The Street (8 page)

Just before she reached her own door, she heard the question again, ‘Shine, Miss?' And then a giggle. ‘Gosh, Mom, you didn't even know me.'

She turned around quickly and she was so startled she had to look twice to be sure. Yes. It was Bub. He was sitting astride a shoeshine box, his round head silhouetted against the brick wall of the apartment house behind him. He was smiling at her, utterly delighted that he had succeeded in surprising her. His head was thrown back and she could see all his even, firm teeth.

In the brief moment it took her to shift all the small packages under her left arm, she saw all the details of the shoeshine box. There was a worn piece of red carpet tacked on the seat of the box. The brassy thumbtacks that held it in place picked up the glow from the sunset so that they sparkled. Ten-cent bottles of shoe polish, a worn shoe brush and a dauber, were neatly lined up on a little shelf under the seat. He had decorated the sides of the box with part of his collection of book matches.

Then she slapped him sharply across the face. His look of utter astonishment made her strike him again—this time more violently, and she hated herself for doing it, even as she lifted her hand for another blow.

‘But Mom—' he protested, raising his arm to protect his face.

‘You get in the house,' she ordered and yanked him to his feet. He leaned over to pick up the shoeshine box and she struck him again. ‘Leave that thing there,' she said sharply, and shook him when he tried to struggle out of her grasp.

Her voice grew thick with rage. ‘I'm working to look after you and you out here in the street shining shoes just like the rest of these little niggers.' And she thought, You know that isn't all there is involved. It's also that Little Henry Chandler is the same age as Bub, and you know Little Henry is wearing gray flannel suits and dark blue caps and long blue socks and fine dark brown leather shoes. He's doing his home work in that big warm library in front of the fireplace. And your kid is out in the street with a shoeshine box. He's wearing his after-school clothes, which don't look too different from the ones he wears to school—shabby knickers and stockings with holes in the heels, because no matter how much you darn and mend he comes right out of his stockings.

It's also that you're afraid that if he's shining shoes at eight, he will be washing windows at sixteen and running an elevator at twenty-one, and go on doing that for the rest of his life. And you're afraid that this street will keep him from finishing high school; that it may do worse than that and get him into some kind of trouble that will land him in reform school because you can't be home to look out for him because you have to work.

‘Go on,' she said, and pushed him ahead of her toward the door of the apartment house. She was
aware that Mrs. Hedges was, as usual, looking out of the window. She shoved Bub harder to make him go faster so they would get out of the way of Mrs. Hedges' eager-eyed stare as fast as possible. But Mrs. Hedges watched their progress all the way into the hall, for she leaned her head so far out of the window her red bandanna looked as though it were suspended in midair.

Going up the stairs with Bub just ahead of her, Lutie thought living here is like living in a tent with everything that goes on inside it open to the world because the flap won't close. And the flap couldn't close because Mrs. Hedges sat at her street-floor window firmly holding it open in order to see what went on inside.

As they climbed up the dark, narrow stairs, darker than ever after the curious brilliance the setting sun had cast over the street, she became aware that Bub was crying. Not really crying. Sobbing. He must have spent a long time making that shoeshine box. Where had he got the money for the polish and the brush? Maybe running errands for the Super, because Bub had made friends with the Super very quickly. She didn't exactly approve of this sudden friendship because the Super was—well, the kindest way to think of him was to call him peculiar.

She remembered quite clearly that she had told him she wanted all the rooms in the apartment painted white. He must have forgotten it, for when she moved in she found that the rooms had been painted blue and rose color and green and yellow. Each room was a different color. The colors made the rooms look even smaller, and she had said instantly,
‘What awful colors!' The look of utter disappointment on his face had made her feel obligated to find something that she could praise and in seeking for it she saw that the windows had been washed. Which was unusual because one of the first things you had to do when you moved in a place was to scrape the splashes of paint from the windows and then wash them.

