She tries to lift his spirits by parroting the same things Jules said to Peter, that they were "all in this together," but Jules doesn't want to hear it. He's despondent about it, but she doesn't allow him to feel bad. They order food and some drinks, and eventually Peter tells her about what happened earlier that day. By the time Ida arrives, Peter has already had three cocktails. They meet at an Italian restaurant in the Village. Peter has a date with Ida later that evening. I know everybody’s in trouble and nothing is easy, but how can I explain to you what it feels like to be black when I don’t understand it and don’t want to and spend all my time trying to forget it?" Jules offers Peter his floor to sleep on until he finds another place. Peter says, "Oh, I know, you’re Jewish, you get kicked around, too, but you can walk into a bar and nobody knows you’re Jewish and if you go looking for a job you’ll get a better job than mine! How can I say what it feels like? I don’t know. Jules feels badly about what happened he reminds Peter that as a Jewish person, he experiences discrimination, too. So he finishes dressing, packs his belongings, and goes to Jules's apartment. He doesn't want a confrontation with police, because he knows it's a confrontation he will lose.
Why don’t you go on uptown, like you belong?” to which Peter responds, “I can’t stand niggers." In the end, Peter realizes it's a losing battle. When he tells her he's legally allowed to be there and that the room was rented in his name, she says, “I got the right to know who’s in my house! This is a white neighborhood, I don’t rent to colored people. As he's getting dressed, the landlady pounds on the door. Peter then returns to the scene of the stuffy little rented room where he was staying partly in secret, because Jules had been the one to rent the room for him, and the landlady isn't aware that Peter is black. She’s a very beautiful woman who married young and married for money." Ida sometimes relates her experience of growing up poor and white to Peter's experience of growing up poor and black, and accuses him of being self-pitying. Peter describes Ida as coming from "the kind of family called shanty Irish. He and his friend and sometime-lover Ida are driving through upstate New York. The next scene Peter describes happens a year after his mother dies.
When the landlord came around they paid him and took his crap." When he left home, he left a note telling his mother he'd be back, but she dies when he's twenty-two. I hated all the people in my neighborhood. He says of his childhood neighborhood, "We lived in an old shack in a town in New Jersey in the nigger part of town, the kind of houses colored people live in all over the U.S. He hated how it felt so stagnant, and how the black people he grew up around seemed stuck in this little neighborhood in New Jersey. Peter recounts how he left home at sixteen and how he hated where his mother lived. Next time somebody calls you nigger you tell them you’d rather be your color than be lowdown and nasty like some white folks is." He asked his mother that night what the word means, and she says, “Baby, don’t fret. He stuck his tongue out at her, and she yelled the word after him as he walked home. When he asked her to play, she told him, “My mother don’t let me play with niggers." Peter, at the time, didn't know what that word meant. He was a child, and he retrieved a ball for a little white girl. The scene is broken up by Peter's memory of the first time he was addressed as a racial slur. He's been sleeping poorly, having nightmares and waking up in a sweat, as if he's been running in his sleep. Peter describes the room as having a suffocating effect. The story begins in the "dirty furnished room" Jules recently rented for him. Its narrator, Peter, is an actor in his twenties, living in New York City and struggling to find gratifying work and a place to live, largely due to the fact that he is black, and white landlords refuse to rent to him, even when his Jewish friend Jules rents rooms in his name. "Previous Condition" is the first story in the collection to be told from a first-person perspective.
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