by Ann Petry
Yes, she thought, if you were born black and not too ugly, this is what you get, this is what you find. It was a pity he hadn’t lived back in the days of slavery, so he could have raided the slave quarters for a likely wench any hour of the day or night. This is the superior race, she said to herself, take a good long look at him: black, oily hair; slack, gross body; grease spots on his vest; wrinkled shirt collar; cigar ashes on his suit; small pig eyes engulfed in the fat of his face.
She remembered the inkwell on the desk in back of him. She picked it up in a motion so swift that he had no time to guess her intent. She hurled it full force in his face. The ink paused for a moment at the obstruction of his eyebrows, then dripped down over the fat jowls, over the wrinkled collar, the grease-stained vest; trickled over his mouth.
She slammed the door of the office behind her. The girl in the reception room looked up, startled at the sound.
“Through so quick?” she asked.
“Yes.” She walked past the girl. Hurry, she told herself. Hurry, hurry, hurry!
“Didya fill out a application?” the girl called after her.
“I won’t need one”—she said the words over her shoulder.
She boarded a Sixth Avenue train at Forty-Second Street. It was crowded with passengers. She closed her eyes to shut them out, gripping the overhead strap tightly. She welcomed the roar of the train as it sped toward Fifty-Ninth Street, welcomed its lurching, swaying motion. She wished that it would go faster, make more noise, rock more wildly, because the tumultuous anger in her could only be quelled by violence.
She sought release from the urgency of her rage by deliberately picturing the train plunging suddenly off the track in a fury of sound—the metal coaches rushing headlong on top of each other in a whole series of thunderous explosions.
The burst of anger died away slowly and she began to think of herself drearily. She was running around a small circle, around and around like a squirrel in a cage. All this business of saving money in order to move added up to less than nothing, because she had forgotten or blithely overlooked the fact that she couldn’t find any better place to live, not for the amount of rent she could pay.
She thought of Mr. Crosse with a sudden access of hate that made her bite her lips; and then of Junto, who had prevented her from getting the job at the Casino. She remembered the friends of the Chandlers who had thought of her as a nigger wench; only, of course, they were too well-bred to use the word “nigger.” And the hate in her increased.
The train stopped at Fifty-Ninth Street, took on more passengers, then gathered speed for the long run to 125th Street.
Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North’s lynch mobs, she thought bitterly; the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place. And she began thinking of Pop unable to get a job; of Jim slowly disintegrating because he, too, couldn’t get a job, and of the subsequent wreck of their marriage; of Bub left to his own devices after school. From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in and the wall had been built up brick by brick by eager white hands.
When she got off the local at 116th Street, she didn’t remember having changed trains at 125th Street. She was surprised to find that Bub was waiting for her at the subway entrance. He didn’t see her, and she paused for a moment, noting the anxious way he watched the people pouring into the street, twisting his neck in his effort to make certain he didn’t miss her. She was so late getting home that he had evidently been worried about her; and she tried to imagine what it would be like for him if something had happened to her and she hadn’t come.
At this hour there were countless children with doorkeys tied around their necks, hovering at the corner. They were seeking their mothers in the homecoming throng surging up from the subway. They’re too young to be familiar with worry, she thought, for their expressions were exactly like Bub’s—apprehensive, a little frightened. They’re behind the same wall already. She walked over to Bub.
“Hello, hon,” she said gently. She put her arm around his shoulders as they walked toward home.
He was silent for a while, and then he said, “Mom, are you sure you’re not mad at me?”
She tightened her grip on his shoulder. “Of course not,” she said. She was neatly caged here on this street and tonight’s experience had increased the growing frustration and hatred in her. It probably shows in my face, she thought, dismayed, and Bub can see it.
“I’m not mad at you at all. I couldn’t be”—she caressed his cheek. “I’ve been worried about something.”
She thought of the animals at the Zoo. She and Bub had gone there one Sunday afternoon. They arrived in time to see the lions and tigers being fed. There was a moment, before the great hunks of red meat were thrust into the cages, when the big cats prowled back and forth, desperate, raging, ravening. They walked in a space even smaller than the confines of the cages made necessary, moving in an area just barely the length of their bodies. A few steps up and turn. A few steps down and turn. They were weaving back and forth, growling, roaring, raging at the bars that kept them from the meat, until the entire building was filled with the sound, until the people watching drew back from the cages, feeling insecure, frightened at the sight and the sound of such uncontrolled savagery. She was becoming something like that.
“I’m not mad at you, hon,” she repeated. “I guess I was mad at myself.”
Because she was late getting home and she knew that Bub was hungry, she tried to hurry the preparation of dinner. And when she tried to light the gas stove, there was a sudden, flaring burst of flame that seared the flesh of her hand and set it to smarting and burning. Bub was leaning out of the kitchen window intently watching the dogs in the yard below.
