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Ann Petry (born October 12 1908, died April 28 1997) was an American author.Ann Lane was born as the younger of the two daughters to Peter and Bertha Clark on October 12th 1908 in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Her parents belonged to a black minority of the small town. Her father was a respected pharmacist, “and her mother was a shop owner, chiropodist, and hairdresser.” Ann and her sister were raised “in the classic New England tradition: a study in efficiency, thrift, and utility (…) They were filled with ambitions that they might not have entertained had they lived in a city along with thousands of poor blacks stuck in demeaning jobs.” The family belonged to the middle-class, and had never to suffer any financial struggle similar to those of many Harlem inhabitants. The Lane girls were raised sheltered from most disadvantages other people in the United States had to experience due to the color of their skin. Only once Ann had experienced racial discrimination when she went to school two years early in the age of 4 with her older sister Helen. On their way home, the two sisters were attacked by some white juveniles with stones. After the girls’ uncles took care of this by threaten the wrongdoers the Lane girls were never bothered again. The strong family bonding was a big support for Ann’s self-esteem. Her well-traveled uncles, who had many stories to tell their nieces when coming home, her ambitious father who overcame racial obstacles when opening his pharmacy in the small town as well as her mother and aunts, set a great example to the Ann and Helen to become strong themselves. Petry interviewed by the Washington Post in 1992 says about her tough female family members that “it never occurred to them that there were things they couldn’t do because they were women.” Petry was raised very open minded and tolerant. Gender, race or class did not determine the lot of anybody and should not be an obstacle on anybody’s way to pursue his passion. Those ideas seem very progressive, regarding the circumstances of the 1950s in the United States. The Discrimination of colored people, women, and lower classes among the population was an everyday issue. Nevertheless, Petry did not give up on that. The wish to become a professional writer was raised in Ann for the first time in High School when her English teacher read her essay to the class commenting it with the words : “I honestly believe that you could be a writer if you wanted to.” However, Petry decided on a rather stable education after finishing High School following the family tradition. She enrolled college graduating with a Ph.G. degree from Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Heaven in 1931 and worked in the family business for several years. On the 22nd of February in 1938 she married George D. Petry of New Iberia, Louisiana. This new commitment brought Petry to New York and eventually back to writing. She did not only write articles for newspapers like Amsterdam News, or People’s Voice, and published short stories in the Crisis, but was also engaged at an elementary school in Harlem. It was during this period of her life that she had realized and personally experienced what the black population of the United States had to go through in their every day life. Traversing the littered streets of Harlem, living for the first time among large numbers of poor black people, seeing neglected children up close – Petry’s early years in New York inevitably made painful impressions on her. Deeply impacted by her Harlem experiences, Ann Petry was in the possession of the necessary creative writing skills to bring it to paper. Her daughter Liz explains to The Washington Post that “her way of dealing with the problem was to write this book, which maybe was something that people who had grown up in Harlem couldn’t do.” She wrote her most popular novel The Street in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. Back in Old Saybrook in 1947, the writer worked on Country Place (1947), The Narrows (1953), and some other stories but they have never achieved the same success as her first book. Until her death Petry lived in a representative eighteenth-century house in her hometown, Old Saybrook. Ann Lane Petry died in the age of 88 on 28th of April in 1997. She was outlived by her only daughter Liz Petry.

