The Street

As Lutie boards a train to take her from her job as a file clerk to her new apartment on 116th Street, she sees an advertisement of a blond girl and a smiling man standing next to a kitchen sink “whose white porcelain surface gleamed under the train lights” (28). The ad’s depiction of domestic tranquility reminds Lutie of the years she spent in Connecticut working as a housemaid for a wealthy white family.

An extended flashback reveals that Lutie’s husband, Jim, had been unable to find work, and with both a young son to feed and a mortgage, Lutie was forced to look for work herself. After writing a carefully-worded application letter and securing a reference from Mrs. Pizzini, a local grocer, Lutie accepts the job at the home of the Chandlers in Lyme, Connecticut. 

Upon meeting Mrs. Chandler, Lutie is impressed that the clothes Mrs. Chandler wears “cost a lot of money” (36), which makes Lutie feel cheap by comparison. The Chandler’s home is magnificent, and Mrs. Chandler and her son Little Henry treat Lutie well, making Lutie believe “the whole thing was perfect” (390).

However, after a few years of working at the Chandler’s home, during which Lutie only returns to see Jim and Bub every few months, Lutie begins to notice cracks in the façade of the Chandler’s happiness. Mr. Chandler drinks too much, and Mrs. Chandler seems more interested in other men than her own family. In addition, Lutie constantly overhears Mrs. Chandler’s friends warning her about having an attractive black maid like Lutie around, leaving Lutie to wonder “why they all had the idea that colored girls were whores” (41). Lutie overhears arguments between the family members, and is happy to see that “[w]hite people had loud common fights just like colored people” (46). 

After Mr. Chandler’s brother shoots himself in front of the family on Christmas morning, the family begins to disintegrate. Lutie finally leaves after receiving a letter from Pop informing her that Jim is seeing another woman, returning home to find “another woman living there with Jim” (53). While Lutie fumes at the fact that she sent almost all of her money back home, only to have Jim spend it on another woman, Jim blames Lutie for leaving: “‘Maybe you can go on day after day with nothing to do but just cook meals for yourself and a kid. With just enough money to be able to eat and have a roof over your head. But I can’t” (54).Now, the kitchenware ad she stares at on the train reminds her that “she’d cleaned another woman’s house and looked after another woman’s child while her own marriage went to pot” (30).

However, she can’t help but feel slightly optimistic. She moved out of Jim’s house to live with her father, then worked herself through night school and got a white-collar job as a file clerk that paid enough for her and Bub to live alone. It’s not perfect, but it’s hers.

Arriving on 116th Street, Lutie observes all the children at play and worries about Bub, who has to spend his hours after school “either in the apartment by himself or playing in the street” (60). There are plenty of dangers and temptations on a street like theirs, and Lutie resolves to do her best to keep Bub safe. She stops by a butcher shop and a grocery store to buy dinner, and as she walks home with her arms full of groceries, “she thought immediately of Ben Franklin and his loaf of bread” (63). The idea that Ben Franklin could come from meager beginnings and make something of himself inspires her.

Making her way to her apartment, she ignores the dozens of shoe-shine kids, until one gets her attention: Bub. She immediately slaps him across the face, and the “look of utter astonishment made her strike him again” (66). She orders her sobbing son into their apartment as their nosy neighbor, Mrs. Hedges, watches from her first-floor window. Inside, Lutie explains that she doesn’t want Bub to shine shoes because “White people seem to think that’s the only kind of work” (70) that black people can do. She wants Bub to aspire to more, instead of the dirty work “that pays the least” (70). 

Lutie prepares dinner and, watching Bub stare out their window at the rubbish below, regrets that there “wasn’t a playground or a park for blocks around” (78). She also worries that Bub has become friends with the super, Jones, a man she still doesn’t trust and who told Bub he thinks Lutie is pretty. To assuage her guilt, she gives Bub some money to see a movie. Now alone in the apartment, she thinks back on her father, Pop, who sold bootleg liquor from their house, and of her Granny, who used to disapprove of Pop’s activities and girlfriends. Lutie feels more alone than ever, not happy with her new apartment but knowing that the only places she could afford would also be “[d]irty, dark, filthy traps” (73). She laments that she may never be able to afford an official divorce from Jim, a fact that would prevent her from finding another man. She worries that “life is going past me so fast that I’ll never catch up with it” (83) and feels trapped by the small apartment.

She decides to walk to the corner bar for a beer, but not before Mrs. Hedges, who runs a brothel out of her apartment, offers to set Lutie up with “a nice white gentleman” (84) so that she could make an extra little money.