The Street

Lutie frets as she tries to figure out how to come up with $200 in legal fees. She doesn’t have the money, and nothing she owns is worth even close to that amount. In fact, no one she’s ever known has had that amount of money, owning at most “driblets that barely covered food and shoes and subway fare” (394). She considers asking some of the women at her work, but has heard them speak of their “sick mothers and unemployed fathers” (395), and knows they would not have the money to spare.

Finally, Lutie settles upon Boots Smith, knowing that that amount would be “no problem to him” (398). She drops by his lavish apartment. Upon hearing her story, it was like Boots had “suddenly seen something he had been waiting for, seen it spread right out in front of him, and it was something that he wanted badly” (400). He’s eager to help her, perhaps too eager, and agrees to give her the money the following night. Though Lutie knows Boots’ intentions aren’t pure, Lutie has little choice but to take his money. 

Lutie worries that Bub’s future is in jeopardy, for all the teachers and other authority figures would view him suspiciously since he has now “established himself in their minds as a potential criminal” (402). She blames herself for not being present enough in Bub’s life, and thinks back to her own childhood, when she was never alone in the home because her Granny was always around: “Granny was there and it gave [Lutie] a sense of security that Bub had never known” (404). 

She visits Bub in the children’s shelter, and is surprised to find that not all of the other mothers in the waiting room are black. She does notice one common connection, however, that they are “all here because we’re poor” (409). Their visit is brief and dissatisfying, though she promises to visit every day until his hearing on Friday.

In order to distract herself from the waiting empty apartment, Lutie goes to the movies. However, the “glitter on the screen did nothing to dispel her sense of panic” (412), since the action onscreen seemed so far away from her real-life problems. She then goes to a salon, but can’t help shivering at the stillness that had found her in the shelter and followed her all day. This stillness now sat in the empty chair next to her, “Waiting. Waiting” (413).

Lutie exits the salon and is overwhelmed by the street outside, the noise, the dirtiness, and the people. She thinks of her son, saddened that “[i]t was impossible to know how this street looked to eight-year-old Bub. It may have appealed to him or it may have frightened him” (415).

As Lutie enters her apartment, Mrs. Hedges, who knows Lutie needs money for Bub, once again offers her a chance to meet with Junto. Lutie ignores this and returns to her apartment. Inside, her rage and sadness become focused on Junto, the image of whom she imagines sitting on her couch. She knows that Junto’s “desire to sleep with her” (422) kept Boots from paying her for singing at the casino, and has led to much of her current misfortune. 

She reluctantly returns to Boots’ apartment for the money, and finds that Junto himself waits with Boots. She surprises herself when she realizes that she “would like to kill” (422) Junto for all that she’s done. Boots suggests that all her problems will go away if she’s nice to Junto, but she resists, demanding that Junto leave.

He does, and Boots relishes the opportunity to have Lutie before Junto could. Boots fixes he and Lutie a drink and then begins to kiss Lutie roughly. She resists, becoming filled with so much anger that she “couldn’t even think straight, couldn’t even see straight” (426). After he slaps her, she grabs a candlestick and with an “anger surging through her” (428), begins to batter him with it.

In that moment, Boots represents “everything she hated, everything she had fought against” (429), and all the men who had wronged her or kept her down. She continues to beat his head with the candlestick even after he becomes motionless and a “haze of red blocked his face out completely” (431).

Lutie soon comes to her senses and realizes what she’s done: murdered Boots. She quickly understands that she can no longer stay in the city or be a mother to Bub. He would be “bewildered and lost without her” (435), but she determines that being raised in a reform school would be better than seeing her arrested. Lutie takes money from Boots’ wallet and flees the apartment building. At the train depot, she figures that “Chicago was not too far away and it was big” (434), and so buys a ticket there, in order to disappear into a new life.

As the train leaves, she thinks about how her life conspired to take her to that moment, fleeing town a murderer and abandoning her son, and blames it on one simple thing: “It was that god-damned street” (436).