The Street The story of The Street reveals the life of a single mother, Lutie Johnson, during the 1940s in Harlem, New York City. Originally from Jamaica, Lutie decides to work as a maid first for the rich, white Chandlers’ family in Connecticut, then, after her husband abandons her, she hopes to find her luck with her eight year old son Bub in Harlem. Lutie is full of optimism when she arrives in Harlem. Despite the desperate situation she is in, she is able to provide for herself and Bub. She rents a shabby but sufficient apartment, finds employment, and even a way to acquire typing skills among other duties. She is determined that with hard work she will be able to improve their status. Deeply impacted by the rich Chandlers Lutie believes in the pursuit of the American Dream. “The ‘American Dream’ has been a prominent subject in American literature, especially during the first half of the twentieth Century.” This philosophy goes through the entire novel. As the story advances, the more desperate Lutie becomes. She realizes the hopeless situation of Harlem’s women and their exclusion from the benefits of “the richest damn country in the world.” On the eve of the war, according to the 1940 census, 59,5 percent of employed Black women were domestic workers and another 10,4 percent worked in non-domestic service occupations. Since approximately 16 percent still worked in the fields, scarcely one out of ten Black women workers had really begun to escape the old grip of slavery. Even those who managed to enter industry and professional work had little to boast about, for they were consigned, as a rule, to the worst-paid jobs in these occupations. Then, Lutie becomes the job offer as a singer in a Harlem band. In one moment all the despair vanishes and hope grows again. This job could help Lutie to move out of the neighborhood she so much despises. The streets in Harlem of the 40s are dirty, overcrowded. People live under unbearable conditions due to lack of adequate employment for anybody, racial discrimination, or poverty in general. Landlords do not care about the housing they rent to the mainly colored population of Harlem. “Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North’s lynch mobs, she thought bitterly; the method the big cities used to keep Negros in their place.” It a painful experience for Luite when she finds out that she won’t get the position. She is an attractive woman which causes that all men surrounding her pursue just one goal. Petry, whose husband admired her, had fortunately never to experience the degrading attitude towards women but she acknowledged it as sad matter of fact: “These young women, who really I think are beautiful, and who I guess are regarded as fair game by the males in this society.” Towards the end of the novel, as Lutie gets more and more realistic about the hopeless condition she is in, the tragedy takes its run. It does not matter what she knows, who she is, or what her goals are, as long as this society remains the same; discriminating, judging, full of prejudices and stereotypes not only towards black people but also towards women. All those years, going to grammar school, going to high school, getting married, having a baby, going to work for the Chandlers, leaving Jim because he got himself another woman – all those years she’d been heading straight as an arrow for that street or some other street just like it. Step by step she’d come, growing up, working, saving, and finally getting an apartment on a street that nobody could have beaten. Even if she hadn’t talked to Bub about money all the time, he would have got into trouble sooner or later, because the street looked after him when she wasn’t around.

In the last chapter when the catastrophe is at its peak, Lutie sees in the white Junto the personification of the whole evil she is surrounded by. “It is as though he were a piece of that dirty street itself, tangible, close at hand, within reach.”  Furthermore, when Lutie finally kills Boots Smith, who is also interested in having his sexual pleasure with her, she sees not him but the whole situation of Harlem embodied in his person. 

First she was venting her rage against the dirty, crowded street. She saw the rows of dilapidated old houses; the small dark rooms; the long steep flights of stairs; the narrow dingy hallways; the little lost girls in Mrs. Hedges’ apartment; the smashed homes where the women did drudgery because their men had deserted. She saw all those things and stuck at them. This tragically ending to Lutie Johnson’s lot is disappointing to the reader. She does not deserve it. McDowell claims in her essay that Petry has missed to achieve “the significance of fortitude” in this novel by creating an ending of such a disaster. It leaves the reader with the feeling that nothing can be done about hopeless situations similar to the one her protagonist is in. The society is evil, stereotypes are set, and its consequences are definite. The American Dream is not attainable for certain groups of the population. It contradicts Petry’s own development though. She achieved a career, raised her social and financial status although she was a black woman in the 1950s in the United States. Of course, Ann Petry had a better starting position than her protagonist Lutie due to the backgrounds of her own family. Nevertheless, I personally do not think that it was the objective of Petry to deprive the reader from the illusion that a society is able to overcome interracial barriers.