So she said quickly, ‘Oh, the windows have been washed.' And when the Super heard the pleased note in her voice, he had looked like a hungry dog that had suddenly been given a bone.

She hurried up the last flight of stairs, fumbling for her keys, pausing in the middle of the hallway to peer inside her pocketbook, so that Bub reached their door before she did. She pushed him away and unlocked the door and the can of peas slipped out from under her arm to roll clumsily along the hall in its brown-paper wrapping. While Bub scrambled after it, she opened the door.

Once inside the apartment he turned and faced her squarely. She wanted to put her arm around him and hug him, for he still had tears in his eyes, but he had obviously been screwing his courage up to the point where he could tell her whatever it was he had on his mind, even though he wasn't certain what her reaction would be. So she turned toward him and instead of hugging him listened to him gravely, trying to tell him by her manner that whatever he had to say was important and she would give it all her attention.

‘You said we had to have money. You kept saying it. I was only trying to earn some money by shining
shoes,' he gulped. Then the words tumbled out, ‘What's wrong with that?'

She fumbled for an answer, thinking of all the times she had told him no, no candy, for we can't afford it. Or yes, it's only twenty-five cents for the movies, but that twenty-five cents will help pay for the new soles on your shoes. She was always telling him how important it was that people make money and save money—those things she had learned from the Chandlers. Then when he tried to earn some of his own she berated him, slapped him. So that suddenly and with no warning it was all wrong for him to do the very thing that she had continually told him was important and necessary.

She started choosing her words carefully. ‘It's the way you were trying to earn money that made me mad,' she began. Then she leaned down until her face was on a level with his, still talking slowly, still picking her words thoughtfully. ‘You see, colored people have been shining shoes and washing clothes and scrubbing floors for years and years. White people seem to think that's the only kind of work they're fit to do. The hard work. The dirty work. The work that pays the least.' She thought about this small dark apartment they were living in, about 116th Street which was filled to overflowing with people who lived in just such apartments as this, about the white people on the downtown streets who stared at her with open hostility in their eyes, and she started talking swiftly, forgetting to choose her words.

‘I'm not going to let you begin at eight doing what white folks figure all eight-year-old colored
boys ought to do. For if you're shining shoes at eight, you'll probably be doing the same thing when you're eighty. And I'm not going to have it.'

He listened to her with his eyes fixed on her face, not saying anything, concentrating on her words. His expression was so serious that she began to wonder if she should have said that part about white folks. He was awfully young to be told a thing like that, and she wasn't sure she had made her meaning quite clear. She couldn't think of any way to soften it, so she patted him on the shoulder and straightened up and began taking off her hat and coat.

She selected four potatoes from the package she had put on the kitchen table, washed them, found a paring knife, and seating herself at the table began peeling them.

Bub came to stand close beside her, almost but not quite leaning against her as though he was getting strength and protection from his closeness to her. ‘Mom,' he said, ‘why do white people want colored people shining shoes?'

She turned toward him, completely at a loss as to what to say, for she had never been able to figure it out for herself. She looked down at her hands. They were brown and strong, the fingers were long and well-shaped. Perhaps because she was born with skin that color, she couldn't see anything wrong with it. She was used to it. Perhaps it was a shock just to look at skins that were dark if you were born with a skin that was white. Yet dark skins were smooth to the touch; they were warm from the blood that ran through the veins under the skin; they covered bodies that were just as well put together as the bodies that
were covered with white skins. Even if it were a shock to look at people whose skins were dark, she had never been able to figure out why people with white skins hated people who had dark skins. It must be hate that made them wrap all Negroes up in a neat package labeled ‘colored'; a package that called for certain kinds of jobs and a special kind of treatment. But she really didn't know what it was.

‘I don't know, Bub,' she said finally. ‘But it's for the same reason we can't live anywhere else but in places like this'—she indicated the cracked ceiling, the worn top of the set tub, and the narrow window, with a wave of the paring knife in her hand.

