Transcript

Ann Petry moved to Harlem in 1938, after she married her husband, George. She was an aspiring writer, she had not yet published widely, but she fell in love with Harlem and worked all over Harlem and eventually became one of the best chroniclers of Harlem life in the 1940s. She did journalism, novels, short stories. We don't know a lot about her today, but if you really want to know that period you have to read Ann Petry.

She moved here to be with her husband, but eventually she began to work on newspapers, the major black newspapers of the day. She worked at the Amsterdam News, which was probably the most famous African American newspaper, not just in Harlem, but in the country, and she sold ad space for them, and did a little writing. But her really big job was when she began to work for the People's Voice, a left-wing progressive newspaper edited by Adam Clayton Powell, who would become the first black congressman from Harlem. She worked as the women's editor for that magazine. She also wrote a lot of editorials, and she did some reporting, although she didn't always get a byline for those stories that she did.

Ann Petry, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1948.

The Carl Van Vecten Trust and the Ann Petry Collection in The Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University

And sometimes there are certain moments in her fiction, in her novels, in her short stories, that come directly from stories that she covered. There's a story about the Harlem riots of 1943, and she was in Harlem covering those riots. There's stories about children who have been left at home while their mothers had to work.

She wrote stories about the lack of choice for consumers. She even organized a consumer-rights organization. And so, when you read her fiction, she'll really be very detailed about produce and meat and clothing and things like that.

In The Street, her first novel, published in 1946, she has her character, her protagonist, Lutie Johnson, shopping for food in a butcher shop. And she's looking at all of the meats that are available and how they aren't the best cuts, they're the worst cuts, and they're very red, they're very bright red. And Lutie thinks to herself that she heard stories about them being painted, having dye in them, injected in the slices of meat, but also embalming fluid. She says there are rumors. And because of those rumors she won't buy the meat there, she'll buy some hamburger or something like that.

She was involved in theater, the American Negro Theater. She was involved in the Harlem Community Arts Center. She was actively engaged in the community, a very active member of it. And I think that's why you can see in her fiction—in the street scenes, in the crowd scenes, even in the individuals that she paints with such painstaking detail—that this is someone who really knows this community.

Harlem is a very diverse community at that time, and you get a sense of the diversity of the community in her journalism, but not necessarily in her fiction. In her journalism, she'll cover working mothers and the need for after-school programs for their children, and at the same time she'll cover the lovely socialites, the debutantes, the wives of famous musicians, or even famous actresses themselves; she'll cover Puerto Rican youth in East Harlem. You really get a feel for how diverse this community is, people from the Caribbean, people from the American South. But in her fiction she tends to focus on working-class and working-poor African Americans, largely migrants from the South, in Harlem and often below 125th Street. She's really interested in her fiction in people who live from 110th to 116th Street, whereas her own life she lived at 129th Street, for instance, and the journalism goes from 110 through the 150s.

I think that Petry definitely gave a sense of Harlem geography through her fiction. Her fiction, the short stories as well as The Street, are filled with people who are mobile, who are constantly on the move, who are part of these brown and black crowds. One of the most beautiful descriptions in The Street is a description of Lutie, who's been working all day, coming off the A train and coming up out of the subway and merging with this crowd of people in Harlem, where she finally can let the weight of the world off of her shoulders and feel at home, and feel like she's part of this thriving community.

I think that Petry is so interested in the details of Harlem geography that her characters really become a way for readers to experience that geography, almost as if they were reading a sociological text about it.

In the Tradition of Protest Fiction

I think that Petry comes out of a tradition of protest fiction. And she's in Harlem during a period where, although you don't have the same radical politics that you had during the Depression, there still is this lingering sense of radicalism, a sense of concern over the lives of the poorest people, and how she as an educated, middle-class person really needs to represent the concerns and interests of the black poor.

I think that comes directly from the political atmosphere in Harlem at the time, and her involvement with people like Adam Clayton Powell, but even the actors with whom she acts, Ruby Dee, Ozzie Davis, people like that who are very political in their thinking, and who are very interested in the working class.

