Lutie Johnson Quotes

At the start of the novel, Lutie Johnson is portrayed as a hard working women who is looking to turn her life around to improve her current situation. She buys this house on the street as a step in an upward movement for a place for her and her son Bub to live. From there she has a bright plan to find a job and earn enough money to eventually find a nicer and more permanent house. At this point she has the ambition and will, but unfortunately from here on out the racism and sexism gets to her head and we only see a downward trend. Throughout Luties experiences on the street we see her initial motivation begin to deteriorate; the incidents with Jones and Bub quickly build up and eventually force her to make poor decisions.
When Lutie first

She starts off the book with a positive attitude looking for a place for Bub and herself to settle down. Throughout the novel we see Lutie get more and more frustrated from the constant racism and sexism on the street and she begins to take her anger out on Bub. She even noticed herself that, “she was impatient, she rarely smiled, and she only half hear him when he talked to her” (Petry 316). Bub noticed his mother's frustration and went out of his way to make his mother happy.. This need to please Lutie forced him to go out and take the “mail job” from Jones. Although Bub taking this job only caused more stress for her. When she learns that Bub has been sent to the Children’s Shelter she begins to rapidly decline from here. All of her anger and rage that built up inside of her from living on the street came out and took over her body. “First she was venting her rage against the dirty, crowded street… now she was striking at the entire white world … and then the turn of events which has forced her to leave Bub alone while she was working so that he now faced reform school, and now had a police record” (Petry 430). These were the little things that pushed Lutie past her breaking point. Each individual incident caused her to decline more and more eventually placing her in front of Boots’s dead body. With nowhere else to go or anyone to turn to Lutie hits her all time low and flees. Leaving behind