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Buried alive: gothic homelessness, black women's sexuality, and death in Ann Petry's The Street
African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Evie Shockley
The silence begins to take on substance in the waiting room of the Children's Shelter where Bub is being held. Here Lutie notices "a smell--a distinct odor that filled her nose until it was difficult for her to breathe" (410). The waiting room is full of women who are not all black--but who are all poor. Petry's critique thus spotlights the societal systems that herd so many poor women into this role of "bad mother." While Lutie, employing the logic of domestic ideology, thinks that "it was always the mother's fault when a kid got into trouble, because it meant she'd failed the kid somewhere" (405), Petry's gothic silence reminds the reader that a poor mother could hardly help but "fail" in domestic ideology's terms. Lutie had not known this threatening silence as a child, "because Granny had always been there," rocking in her chair and humming (404). But Bub had faced this silence every day after school because Lutie could not be home to protect him and earn the money she needed to feed and clothe him, at the same time. The trope of silence thus becomes the "unspeakable" indictment of the ideological contradictions that force poor mothers into this lose-lose situation.
Petry's reliance on the gothic convention of silence increases as its substance builds. It follows Lutie to the movie theatre, where it begins to assume a human form, "coming at her softly on its hands and knees" (412). It sits down in the next booth at the hairdresser's shop. As Lufie wastes her quarters on empty consumerism--purchasing the "glitter" and glamour of cinema and style (412), which are of no more use to her than the rhinestone earrings Boots gives her instead of a job--she begins to imagine the silence rushing ahead of her to the apartment, able to "seep in ... before she got there, so that when she opened the door it would be there. Formless. Shapeless. Waiting" (413). Lutie does not have a "home" whose walls and threshold form boundaries that such frightening societal forces as poverty and racism must respect. And indeed, once inside her apartment, Lutie recognizes "the deep, uncanny silence that filled it" as the man who has been responsible for so many of her problems: Junto (418). She believes that she sees him sitting on her couch with his feet planted on her rug and feels an almost uncontrollable panic rising. Petry's gothic silence takes the shape of the wealthy, white man with a persistent desire for bodies like Lutie's. First, it helped to place her at odds with her neighbor, Mrs. Hedges, who might otherwise have been a source of useful information. Further, it played a part in transforming her from an object of lust to an object of hatred in the eyes of Jones, who assumed and resented that Lutie would prefer the white man's advances to his own and determined to hurt her by getting Bub in trouble. And, finally, it essentially precluded Lutie from obtaining a well-paying singing job and possibly even a proposal of marriage from Boots, because Junto, as his employer, forced the musician to choose between his lavish lifestyle and his incipient affection for Lutie. The last straw for Lutie is finding Junto waiting with Boots at his apartment that evening, standing between her and the money she needs for her son.
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