Representing a Changing Harlem

Harlem was very vibrant and lively. You get the sense of incredible energy in Petry's fiction. And I think some of that energy is just the energy of Harlem in general, but because of the war you're getting a whole new wave of migration. So the first big wave of migration comes because of World War I, and you already have people who are there, but you also have people coming from the southern part of the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, and things begin to develop that way again after World War II, especially greater migration from the South. They make up the second wave. And I think that's probably one of the biggest changes in Harlem.

Another big change in Harlem at the time is just the visibility and militancy of the black community around World War II. During World War I, many black leaders called for black people to not focus so much on the racial problems of the United States, to get behind the war effort, prove that we were patriotic. In World War II you get something that's a little bit different, you get the emergence of the Double-V Campaign: If we're going to fight for democracy abroad, we have to fight for democracy here. And you sense that in her fiction as well, and certainly in her journalism. So those are the things that are happening in Harlem at the time.

A Best-Selling Author

What's very interesting is that from our vantage point she almost seems like a lost figure, unless you take a class in African American literature. But during the '40s when she published The Street—it came out in 1946, she'd won a fellowship from Houghton Mifflin to finish it—it was the first novel by an African American woman to sell over a million copies, it sold 1.5 million copies, and she was widely reviewed in all the great newspapers and magazines. The New York Times carries stories about her all the time. And so she did get a great deal of attention, The Crisis covered her, Amsterdam News covered her, there's a story about her even in Ebony magazine. And, in fact, the spotlight of celebrity gets so charged for her that she begins to hate it, and she decides to leave New York and move back to Connecticut where she's from to avoid celebrity status and focus more on her writing. But she's very well known, she's probably the most well-known black woman writer of the early '40s.

Well, when Petry wrote and published The Street probably the writer who dominated African American letters, and who was very important just in American literature in general, was Richard Wright. And Richard Wright through Native Son had produced an audience who really had an expectation of a certain protest fiction. And so I think that Petry tapped into that audience, although she differed a great deal from him in many ways, and later on she would suffer. And she's been called a lesser member of the Richard Wright school, but at the time I think that that affiliation was actually something that was very good for her. It would make people read the novel, people who had read Native Son and perhaps wanted to see the female version of it, although Lutie Johnson and The Street is nothing like Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas.

Lutie Johnson is a very dignified, hard working, responsible, ambitious, single mother. She's not someone who doesn't want to work, she's not unemployed, she's a model citizen in many ways, and she firmly believes in the American dream. Her model is Benjamin Franklin. She quotes Benjamin Franklin all the time.

She represents, I think, the working women who Petry would see in Harlem but wouldn't see in many of the organizations that she was a part of, and she was very interested in them. So that's how Lutie differs a great deal from Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas. She's not someone who's looking for violence as a means of self-expression or creativity. Even though she's forced into positions that require her to be violent, that's certainly her character at the core.

Petry and the Harlem Music Scene

She was a music lover. She doesn't ever write about knowing musicians the way, say, a Ralph Ellison knew the musicians. She doesn't write specifically about having relationships with musicians, but she clearly knows the music scene, because that also is evident in her fiction. There will be fictional places that are based on real spots where the music is played. For instance, in one of her stories, "In Darkness and Confusion," which is a story about the Harlem riot of 1943, she talks about a hotel where she has her protagonist go for a drink. And he doesn't like the music, and he looks out in the lobby and he sees a confrontation between a police officer, a young woman, and a soldier. And that hotel is based on the Braddock Hotel, which was a famous hangout of musicians like Carmen McRae and Lena Horne and Ella Fitzgerald. So in her fiction she has many sorts of famous night spots, and music is all throughout the fiction, both records as well as live music. And, in fact, one of her characters, Lutie herself, aspires to be a vocalist and tries to sing, thinks that might be a way out of her economic situation.

Another story is called "Solo on the Drums," and it's about a drummer. There's another story about a young woman who's a dancer, and people speculate that she was based on the dancer Katherine Dunham. So she's very aware of the musical and cultural scene in Harlem at the time.