a gaudy mask with patches of brown here and there where her skin showed through.

  Lutie got that same jolting sense of shock and then of rage, because these people, all of them—the girl, the crowd in back of her—showed no horror, no surprise, no dismay. They had expected this. They were used to it. And they had become resigned to it.

  Yes, she thought, she and Bub had to get out of 116th Street. It was a bad street. And then she thought about the other streets. It wasn’t just this street that she was afraid of or that was bad. It was any street where people were packed together like sardines in a can.

  And it wasn’t just this city. It was any city where they set up a line and say black folks stay on this side and white folks on this side, so that the black folks were crammed on top of each other—jammed and packed and forced into the smallest possible space until they were completely cut off from light and air.

  It was any place where the women had to work to support the families because the men couldn’t get jobs and the men got bored and pulled out and the kids were left without proper homes because there was nobody around to put a heart into it. Yes. It was any place where people were so damn poor they didn’t have time to do anything but work, and their bodies were the only source of relief from the pressure under which they lived; and where the crowding together made the young girls wise beyond their years.

  It all added up to the same thing, she decided—white people. She hated them. She would always hate them. She forced herself to stop that train of thought. It led nowhere. It was unpleasant.

  She slipped out of the wool robe and got back into bed and lay there trying to convince herself that she didn’t have to stay on this street or any other street like it if she fought hard enough. Bub didn’t have to end up stretched out on a sidewalk with a knife through his back. She was going to sleep, and she wasn’t going to dream about supers who were transformed into wolfish dogs with buildings chained on their backs.

  She searched her mind for a pleasant thought to drift off to sleep on. And she started building a picture of herself standing before a microphone in a long taffeta dress that whispered sweetly as she moved; of a room full of dancers who paused in their dancing to listen as she sang. Their faces were expectant, worshiping, as they looked up at her.

  It was early when she woke up the next morning and she yawned and stretched and tried to remember what it was that had given her this feeling of anticipation. She burrowed her head deep into her pillow after she looked at the small clock on the bureau, because she could stay in bed for a few more minutes.

  And then she remembered. Tonight was the night that she was going to sing at the Casino. Perhaps after tonight was over she could leave this street and these dark, narrow rooms and these walls that pressed in against her. It would be like discarding a worn-out dress, a dress that was shiny from wear and faded from washing and whose seams were forever giving
way. The thought made her fling her arms out from under the covers. She pulled the covers close around her neck, for the room was cold and the steam was as yet only a rattling in the radiator.

  Immediately she began planning the things she had to do. When she got home from work, she would wash her hair and curl it, then press the long black taffeta skirt which with a plain white blouse would have to serve as evening gown. She wouldn’t wear her winter coat, even though it was cold out, for the little short black coat would look better.

  The hands of the battered clock moved toward seven and she jumped out of bed, shivered in the cold air, and slammed the airshaft shut.

  Pulling her bathrobe around her, she went into the living room. Bub was still sleeping and she tucked the covers tight under his chin, thinking that sometime soon he would wake up in a bedroom of his own. It would have maple furniture and the bedspread and draperies would have ships and boats on them. There would be plenty of windows in the room and it would look out over a park.

  In the kitchen she poured water into a saucepan, lit the gas stove, and stood waiting for the water to boil. While she stirred oatmeal into the boiling water, she began to wonder if perhaps she shouldn’t wear that thin white summer blouse instead of one of the plain long-sleeved ones. The summer blouse had a low, round neck. It would look a lot more dressed-up. She turned the flame low under the oatmeal, set the table, filled small glasses with tomato juice, thinking that Bub could sleep about fifteen more minutes. She would have just time enough to take a bath.

  But first she would look at the blouse to see if it needed pressing. She went into the bedroom and opened the closet door quietly. The blouse was rammed in between her one suit and her heavy winter coat. She reached her hand toward it, thinking, That’s just plain careless of me. It must be terribly wrinkled from having been put in there like that.

  She took the blouse out and held it up in front of her, staring at it in amazement. Why, it’s all crushed, and there’s dirt on it, she thought—great smudges of dirt and tight, small wrinkles as though it had been squeezed together. What on earth had Bub been doing with it?