“Damn it,” she said. She covered her hand with a dishtowel, holding the towel tightly to keep the air away from the burn. It wasn’t a bad burn, she thought; it was a mere scorching of surface skin.
Yet she couldn’t check the rage that welled up in her. “Damn being poor!” she shouted. “God damn it!”
She set the table with a slam-bang of plates and a furious rattling of knives and forks. She put the glasses down hard, so that they smacked against the table’s surface, dragged the chairs across the floor until the room was filled with noise, with confusion, with swift, angry movement.
The next afternoon after school, Bub rang the Super’s bell.
“I changed my mind, Supe,” he said. “I’ll be glad to help you.”
Chapter 14
* * *
IT WAS ONLY TWO-THIRTY in the afternoon. Miss Rinner looked at the wriggling, twisting children seated in front of her and frowned. There was a whole half-hour, thirty long unpleasant minutes to be got through before she would be free from the unpleasant sight of these ever-moving, brown young faces.
The pale winter sunlight streaming through the dusty windows and the steam hissing faintly in the big radiators intensified the smells in the room. All the classrooms she had ever taught in were permeated with the same mixture of odors: the dusty smell of chalk, the heavy, suffocating smell of the pine oil used to lay the grime and disinfect the worn old floors, and the smell of the children themselves. But she had long since forgotten what the forty-year-old buildings in other parts of the city smelt like, and with the passing of the years had easily convinced herself that this Harlem school contained a peculiarly offensive odor.
At first she had thought of the odors that clung to the children’s clothing as “that fried smell”—identifying it as the rancid grease that had been used to cook pancakes, fish, pork chops.
As the years slipped by—years of facing a room swarming with restless children—she came to think of the accumulation of scents in her classroom with hate as “the colored people’s smell,” and then finally as the smell of Harlem itself—bold, strong, lusty, frightening.<
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She was never wholly rid of the odor. It assailed her while she ate her lunch in the corner drugstore, when she walked through the street; it lurked in the subway station where she waited for a train. She brooded about it at home until finally she convinced herself the same rank, fetid smell pervaded her small apartment.
When she unlocked the door of her classroom on Monday mornings, the smell had gained in strength as though it were a living thing that had spawned over the week-end and in reproducing itself had now grown so powerful it could be seen as well as smelt.
She had to pause in the doorway to nerve herself for her entry; then, pressing a handkerchief saturated with eau de Cologne tight against her nose, she would cross the room at a trot and fling the windows open. The stench quickly conquered the fresh cold air; besides, the children insisted on wearing their coats because they said they were cold sitting under open windows. Then the odors that clung to their awful coats filled the room, mingling with the choking pine odor, the dusty smell of chalk.
The sight of them sitting in their coats always forced her to close the windows, for the coats were shabby, ragged, with gaping holes in the elbows. None of them fit properly. They were either much too big or much too small. Bits of shedding cat fur formed the collars of the little girls’ coats; the hems were coming out. The instant she looked at them, she felt as though she were suffocating, because any contact with their rubbishy garments was unbearable.
So in spite of the need for fresh air she would say, “Close windows. Hang up coats.” And for the rest of the day she would avoid the clothes closet in the back of the room where the coats were hung.
Thus drearily she would start another day. It always seemed as if by Monday she should have been refreshed and better able to face the children, but the fact that the smell lingered in her nostrils over the week-end prevented her from completely relaxing. And when the class assembled, the sight of their dark skins, the sound of the soft blurred speech that came from their throats, filled her with the hysterical desire to scream. As the week wore along, the desire increased, until by Fridays she was shaking, quivering inside.
On Saturdays and Sundays she dreamed of the day when she would be transferred to a school where the children were blond, blue-eyed little girls who arrived on time in the morning filled with orange juice, cereal and cream, properly cooked eggs, and tall glasses of milk. They would sit perfectly still until school was out; they would wear starched pink dresses and smell faintly of lavender soap; and they would look at her with adoration.
These children were impudent. They were ill-clad, dirty. They wriggled about like worms, moving their arms and legs in endless, intricate patterns, and they frightened her. Their parents and Harlem itself frightened her.
Having taught ten years in Harlem, she had learned that a sharp pinch administered to the soft flesh of the upper arm, a sudden twist of the wrist, a violent shove in the back, would keep these eight- and nine-year-olds under control, but she was still afraid of them. There was a sudden, reckless violence about them and about their parents that terrified her.
She regarded teaching them anything as a hopeless task, so she devoted most of the day to maintaining order and devising ingenious ways of keeping them occupied. She sent them on errands. They brought back supplies: paper, pencils, chalk, rulers; they trotted back and forth with notes to the nurse, to the principal, to other teachers. The building was old and vast, and a trip to another section of it used up a good half-hour or more; and if the child lingered going and coming, it took even longer.
