The Street (7 page)

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.

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.

She watched the butcher slap the hamburger on a piece of waxed paper; fold the paper twice, and slip the package into a brown paper bag. Handing him a dollar bill, she tucked the paper bag under her arm and held her pocketbook in the other hand so that he would have to put the change down on the counter. She never accepted change out of his hand, and watching him put it on the counter, she wondered why. Because she didn't want to touch his chapped roughened hands? Because he was white and forcing him to make the small extra effort of putting the change on the counter gave her a feeling of power?

Holding the change loosely in her hand, she walked out of the shop and turned toward the grocery store next door, where she paused for a moment in the doorway to look back at 116th Street. The sun was going down in a blaze of brilliant color that
bathed the street in a glow of light. It looked, she thought, like any other New York City street in a poor neighborhood. Perhaps a little more down-at-the-heels. The windows of the houses were dustier and there were more small stores on it than on streets in other parts of the city. There were also more children playing in the street and more people walking about aimlessly.

She stepped inside the grocery store, thinking that her apartment would do for the time being, but the next step she should take would be to move into a better neighborhood. As she had been able to get this far without help from anyone, why, all she had to do was plan each step and she could get wherever she wanted to go. A wave of self-confidence swept over her and she thought, I'm young and strong, there isn't anything I can't do.

Her arms were full of small packages when she left Eighth Avenue—the hamburger, a pound of potatoes, a can of peas, a piece of butter. Besides six hard rolls that she bought instead of bread—big rolls with brown crusty outsides. They were good with coffee in the morning and Bub could have one for his lunch tomorrow with the hamburger left over from dinner.

She walked slowly, avoiding the moment when she must enter the apartment and start fixing dinner. She shifted the packages into a more comfortable position and feeling the hard roundness of the rolls through the paper bag, she thought immediately of Ben Franklin and his loaf of bread. And grinned thinking, You and Ben Franklin. You ought to take one out and start eating it as you walk along 116th
Street. Only you ought to remember while you eat that you're in Harlem and he was in Philadelphia a pretty long number of years ago. Yet she couldn't get rid of the feeling of self-confidence and she went on thinking that if Ben Franklin could live on a little bit of money and could prosper, then so could she. In spite of the cost of moving the furniture, if she and Bub were very careful they would have more than enough to last until her next pay-day; there might even be a couple of dollars over. If they were very careful.

The glow from the sunset was making the street radiant. The street is nice in this light, she thought. It was swarming with children who were playing ball and darting back and forth across the sidewalk in complicated games of tag. Girls were skipping double dutch rope, going tirelessly through the exact center of a pair of ropes, jumping first on one foot and then the other. All the way from the corner she could hear groups of children chanting, ‘Down in Mississippi and a bo-bo push! Down in Mississippi and a bo-bo push!' She stopped to watch them, and she wanted to put her packages down on the sidewalk and jump with them; she found her foot was patting the sidewalk in the exact rhythm of their jumping and her hands were ready to push the jumper out of the rope at the word ‘push.'

You'd better get your dinner started, Ben Franklin, she said to herself and walked on past the children who were jumping rope. All up and down the street kids were shining shoes. ‘Shine, Miss? Shine, Miss?' the eager question greeted her on all sides.

She ignored the shoeshine boys. The weather had
changed, she thought. Just last week it was freezing cold and now there was a mildness in the air that suggested early spring and the good weather had brought a lot of people out on the street. Most of the women had been marketing, for they carried bulging shopping bags. She noticed how heavily they walked on feet that obviously hurt despite the wide, cracked shoes they wore. They've been out all day working in the white folks' kitchens, she thought, then they come home and cook and clean for their own families half the night. And again she remembered Mrs. Pizzini's words, ‘Not good for the woman to work when she's young. Not good for the man.' Obviously she had been right, for here on this street the women trudged along overburdened, overworked, their own homes neglected while they looked after someone else's while the men on the street swung along empty-handed, well dressed, and carefree. Or they lounged against the sides of the buildings, their hands in their pockets while they stared at the women who walked past, probably deciding which woman they should select to replace the wife who was out working all day.

And yet, she thought, what else is a woman to do when her man can't get a job? What else had there been for her to do that time Jim couldn't get a job? She didn't know, and she lingered in the sunlight watching a group of kids who were gathered around a boy fishing through a grating in the street. She looked down through the grating, curious to see what odds and ends had floated down under the sidewalk. And again she heard that eager question, ‘Shine, Miss? Shine, Miss?'

She walked on, thinking, That's another thing. These kids should have some better way of earning money than by shining shoes. It was all wrong. It was like conditioning them beforehand for the role they were supposed to play. If they start out young like this shining shoes, they'll take it for granted they've got to sweep floors and mop stairs the rest of their lives.