1. society

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Ann Petry’s The Street:An Attempt to Uncover and Expose the Real
Face of Harlem
Sakshi Singh
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Motilal Nehru College
University of Delhi
New Delhi
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to bring to light the flip side of Harlem Renaissance in America during
the 1940s through a close examination of the novel The Street written by Ann Petry, published in
1946. In 1920s, Harlem was considered as the Promised Land for all the African Americans
because now they were getting a chance to express themselves through a number of creative fields
such as literature, music, art and dance. To them, Harlem became the symbol of a dream that they
had waited so long to be fulfilled. But Harlem also had a dark side and a deferred dream. It is this
dark face of Harlem Renaissance that the current paper will attempt to unveil. By 1940s, all the
hopes that were raised by this upheaval fizzled out and resulted in a joint disappointment and
disenchantment in blacks all over the country. Petry portrays this disillusionment in her novel
through her protagonist Lutie Johnson in an extremely accurate and appropriate manner. Through
her she outlines and criticizes the ugly appearance that Harlem has taken with the passage of time.
Key Words: Harlem, disenchantment, alienation, black female self.
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If you looked at them from inside the framework of a fat weekly salary, and you
thought of colored people as naturally criminal, then you didn’t really see what
any Negro looked like. You couldn’t, because the Negro was never an individual.
He was a threat, or an animal, or a curse, or blight, or a joke. (199)
The Street, Ann Petry
This potent paragraph from Ann Petry’s novel, The Street, sums up the situation of the
blacks during the 1940s in a place like Harlem. In her very first novel, published in 1946, Petry
was able to incarcerate the existent visage of black Harlem which was later re-emphasized in 1949
by Ralph Ellison in “Harlem is Nowhere”. Living in Harlem, says Ellison, is to dwell in the very
bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously
skyward with the spires and crosses of churches and clutter underfoot with garbage and decay.
Harlem is a ruin, overcrowded and exploited politically and economically, Harlem is the scene and
the symbol of the Negro’s everlasting alienation in the land of his birth. Similarly Petry, a few
years earlier, had already ripped off the disguise of joviality and entertainment from the face of
Harlem and had uncovered it as a place that possessed a colossal potential for ruin hidden
underneath an erroneous exterior.
When Petry moved to Harlem in 1938, as a result of her marriage to George. D. Petry and
pursued her vocation as a journalist and a social reformer which added enormously to her
profession as a novelist, she was able to gaze at a Harlem that was concealed below multiple layers.
She began to work for well-liked Harlem newspapers like Amsterdam News and then in 1941 she
became the editor of the women’s page and a news reporter for The People’s Voice, owned by
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Through her line of work as a journalist, Petry kept herself occupied
with the artistic, creative, literary and community endeavors. Her effort and toil in the Harlem
community was very well appreciated which incorporated activities like teaching a course in basic
business correspondence at the YWCA in Harlem, serving to construct dramatic programs for the
children of laundry employees, developing programs for children who attended public schools
located in the distressed, wartime era in Harlem neighborhood and co-funding Negro Women
Incorporated, a woman’s consumer encouragement group. She also became a lively component
of the American Negro theatre which helped her even more to look at and comprehend the figure
of black woman and man in Harlem and impediments faced by them while living an everyday life
in America.
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While enthusiastically engaging herself in the lives of people in Harlem, she was able to
glance at an absolutely unusual face of this black inner city, a face that was hid behind the facade
or the guise of lots of energy and effervescence. It is true that Harlem existed as a dynamic place
but under that active energy what lingered was a web like, ferocious world where life dealt with
issues related not only to race, gender and class but was also faced with the obscurity of living an
everyday life which came into contact with enormous poverty, hostile social conditions and
inadequate alternatives. Though Harlem, at the outset, became significant for black endurance as
it embodied a place that seized opportunities and hopes for the blacks, but steadily it got
transformed into a place that engendered feelings of claustrophobia, discomfort and lack of
expectations amongst the black mass. It is this very appearance of Harlem that Petry attempts to
incarcerate in her bestselling novel The Street published in 1946 and in her collection of short
stories called Miss Muriel and Other Stories published in 1971.
Petry’s fiction gives an influential insight not only into the foremost events like Harlem
riots of 1943, but her fiction also pays a lot of attention to the diminutive, but very intricate and
integral, details of everyday life like the stories she wrote about the children who have been left at
home while their mothers went to work. Petry’s brush with journalism allowed her to come in
contact with individuals from every echelon of the society. As a reporter, she got to know "many
of New York's citizens, visited their homes, heard their stories ... watched their reactions," and she
used them to people her fictional world. It is not by accident, then, that Petry’s world is populated
by an extensive array of people reflecting a multiplicity of tendencies, attitudes, desires, and
determinations. They are black, white, and brown; they are rich and poor, young and old
(Theodore).