Because the school was in Harlem she knew she wasn’t expected to do any more than this. Each year she promoted the entire class, with few exceptions. The exceptions were, she stated, unmanageable and were placed in opportunity classes. Thus each fall she started with a fresh crop of youngsters.
At frequent intervals the children would bring penknives into the classroom. Her mind immediately transformed them into long, viciously curving blades. The first time it happened, she attempted to get a transfer to another district. Ten years had gone by and she was still here, and the fear in her had now reached the point where even the walk to the subway from the school was a terrifying ordeal.
For the people on the street either examined her dispassionately, as though she were a monstrosity, or else they looked past her, looked through her as though she didn’t exist. Some of them stared at her with unconcealed hate in their eyes or equally unconcealed and jeering laughter. Each reaction set her to walking faster and faster.
She thought of every person she passed as a threat to her safety—the women sitting on the stoops or leaning out of the windows, the men lounging against the buildings. By the time she dropped her nickel into the turnstile, she was panting, out of breath, from the cumulative effect of the people she had met. It was as though she had run a gantlet.
Waiting for the train was a further trial. She searched the platform for some other white persons and then stood close to them, taking refuge in their nearness—refuge from the terror of these black people.
Once she had been so tired that she sat down on one of the benches in the station. A black man in overalls came and sat next to her. His presence sent such a rush of sheer terror through her that she got up from the bench and walked to the far end of the platform. She kept looking back at him, trying to decide what she should do if he followed her.
Despite the fact that he remained quietly seated on the bench, not even glancing in her direction, she didn’t feel really safe until she boarded the train and the train began to pull away from Harlem. After that, no matter how tired she was, she never sat down on one of the benches.
Her thoughts returned to the street she had to walk through in order to reach the subway. It was as terrifying in cold weather as it was in warm weather. On balmy days people swarmed through it, sitting in the doorways, standing in the middle of the sidewalk so that she had to walk around them, filling the length of the block with the sound of their ribald laughter. Half-grown boys and girls made passionate love on the very doorsteps. Discarded furniture—overstuffed chairs thick with grease, couches with broken springs—stood in front of the buildings; and children and grown-ups lounged on them as informally as though they were in their own living rooms.
When it was cold, the snow stayed on the ground, growing blacker and grimier with each day that passed. She walked as far away from the curb where it was piled as she could, so that even her galoshes wouldn’t come in contact with it, for she was certain it was teeming with germs. Lean cats prowled through the frozen garbage that lay along the edge of the sidewalk.
The few people on the street in cold weather had a desperate, hungry look, and she shuddered at the sight of them, thinking they were probably diseased as well; for these blacks were a people without restraint, without decency, with no moral code. She refused to tell even her closest friends that she worked in a school in Harlem, for she regarded it as a stigma; when she referred to the school, she said vaguely that it was uptown near the Bronx.
And now, as she watched the continual motion of the young bodies behind the battered old desks in front of her, she thought, They’re like animals—sullen-tempered one moment, full of noisy laughter the next. Even at eight and nine they knew the foulest words, the most disgusting language. Working in this school was like being in a jungle. It was filled with the smell of the jungle, she thought: tainted food, rank, unwashed bodies. The small tight braids on the little girls’ heads were probably an African custom. The bright red ribbons revealed their love for gaudy colors.
Young as they were, it was quite obvious that they hated her. They showed it in a closed, sullen look that came over their faces at the slightest provocation. It was a look that never failed to infuriate her at the same time that it frightened her.
Every day when the classes poured out of the building at three o’clock, she hastened toward the subway, and as she went she heard them chant
ing a ghastly rhyme behind her:
Ol’ Miss Rinner
Is a Awful Sinner.
When she turned to glare at them, they would be clustered on the sidewalk, standing motionless, silent, innocent. The rest of the rhyme followed her as she went down the street:
She sins all day
She sins all night.
Won’t get a man
Just for spite.
She glanced at her wrist watch and saw with relief that it was now quarter of three. She would have them put their books away and that would occupy them until they got their frowzy hats and coats on.
The order, “Put your books away!” was on the tip of her tongue when Bub Johnson’s hand shot up in the air. The sight of it annoyed her, because she didn’t want even so much as a second’s delay in getting out of the building.
“Well?” she said.
“Bathroom. Got to go to the bathroom,” he announced baldly.
“Well, you can’t. You can wait until you get out of school,” she snapped. All of them said it like that—frantically, running the words together and managing to evoke the whole process before her reluctant eyes.
Bub got out of his seat and stood in the aisle, jiggling up and down, first on one foot and then on the other. All the children did this when she refused them permission to leave the room. It was a performance that never failed to embarrass her, because she couldn’t determine whether they were acting or whether their desperate twisting and turning was the result of a real and urgent need. If one of them should have an accident—and she felt a blush run over her body—it would be horrible. The thought of having to witness one of the many and varied functions of the human body revolted her, and with boys—she looked away from Bub determinedly.