Introduction
A prostitute is one who submits him-or herself to unworthy purposes for pay. Prostitution takes many forms. But the goal of every prostitute is the money his or her indecency can bring. The money, plain and simple? No, never money alone; rather the security that money buys. The instinct for comfort, basic to most men and women, is the end toward which one directs one's efforts.
We all submit our talents to those who will pay for them. For money, an artist of much promise will design advertisements for The New Yorker. We all know this man: a talented student at one of the best art schools. Wins second prize, out of five hundred entries, in the spring competition prior to his graduation. Gets honorable mention for the scholarship he applies for. Decides to go to Europe anyway, be a bohemian, sketch and paint. See the world, gain experience, live free for a while. It's a good beginning. So he does, and enjoys life, and one day decides that if he's going to be an artist after all, he's got to get back and go to work. He finds a garret in the East Village and starves and is eaten by bugs more than he ever was in Greece, and one day a friend offers him a chance to make a little cash designing a spread for an ad in Popular Photography. He needs the money; it won't take much time, so he concurs. They like what he does, and before the year's up he has moved out of the East Village over to the respectable part around Washington Square because he likes the downtown area. He doesn't want to move out. Then he meets a girl (who is different from the others), lives with her for a while, and buys an MG.
They decide to get married. Why not? All this time, he's doing designs, becoming better known in advertising, is taken into the company as a junior vice president, has become respectable. He meets a friend from the old days. They talk. The artist describes his new life: the wife is pregnant, they have a very good doctor; her health is important after all. The friend from the old days says very little, and later they have a few beers and the old friend calls the artist a prostitute. The artist doesn't say anything. It is too late to explain how little time there is now to paint, and maybe it isn't important to paint pictures nowadays anyway, he says, half out loud.
There are more obvious cases. On an average clean, neat suburban street, an attractive young woman of possibly twenty-three loads her two children, Kathy and Nick, aged eighteen months and almost three, into her station wagon. They drive to the supermarket a mile away. The young woman-call her Mary-buys vegetables and cans of soup and detergents and beer, a couple of roasts and six steaks and some hamburger for the kids, and three women's magazines for when the kids are asleep. She waves to friends, smiles at the check-out clerk, cashes a check for the bill plus a few dollars to have on hand-naturally, they trust her at the market. The boy loads her groceries into the back of the wagon and she drives home to her three-bedroom house with the large tree-covered back yard, where the kids can play and she doesn't have to worry about them. Her husband comes home, mixes a couple of martinis for each of them. They relax and feed the kids and themselves and he sits down and reads the paper. She reads her magazines. He takes a shower. She slips out of her clothes and looks at herself naked in the mirror, and admits to herself she is still very attractive. She slips into a sheer, lace-trimmed negligee and lies down. He comes out of the shower, already in his pajamas, and lies down and kisses her on her cheek and turns around and in five seconds he is asleep. He works very hard, she thinks, as she looks at the back of his head which is beginning to bald: only naturally, since she is twelve years younger than her husband. They've been married four years. They met when she was in her second year of college. She didn't much like college, so when he asked her to marry him, she agreed. He was already well established in the law firm, and last year they had made him a junior partner. Well and good. She read her magazines. In one there was an article about prostitution. It defined a prostitute as one who gives up one's human desires to the first person who comes along, who could pay the price-the first customer. She thinks to herself: My God!
We know Mary. She lives next door. Possibly we know Naomi, too. Naomi lives in Betty Petterson's novel, Luck Changer. Naomi is closer to what we mean when we say prostitute in its daily context. Naomi is a whore. She hangs around bars, sometimes. She lets herself get picked up, sometimes. Men take her home and they pay her, usually. Naomi is a prostitute. But does she have the talent of an artist? Is she demeaning that talent? Not in the earlier sense, no. Naomi has no talents, except her ability to make love-or rather, her ability to render men sensually ecstatic. And this ability is for sale. It has nothing to do with love. Her body is her talent. She has a commodity for sale: sensuality. The commodity can be packaged and labeled and advertised and tried and tried again, as long as there is money to pay for it-and as long as there are customers.
So Naomi sells what she's got. Yet what does she sell it for? Does she, like Mary, sell herself for a life of absolute security, of freedom from care, of isolation from danger-a life with nothing to worry about except cancer? No, this kind of life is unavailable to her. Naomi can never have security from the daily ravages of man, or of woman, because Naomi is black, and blacks can never be secure in a white man's world. Naomi tries, God knows. She first appears in the novel in the apartment of a white man, Randy. Randy had picked her up at a bar. It's unusual for Naomi to let herself be taken around by a white man, but for some reason this evening was different. One senses that Naomi is trying to break out of her earlier life-the twin ghettoes of her house and her mind. So she accepts this offer from the pale-pink white man and she behaves for him according to her talents. Beforehand, she is prepared to hate him for his inadequacies, his white man's weaknesses. He already despises her for being black, for being for hire; he is a little afraid of her, too, since he has read about the fabled Negro sexual prowess. In the passion of their love, however, each discovers in the other, for a moment, the instrument of absolute sensuality, each mistakes it for love, and they decide to live together-she is Randy's official mistress.
Environment and biology collude to destroy any attempt at happiness for Randy and Naomi, however. Naomi has become a prostitute-for reasons far more complex than a wish to enjoy the money which the fruits of her body could garner. Naomi also wants to give love. Her problem, however, is her inability to distinguish between her desire to give love, and the idiom she confuses for love, her sex-machine body. When she fornicates it is in the belief that she is giving love. Her confusion, which becomes an integral segment of her post-coital exhaustion, usually comes to the surface as anger, or, when she controls it, irritation. It is difficult for her to analyze, out of the confused mass of her experience, the cause for this lack of complete satisfaction. She senses she is a lost woman, but never does she begin to consider the nature of her lostness. At best, she blames the color of her skin the sorrows to which her sex, rather than her race, is heir.