The Street, Petry’s debut novel is considered to be the first by an African American
woman to sell over a million copies when published in 1946, demonstrates a picture that is colored
not only with the complexities that gyrate around the ideas of race and gender but is further
complicated by the problems of economic deprivation, poverty and limited choices faced by a
single black mother in a decaying Harlem ghetto. Nellie Y. McKay points out that The Street
introduces Lutie Johnson, the first black female in American literature who combats a hostile urban
surrounding at a time when black women were projected as the helpless and vulnerable victims of
both black and white men, in the novels written by black male writers. Petry, in her novel, does
not present Lutie as a powerless lonely woman but as a woman who has a different discernment
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of herself, a different value system and a different view of the world. It is through a protagonist
like Lutie, strong and confident, that Petry’s novel chronicles a black woman’s endeavors to
generate and claim a space for herself and her son in the modern metropolis like Harlem, New
York. This paper will try to examine the way in which Harlem, the black inner city, is presented
through the eyes of a female protagonist Lutie Johnson, how it gets transformed from being an
emblem of material opulence to becoming a new structure of colonization and how the site of
being colored influences the opinions of the people around her. The paper will also gaze at the
ways in which an individual female self tries to endure and survive in a place like Harlem while
trying to fight back the oppressive forces that are social, economic and racist in nature. The paper
will further look at the way in which Petry deals with the ideas of “anger, frustration and prejudice”
through the African American characters that she creates.
In her novel The Street, Petry showcases Harlem as a place where the black world exists
behind a shroud, as pointed out by DuBois as the “veil of race that separates the white and the
black America” (The Souls of Black Folk, 265). It is in this segregated world that we find Lutie
Johnson, the protagonist of the novel, trying very hard to unearth a space for herself and her son
Bub in order to offer him a life that is safe, sound and sheltered. The story revolves around Lutie’s
struggles in opposition to a world that denies the black woman, like her, the right to grow and
cultivate. Despite being determined, intellectual and meticulous Lutie is not able to succeed in
attaining what she wants not because she does not has the potential to do so but because the milieu
that she lives in is the one where there are not many opportunities and choices available to women
like her. In the novel, Petry inscribes an urban backdrop that marginalizes women and hinders
their movement to the very core and center. By stressing the traditional aspects of disintegration,
fragmentation and estrangement that black women were subjected to, Petry gives a picture of a
society that detains women and frustrates their efforts to move beyond the drawbacks of their
designed space in society. This is a place where there is no sense of community and no sense of
belonging; instead there is a constant feeling of degeneration, dilapidation and decay of individual
sense of self. The community that Petry presents is the one which is predatory and rapacious, “the
residents are animalistic characters whose behaviors are constructed by their individual
estrangement from the black community and the black community’s marginalization from the
larger society”. Petry writes:
Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North lynch mobs, she
thought bitterly; the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place. And she
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began thinking of Pop unable to get a job; of Jim slowly disintegrating because he, too,
couldn’t get a job, and of the subsequent wreck of their marriage; of Bub left to his own
devices after school. From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an evernarrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in and the wall had been built up
brick by brick by eager white hands. (323)
The novel through its employment of the tropes of enclosed space (the image of walls closing in)
implies both the psychosomatic dead ends into which some characters are driven and the social
psychological forces that strain them into such circumstances. Petry’s use of the trope of the
invisible wall is a defining feature of the gendered as well as the racial legroom that disallows
black women an access to authority, supremacy and empowerment.
Apart from Lutie as the protagonist we come across two other women who embody
unusual stratagems to endure in Harlem. One of them is Mrs. Hedges and the other one is Min.
Interestingly, all the three women through whom we look at the state of life in the streets of Harlem,
reside in the same building on 116th street. Lutie, as the struggling single mother trying to escape
from the street as soon as possible, Mrs. Hedges as the owner of the whore-house that she has
opened in her apartment as a way to earn easy and quick money and Min, who lives with Jones,
the superintendent of the building, in order to drive away loneliness from her life. All the three
women look at life in Harlem in fairly diverse terms and this dissimilar outlook of theirs is colored
by their experiences here. For Lutie, Harlem is nothing but a place that steadily encroaches upon
one’s private space and completely takes over it. When Lutie moves to the apartment, Petry
expresses her disenchantment in the following manner:
Going up the stairs with Bub just ahead of her, Lutie thought living here is like living in a
tent with everything that goes on inside is open to the world because the flap won’t close.
And the flap couldn’t close because Mrs. Hedges sat at her street-floor window firmly
holding it open in order to see what went on onside. (68)
Lutie feels a parallel kind of frustration when she finds out that Super Jones has been in her
apartment in her absence. She feels that her personal space has been invaded and this feeling adds
to her disenchantment not only with the street but also with the people who reside on that street.