The Narrows The story tells about love between two young people from different worlds although from the same town. The story takes place in the early 1950s. Link Williams is handsome, black and a college graduate working at The Last Chance, a speakeasy in the Narrows. The white heiress of the town’s monition factory, Camillo Treadway, falls in love with him. The interracial relation between those two young people escalates when Link finds out about Camillo’s fortune as well as her martial status. The plot in The Narrows plays around Dumble Street, a street in the black section of Monmouth. Monmouth is a small, neat town located in New England’s Connecticut. Like Harlem, it was inhabited by white population before the black population settled down in that area of the town. Dumble Street has changed. The signs tell the story of the change. It was now despite its spurious early-morning beauty, a street so famous, or so infamous, that the people who lived in Monmouth rarely ever referred to it, or the streets near it, by name; Eye of the Needle, The Bottom, Little Harlem, Dark Town, Niggertown – because Negros had replaced those other earlier immigrants, the Irish, the Italians and the Poles. Unlike Harlem though, Landlords are usually living in the same housing as their tenants, like Abbie Crunch, Link William’s adoptive mother who rents out a part of her own house. Living conditions in a small city like Monmouth are better than in Harlem or New York in general for lower classes. The integration of the inhabitants of this neighborhood into the community of Monmouth is not disturbed, though. The degradation of the district’s reputation is only based on the fact that its population is mainly black instead of white compared to the other districts of Monmouth. “Such compulsion undoubtedly derived from the tenuousness of thrust existing between Blacks and whites, a potentially unstable situation existing in spite of the surface harmony” says McDowell. Located at a river bank, there are green spaces, less traffic and the life is going slowly. Petry draws a rather idyllic picture of this neighborhood. She is not as much concerned about the political or social issues in The Narrows as she is in her first novel The Street. Only “when Link breaks the taboos of class and race by having an affair with a white New England heiress, his violent murder becomes ritual – an inexorable response to a black stepping out of his place.” Neither Link, nor any of the other protagonists have to endure the financial difficulties of racial discrimination of the big city, similar to Lutie Johnson. Still, the racial intolerance is like a cobweb weaved through the plot. Nellie Y. McKay writes in her introduction to The Narrows: “while racism triggers the major conflict in this novel, it neither explains nor determines their fate.” Petry shows in creating the plot that the injustice suffered by black people is not simply to explain by the fact that they are different in the color of skin, rather “that the picture was also complicated by economics, limitation of vision, and gender.” Petry creates with this novel a more multifaceted picture of a neighborhood and its inhabitants than she does with The Street. Here, the protagonists are embedded in one story influencing each others destinies throughout the story. Petry switches from one character to the other, from the past to the present, from an old view to the new. Margret B. McDowell claims in her essay The Narrows: A Fuller View Of Ann Petry that the author’s intention was by demonstrating the twenty year period in the plot to show an historical perception of the racial problems between blacks and whites in a small town. In order to understand the reason for Link’s death, the reader has to acknowledge the causes which lead to this dramatic ending of the story. “Throughout the book she demonstrates how the established and respected institutions – churches, schools, and news media – intensify the polarization between the races”. It would be all too simple to blame just the hostility of the segregated population towards each other, or blame certain streets which seem to create more or less violent neighborhood to be responsible for racial intolerance. Further, due to McDowell, Petry also developed here a more mature writing style than in The Street. “Expansiveness and flexibility mark her technique here as she shifts point of view and intonation, makes abundant use of flashbacks, and elaborates theme through the use of extended metaphor.” She achieves so to broaden the view of the reader who becomes a better understanding for the actions of the protagonists. In the end, different than in The Street, Petry sparks some hope that stereotypes can be erased by becoming more tolerant and open minded. “Because of Abbie’s centrality”, argues McDowell. She gives the reader the sense that everybody can change. Abbie was probably the most stereotyped character in this fiction. Although she is black herself, she despises all Aficanism in black people, feels superior to lower classes, and condemns the interracial relationship of her adopted son. The tragic death of Link, though, makes her consider hr own views. She suspects the vengeance murder of Camillo by Bill Hod who is the owner of The Last Chance, Link’s mentor, and the alleged to regulate Monmouth’s criminal world. Mrs. Crunch decides to inform the police, although she has “never been to a police station before.”

Works by Ann Petry

• The Street (1946);
• Country Place (1947);
• The Narrows (1953);
• Tituba of Salem Village (1964);
• Miss Muriel and Other Stories (1971).