The Street

So he will go to reform school, she repeated back. 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 enough.

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. The impulse to violence had been in her for a long time, growing, feeding, until finally she had blown up in a thousand pieces.

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.

Why was she standing here holding this glass of liquor that she didn't want and had no intention of drinking? Because you're still angry, she thought, and you haven't anyone to vent your anger on and you're halfway hoping Boots will say something or do something that will give you an excuse to blow up in a thousand pieces.

The sound of her own voice startled her. It was hoarse, loud, furious. It contained the accumulated hate and the accumulated anger from all the years of seeing the things she wanted slip past her without her ever having touched them.

And even under the words Lutie heard the stillness. It was crouched down in the next booth. It was waiting for her to leave. It would walk down the street with her and into the apartment. Or if might leave the shop when she did, but not go down the street at all, but somehow seep into the apartment before she got there, so that when she opened the door it would be there. Formless. Shapeless. Waiting. Waiting.

Outside the theater she paused, filled with a vast uneasiness, a restlessness that made going home out of the question.

Their patience silence filled the room, made her uneasy. Why were all of them colored? Was it because the mothers of while children has safe places for them to play in, because the mothers of white children didn't have to work?

There ought to be more than that to living, she thought, resentfully. Perhaps living in a city the size of New York wasn't good for people, because you had to spend all your time working to pay for the place where you lived and it took all the rest of the hours in the day to keep the place clean and fix food, and there was never any money left over.

All through the house radios went on full blast in order to drown out his familiar, frightening, unbearable sound. But even under the radios they could hear it, for they had started crying with her when the sound first assailed their ears. And now it had become a perpetual weeping that flowed through them, carrying pain and a shrinking from pain, so that the music and the voices coming from the radios couldn't possibly shut it out, for it was inside them.

The men stood around and the women worked. The men left the women and the women went on working and the kids were left alone. The kids burned lights all night because they were alone in small, dark rooms and they were afraid. Alone. Always alone. They wouldn't stay in the house after school because they were afraid in the empty, silent, dark rooms. And they should have been playing in wide stretches of green park and instead they were in the street. And the street reach out and sucked them up...

The women work because the white folks give them jobs - washing dishes and clothes and floors and windows. The women work because for years now the white folks haven't liked to give black men jobs that paid enough for them to support their families... The men get out of the habit of working and the houses are old and gloomy and the walls press in. And the men go off, move on, slip away, find new women. Find younger women.

She started down the stairs, walking slowly, stiffly. Her knees refused to bend, her legs refused to go fast. Her legs felt brittle. As though whatever had made them work before had suddenly disappeared, and because it was gone they would break easily, just snap in two if she forced them to go quickly.

No matter what she knew, he couldn't leave here until he saw Lutie Johnson all broken up by what had happened to her kid.

He'd fixed her plenty good.

He couldn't move away from here now. He had to stay and watch her and laugh at her efforts to get Bub out of it. Maybe there was some way of letting her know he had a hand in it. The more he thought about it, the more excited he became.

He'd never acquired the knack of small talk and after a while his silence would weigh on them so heavily that the conversation would slow up, grow halting, and then die completely.

The thought of leaving made him feel free.

'Prophet kept me from being put out, but I don't want to stay no more.' Then her voice dropped so low that Mrs. Hedges had to strain to hear what she was saying. 'Jones really ain't bearable no more,' she said apologetically.

The trouble was she didn't know why she was going. Why was it?... It was because if she stayed here she would die - not necessarily that Jones would kill her, not because it was no longer safe here, but because being shut up with the fury of him in this small space would eventually kill her.

'And a body's go the right to live,' she said softly.

She had held it [the doorkey] in her hand when she left for work in the morning, because the last thing she did before she went out was make sure she had it with her; and at night, too, she'd clutched it tight in her hand when she approached the door on her return. Leaving it here like this meant that she was saying good-bye to the security she had known; meant, too, that she couldn't come back, never intended coming back, no matter what the future held for her.

Jones was sick; at least he certainly wasn't what you'd call well and healthy, so he must be sick.

Funny how she got to believe that not having to pay rent was so important, and it really wasn't. Having room to breathe in meant much more. Lately she couldn't get any air here. All the time she felt like she'd been running, running. running, and hadn't been able to stop long enough to get a nose full of air.

The change in him had transformed the apartment into a grim, unpleasant place. His constant anger, his sullen silence, filled the small rooms until they were like the inside of an oven... It had been like that for weeks now, and she didn't think she could bear it much longer.

Mrs. Hedges remained at the window, her arms folded on the sill. She and Bub looked at each other for a long moment. They appeared to be holding a silent conversation - acknowledging their pain, commiserating with each other, and then agreeing to dismiss the incident from their minds, to forget it as though it had never occurred.