But she has tried life, and sex with black men, too. Prior to Randy it was her world. There had been Line, jet-black and proud of his heritage, a Black Muslim, to whom she had been engaged. They were to have been married, until she met Randy. At one point, she blames her many sorrows on having run away from her race, from the man who loved her. But in actuality there would have been little difference between a marriage of Line and Naomi, and the one of Mary, described earlier: in both, the women would be received like chattel. For Line, Naomi is all sex, all excitement, all beauty. Their relationship, the several times we see it either in the progress of the novel or in Naomi's memory, is physical, never more or less. In much the same way, our hypothetical but all-too-real Mary was property to her husband-a thing rather than a human being. She was for him a breeder, a mother to his children, a shopper for his food, a washer of his clothes, a chauffeur of his automobiles, a wife who functioned best as an income-tax deduction. Neither Naomi nor Mary are women who know love; both are mere objects for their husbands. For if love is to be a real thing, a man and a woman must function together as two subjects. When their relation is that of a person and a thing, as a subject and an object, then there can be little hope for love. And the object of a man's lust, the bit of property on which he exerts his sexual urges, is a prostitute.
Now there are, as we have already noted, several kinds of prostitutes. Some kinds society despises, some kinds it condones, and some kinds it encourages. Naomi's ill luck was to be in the first category. Randy's society, his friends and acquaintances, his entire world, despised Naomi. Curiously, it is also Naomi's brand of prostitution which they most completely enjoy. But enjoyment of this sort may never take place in public. Naomi is to be despised by them for two basic reasons: she is a common whore; but more important, she is a black whore. Yet, black lust is precisely the kind of activity which these white respectable folk are most capable of perverting. In a scene which paints the depravity not of the prostitute, so-called, but of the blue-bloods and Brahmins who bring about the prostitute's fall, the inverted principle of honorable prostitution is portrayed at its starkest. For Naomi is certainly not the kind-hearted prostitute out of a Damon Runyon story; yet in comparison to the men whose moral deterioration knows few limits she is saintly and pure.
Respectable prostitutes, a breed of women more despicable and deadening than a half-dozen Nao-mis, are everywhere in this country. They have sold a birthright into which they had not yet grown at the time of the sale-their imagination, their potential as human beings. (It becomes necessary to add here: not only women are guilty of this form of prostitution. But I am stressing women here because Luck Changer is a novel about a woman, by a woman. Men no less than women sell out at a time of life when they still could revolutionize the tiny bits of world they live in. But, in the manner of
Betty Petterson, it is necessary to fight one battle at a time. And Naomi's battle is a difficult one.) But society itself has little desire to fight respectable prostitution-respectable prostitution has so long been encouraged by western society that it has become an integral part of the world which produced it. Only when prostitution, which is branded as a "bad thing," comes into the open in the person of a woman who openly sells her body, does society react. And in its reaction, it shows its own perversity.
It is important to note here that western Christian society is one of the very few which have in fact labeled prostitution this "bad thing." Many Oriental and African societies have recognized certain physical drives in humans to be potentially separate from love, marriage and procreation. In these societies, prostitution is elevated from the gutter to professional status. Women who are members of the profession are respected, and, according to their talents, honored. In these cases there is nothing despicable about open prostitution. However, when a society recognizes sexual drives as important and creates institutions to cope with these drives, institutions which are respectable, then the practitioners within the institutions themselves become decent members of society, alongside, let us say, dancers who also use their bodies to important, and creates institutions to cope with pleasure. The important measure is to avoid making the talents of the individual in question objects to be used and then discarded. When a woman is a thing, she is a prostitute. When an artist begins to sell his abilities to powers which destroy the principles he once stood for, he is a prostitute. When Naomi looks for a better life with Randy and sells herself to his whims and desires, even if she enjoys her work, she is a prostitute. When she attempts to return to Line because she senses a need to accept the fashionable ideas of black power and strength, she is again prostituting her need and desire for love to the momentary sexual act. Only when she meets her toad prince, does she ... But this is giving away the novel, taking away the reader's enjoyment in discovery.
This, then, is the story of a girl's search for love, without the realization of what she is searching for to act as her guide. She looks for love in sex, and is disappointed; although she finds her momentary pleasures, the goal of love is not reached. Men treat her, not as herself, Naomi, in search of love, but as a thing to be used. She becomes a prostitute without believing herself to be any such type; she grows to conscious awareness of herself as a prostitute only when she stops sleeping with black men-with those who enjoy her and what she enjoys. Her object-nature stands in relief only when she becomes the whore of a white man-she becomes conspicuous as one of those whom society despises because it has created her, a sensual voluptuous thing. Naomi's search begins in ignorance, passes through a state of discovery, and she becomes dissatisfied with herself-with what she has become. But as the search continues, and she attempts to return to the world she had known, she realizes it no longer exists, because she is different. She has lived through experiences which have made her conscious of the prostituted nature of her previous existence in the ghetto. Since she cannot move backward, she must go on; and the process of moving forward brings the novel to its conclusion.
More than the story of a prostitute who learns to see the nature of love, Luck Changer delineates the perversions of a society which could not live without its Naomis. But when it has them, after it has finished using them, it must destroy them in order to try to cleanse itself of the dirt and the disgrace its Naomis have uncovered.
-Seymour de Hukn, Ph.D.