In the closed streets of Harlem the private and public worlds intermingle in a way that Lutie feels
is strange and unwanted. The more she tries to generate a protected space for Bub and herself the
more she is confronted with the difficulties of accomplishing it. This is because she overlooks the
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complexities of race, class and gender and the connection that they share with social and economic
mobility in Harlem (McKay). Though she is aware of the reality that this is a “city where they set
up a line and say black folks stay on this side and white folks on this side, so that the black folks
were crammed on top of each other- jammed and packed and forced into the smallest possible
space until they were completely cut off from light and air” (206), she is unable to acknowledge
the fact that it is impossible to get away from an environment like this without compromising or
without losing a part of one’s self. Instead, Lutie’s abhorrence for the white people deepens in her
the yearning to achieve the American Dream of economic individualism that she deems can work
for black females under the same conditions as white males. But this false assumption of Lutie’s
extreme disappointment, disillusionment and dissatisfaction with the community as a whole. Her
experiences with the people of this community of Harlem lead her to disbelieve the entire
community because men like Super Jones, Boots Smith and Junto, eye women like her only as a
sexual commodity and women like Mrs. Hedges push women like Lutie, --separated from husband,
good looking and black--, into prostitution in order to make money at the expense of other person’s
dignity and values. Barbara Christian underscores that through Lutie’s experiences we learn about
the challenges that arise from the issues of class, race and gender biases of the day. Petry does not
treat these issues independently but through Lutie she draws attention to their junction and
showcases the challenges that subsist when one is confronted with such an intersection. Lutie’s
struggles to overcome poverty, to overcome oppressive conditions that are social, racial and
economic end up in converting her into nothing but a murderer because in Harlem, the environment
is such that it cannot accept the idea of a flourishing black woman. In this manner Petry represents
Harlem as a place that cannot nurture women like Lutie because such women claim a revolution;
demanding and thinking women like Lutie pose a peril to the society because they aim for a
transformation which a place like Harlem refuses to give them and ultimately ends up in their
obliteration.
Though throughout the novel Petry doesn’t fail to put across the fury and aggravation of Lutie
at not being able to move out from the clutches of the street and her inability to move out of the
limits of poverty, it is in the last scene when she kills Boots Smith that Lutie’s frustration crosses
all limits and ends up in killing him when he attempts to rape her. The novel reads on page 430:
Finally, and the blows were heavier, faster now, she was striking at the white world which
thrust black people into a walled enclosure from which there was no escape; and at the
turn-of-events which had forced her to leave Bub alone while she was working so that he
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now faced reform school, now had a police record… she saw the face and head of the man
on the sofa through waves of anger in which he represented all these things and she was
destroying them.
Lutie’s murder of Boots Smith not only represents an act of a frustrated black woman at not being
able to succeed in life but it also represents the pent up disappointment of a black mother at not
being able to provide for her child what she had dreamt of providing him. She feels that all is her
fault when she says, “… you forgot that you were black and you underestimated the street outside
here” (389). This realization of Lutie makes her to take a decision to leave Harlem and move to
Chicago, leaving her son, Bub, behind in the prison, who is tricked by the Super into stealing
letters. Petry conveys the last thoughts of Lutie in the following way:
He would probably go to reform school…so he will go to reform school, she repeated. He’ll
be better off there. He’ll be better off without you. That way he may have some kind of
chance. He didn’t have the ghost of a chance on that street. The best you could give wasn’t
good enough. (435)
The bars of the prison seem to be more protected than the streets of Harlem is the note with which
the novel closes. Petry puts forth an almost realistic picture of the 1940s Harlem by underlining
the very difficulties faced by a black woman, how her perception of the city changes when she
enters it with certain expectations and how the city fails her in crafting a space for herself, both
private self and a social self, because of its unyielding conditions related to race, gender and
economic status.
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Works Cited
Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958.
Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York:
Pergamon Press, 1985.
Ellison,Ralph.“HarlemisNowhere”.CulturalcontextsfromEllison’sInvisibleMan.Ed.Eric
Sundquist.NewYork,BedfordBooks,1995.
Greene,J.Lee.BlacksinEden:TheAfricanAmericannovel’sFirstCentury.Charlottesville:
UniversityPressofVirginia,1996.
Gross, Theodore. "Ann Petry: The Novelist as Social Critic." In Black Fiction: New Studies in
The afro-American Novel since 1945, edited by A. Robert Lee, 41-53. New York: Barnes
& Noble, 1980.
Lattin, Vernon. "Ann Petry and the American Dream." Black American Literature Forum 12
(Summer 1978): 69-72.
Petry, Ann. The Street. New York: Mariner Books, 1998.
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