She looked at him, wondering what he was thinking. He moved away from her to lean on the edge of the kitchen table, poking at a potato peeling with an aimless finger. Then he walked over to the window and stood there looking out, his chin resting on his hands. His legs were wide apart and she thought, He's got nice strong legs. She was suddenly proud of him, glad that he was hers and filled with a strong determination to do a good job of bringing him up. The wave of self-confidence she had felt on the street came back again. She could do it, too—bring him up so that he would be a fine, strong man.

The thought made her move about swiftly, cutting the potatoes into tiny pieces so they would cook quickly, forming the ground meat into small flat cakes, heating the peas, setting the table, pouring a glass of milk for Bub. She put two of the hard crusty rolls on a plate and smiled, remembering how she had compared herself to Ben Franklin.

Then she went to the window and put her arm
around Bub. ‘What are you looking at?' she asked.

‘The dogs down there,' he said, pointing. ‘I call one of 'em Mother Dog and the other Father Dog. There are some children dogs over yonder.'

She looked down in the direction in which he was pointing. Shattered fences divided the space in back of the houses into what had once been back yards. But as she looked, she thought it had become one yard, for the rusted tin cans, the piles of ashes, the pieces of metal from discarded automobiles, had disregarded the fences. The rubbish had crept through the broken places in the fences until all of it mingled in a disorderly pattern that looked from their top-floor window like a huge junkpile instead of a series of small back yards. She leaned farther out the window to see the dogs Bub had mentioned. They were sleeping in curled-up positions, and it was only by the occasional twitching of an ear or the infrequent moving of a tail that she could tell they were alive.

Bub was explaining the details of the game he played with them. It had something to do with which one moved first. She only half-heard him as she stared at the piled-up rubbish and the sluggish dogs. All through Harlem there were apartments just like this one, she thought, and they're nothing but traps. Dirty, dark, filthy traps. Upstairs. Downstairs. In my lady's chamber. Click goes the trap when you pay the first month's rent. Walk right in. It's a free country. Dark little hallways. Stinking toilets.

She had wanted an apartment to herself and she got it. And now looking down at the accumulation of
rubbish, she was suddenly appalled, for she didn't know what the next step would be. She hadn't thought any further than the apartment. Would they have to go on living here year after year? With just enough money to pay the rent, just enough money to buy food and clothes and to see an occasional movie? What happened next?

She didn't know, and she put her arm around Bub and hugged him close to her. She didn't know what happened next, but they'd never catch her in their dirty trap. She'd fight her way out. She and Bub would fight their way out together. She was holding him so tightly that he turned away from his game with the dogs to look up in her face.

‘You're pretty,' he said, pressing his face close to hers. ‘Supe says you're pretty. And he's right.'

She kissed his forehead, thinking what's the Super saying things like that to Bub for? And she was conscious of a stabbing fear that made her tighten her arm around Bub's shoulder. ‘Let's eat,' she said.

All through the meal she kept thinking about the Super. He was so tall and so silent he was like some figure of doom. She rarely went in or out of the building that she didn't meet him in the hallways or just coming out of his apartment, and she wondered if he watched for her. She had noticed that the other tenants rarely talked to him, merely nodding when they saw him.

He usually had his dog with him when he stood outside on the street leaning against the building. The dog would open his mouth, fairly quivering with the urge to run down the street. She imagined that if he ever satisfied the urge to run, he would plunge
madly through the block biting people as he went. He would look up at the Super with something half-adoring, half-fearful in his expression, drawing a little away from him, edging along slowly a half-inch at a time, wanting to run. Then the Super would say, ‘Buddy!' and the dog would come back to lie down close beside the man.

She couldn't decide which was worse: the half-starved, cringing dog, the gaunt man or the shapeless whispering woman who lived with him. Mrs. Hedges, who knew everything that went on in this house and most of the other houses on the street, had informed her confidentially that the Super's wife wasn't really his wife, that she just stayed there with him. ‘They comes and they goes,' Mrs. Hedges had added softly, her hard black eyes full of malice.