When The Street was published in 1946, African American literature was tacitly understood to be African American male literature; and women’s literature was coded as white women’s literature. Ann Petry was a New Englander, yet she didn’t write with the reserve we associate with authors from that region. This is no novel of manners a la Dorothy West. Nor did she choose Walden Pond as her muse. Instead, Petry set her story in Harlem, but not the “New Negro” centre of racial uplift and progress. For Petry, 116th Street is the gritty antagonist, representing the intersection of racism, sexism, poverty and human frailty.
I was fortunate to discover The Street as an undergraduate student at Spelman College, historically a black women’s college in Atlanta. The week before, we had read Richard Wright’s Native Son, and were dismayed by the depiction of Bessie, the only significant black female character in this book that purportedly illuminated the “black experience” in the 1940s. A professor now myself, I understand that we were assigned Native Son first not because some critics considered The Street to be a women’s version of Native Son, but because after reading The Street we would not have had patience for Native Son’s violent erasure of black women’s lives. (Also, seasoned professors assign the most exciting books at the end of term to motivate exhausted students to make it to the finish line.)
The beating heart of The Street is Lutie Johnson, a single mother of an eight-year-old son. A traditional woman at heart, she married her sweetheart, anticipating some hardships, but overall, expected a happy and respectable life. However, reality intruded on this dream. The union couldn’t withstand the everyday strains of marriage coupled with the financial challenges brought on by pernicious racism and the unique pressure of Lutie’s job as a maid. He cheats; she leaves. Down, but not out, Lutie remains inspired by Benjamin Franklin – she is convinced that “anybody could be rich if he wanted to and worked hard enough and figured it out carefully enough”.
In other words, Lutie is an American. However, she is a black American and these terms do not always mesh. Recently, I was in Washington with my friend, the novelist Jacqueline Woodson. We were on our way to a meeting with Michelle Obama, so questions of citizenship and belonging were at the forefront of our minds. We paused before a huge US flag, draped from a silver pole, watching a gaggle of white tourists pose for photos. Jacqueline suggested that I do the same. In the picture, I am smiling uneasily as the flag, nudged by the wind, curls around my arm.
Jacqueline said: “Doesn’t it seem like any picture of a black person and the American flag appears to be a protest?” Studying the tiny photo of me surrounded by stars and stripes, I agreed. “At the very least, the image is ironic.”
Whenever I think of The Street, my mind is flooded with ironic images. Perhaps it goes back to the first copy I purchased, during my undergraduate days. The cover was all muted greyscale tones; on it, a child hugs his mother’s legs. A classmate had a vintage copy that portrayed Lutie as a buxom bombshell corseted into a red dress. In the years since, I have come across many editions: one shows Lutie, still red-dressed, and captioned: “The boldly shocking bestselling novel of a woman caught in the vice and violence of Harlem.” Another shows Lutie in a 1980s skirt suit, as she rests her hands on the shoulders of her small son. She looks as if she is a woman on her way to the office, pondering issues of the work/life balance. A mass-market paperback shows Lutie decked out in a turtleneck, trench coat and leggings. The description – “She was a soul on ice in a brutal ghetto” – echoes Eldridge Cleaver’s iconic memoir of race and masculinity.
These conflicting images speak to the complexity of Lutie and the Street itself. Crossing the line between belles-lettres and pulp, Petry was a pioneer of the literary thriller, a genre popularised by her contemporary Patricia Highsmith. The Street embodies many of the conventions of crime fiction, and the novel is populated by a host of seedy characters. Boots Smith, the slimy bandleader; Junto, the nightclub owner, so dastardly that he makes Boots seem like a gentleman; Jones, the building superintendent, who sneaks into Lutie’s apartment and fondles her underwear. There is no comfort for Lutie in the friendship of women. The most generous person she meets is the madame downstairs, who offers her an opportunity to be decently compensated for demeaning sex work.
These juicy details are reflected in the trashy book covers and perhaps explain its incredible sales record. However, The Street is so much more than a lurid tale, soaked in sex, violence and suspense. Petry laces through the story shrewd social commentary about the relentless nature of poverty and its effect on black women in particular. She addresses stereotypes one by one and crushes them underfoot.
One treasured figure in the American myth is that of the mammy, the black domestic worker who cares for her employer’s family with duty and delight. Through Lutie, Petry asks what the real cost of this arrangement is to the women whose job it is to care. As a live-in maid, Lutie is only able to see her own husband and child a few days a month. Looking back, she feels like a fool. “She’d cleaned another woman’s house and looked after another woman’s child while her own marriage went to pot.”
Another feelgood belief cut down by this story is the myth of the strong black woman who makes a way out of no way, in a manner that is nearly effortless. A social worker marvels at all that Lutie is able to accomplish, but Lutie is not flattered. “It had been nothing but work, work, work – morning, noon, and night – making bread, washing clothes and ironing them. The investigator used to compliment her, ‘Mrs. Johnson, you do a wonderful job. This house and the children fairly shine.’ She had to bite her lips to keep from saying that that wasn’t half the story.”
Petry’s insight doesn’t end with Lutie. She delves into the psychology of all the characters, even Boots, the predator who pushes Lutie to her limit. Before he was a criminal, he was a Pullman porter. The great labour organiser A Philip Randolph immortalised the profession as one of dignity and a triumph of American unionisation. But Boots remembers the job with bitterness. He figures that he had “done all the crawling a man can do in one lifetime”, summarising his time as a porter as “saying ‘yes sir’ to every white bastard who had the price of a Pullman ticket”.
What hope is there for Lutie, surrounded by people so beaten down by racism and poverty that they are willing to destroy one another for a scrap of comfort? Optimistic readers will assume that the relief will come from her relationship with her son Bub. But not even he is spared. Lutie loves him, but even love is no match for the Street. Yet Petry looks into the abyss without falling in. This is a story that is dark, but not depressing; disturbing, yet intriguing. How can a novel’s social criticism be so unflinching and clear, yet its plot moves like a house on fire? How can characters flirt with type, while remaining singular and unforgettable?
These are questions to which there are no answers. There are no stunts here, nor sleights of hand. This novel, like real life, is rife with seeming contradictions and layered with complex truths. And like the human experience, this book is riddled with pain, but somehow powered by hope.
• Ann Petry’s The Street is published by Virago on 17 December. Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage is published by Oneworld.
