The Street

Boots returns to the Junto Bar and Grill to see what Junto wants. He surmises that it has to do with Boots’ efforts to avoid the draft. Upon receiving his draft notice, Boots had asked Junto to help, since Boots felt “I ain’t got anything to fight for” (259); Boots hated white people too much to be sent off to war for them.

Before that, Boots had worked as a porter on a Pullman train, where he was bossed around and degraded by white passengers, and so Boots had believed that he’d “done all the crawling a man can do in one lifetime” (260). Junto had helped Boots avoid the draft by connecting him with a doctor who performed a dangerous ear surgery that made Boots ineligible for service, and now Boots believes that someone had informed the authorities about the scheme.

However, upon sitting down with Junto, Boots learns that he wants to discuss an entirely different matter: Lutie Johnson. Junto instructs Boots to leave her alone, as he’s “got other plans for her” (262). Boots reflects on his history with Junto, whom Boots knows can “break him” (264) by ensuring his band never gets hired again. Before Junto, Boots had been an itinerant piano player, playing in “dives and honkey-tonks and whorehouses, at rent parties and reefer parties” (266), essentially homeless until Junto offered him a job.

Though Boots is intrigued by Lutie, by the “challenge in the way she walked with her head up, in the deft way she had avoided his attempts to make love to her” (263), he knows that she is not worth the risk of having his career ruined and having to return to his old line of work: “She didn’t weigh enough when she was balanced against a life of saying ‘yes sir’ to every white bastard who had the price of a Pullman ticket” (265).

Boots thinks back on a previous relationship with a woman named Jubilee, who cheated on him with a white man. After discovering her deception, he beat her, leading her to slash his face in response. Boots thinks Jubilee wasn’t worth it, just like Lutie wouldn’t be worth it, no matter how beautiful she was. Boots tells Junto he’ll back off Lutie and leaves. 

Jones returns to his apartment and fumes over the way Mrs. Hedges “slammed him against the cellar door” (279) and dragged Lutie out of his arms. He believes that Lutie was afraid of the dog, not him, and that it was all “Min’s fault” (279) that the dog got loose. 

Jones then thinks that Lutie must be in love with Junto, the thought of which sets him “trembling” (279).He becomes filled with anger at the thought that Lutie believes “[b]lack men weren’t good enough for her” (282), and plots ways that he can have her. He settles on Bub, realizing that “he could hurt her through the kid” (283).He decides to set Bub up by having him “steal letters out of mail boxes” (291).

In his apartment, Jones notices a glass vial on the breakfast table, and becomes suspicious that Min is “working some kind of conjure on him” (285). When he accuses her of this, she claims that it’s heart medicine, an explanation that doesn’t satisfy Jones.

After acquiring a master mailbox key from a neighboring landlord, Jones traces an outline of it, then sends Min to make the copy in order to “fix” her, too (293). There would be no “scrap of evidence” (293) to connect Jones to the crime, and with Min out of the way and Bub in trouble, Jones would be able to manipulate Lutie as he wanted.

However, when Jones presents Bub with the plan to steal from neighborhood mailboxes, claiming that he would be doing “detective work catching crooks” (298), the boy refuses, leaving Jones cursing and kicking his dog.