You Should Read THE STREET by Ann Petry
“Why do the women work? It’s such a simple, reasonable reason. And just thinking about it will make your legs stop trembling like the legs of a winded, blown, spent horse.”
Reading Notes
Early in my career, a colleague challenged me for teaching Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in my freshman English class. Although she started the conversation on behalf of a student, she continued to press the issue as a parent. Her own daughter had been troubled by the book's depiction of racism and use of the n-word, she said. Why must I subject my student, who was also a young black woman, to the same discomfort?
As if I'd been listening, I said: It’s a classic. It’s on the required reading list. Everyone teaches it. Everyone’s taught it for years.
Besides, through challenge comes growth, right? I'm sure I've read that on a bumper sticker somewhere.
My department backed me. My principal backed me. I taught the book, and more than a decade later, I wish I had made a different choice.
Reading The Street, Ann Petry’s 1946 novel, reminded me of this experience. The novel centers on Lutie Johnson, a black woman trying to provide for her young son in Harlem. Petry’s powerful, imagistic prose impressed me. It also, at times, made me uncomfortable. Throughout the book, Lutie expresses her hatred of white people. Coming home from work, Lutie gets off the train and heads toward home, reflecting “that she never [feels] really human until she reache[s] Harlem and thus [gets] away from the hostility in the eyes of the white women who [stare] at her on the downtown streets and in the subway.”
Again and again, the dreams of Lutie and her neighbors are stymied by white people who never question their place, who accept their privilege as easily as they breathe. Each time I read a passage about white people, I felt judged, too.
But I could put the book down. Black Americans—like Lutie, like my student, like my colleague—don’t have that choice. They can’t shut away or turn off the prejudice baked into our history and culture. Not all challenges hold an equal potential for growth, and challenge is not synonymous with virtue. That’s something I’ve known intellectually but haven’t felt, even in this superficial and miniscule way, until I read about Lutie Johnson.
After divorcing her husband, who cheats on her while she’s away working as a housekeeper for the white Chandler family, Lutie lives with her father. He drinks too much and exposes her son, Bub, to bad influences, so Lutie rents a dingy apartment on 116th. Right away, she second-guesses her decision. The superintendent sexually harasses her, and a downstairs neighbor runs a brothel in the building. But 116th Street—the personification of the relentless, inevitable effects of systemic racism and poverty that plague its inhabitants—is all Lutie can afford.
For a while, after a man named Boots offers her a job with his band, Lutie dreams of making it as a singer and whisking Bub to somewhere better. When she sings, Lutie escapes her surroundings: “[S]he leav[es] the street with its dark hallways, its mean, shabby rooms; she tak[es] Bub away with her to a place where there [are] no Mrs. Hedges, no resigned and disillusioned little girls, no half-human creatures like the Super.” Then the offer falls through. Neither Lutie nor Boots possesses agency because Junto, the white man who owns the bar and her apartment building, wants Lutie for himself. Lutie runs out of options, and when Bub gets into trouble, she faces an impossible decision.
A fun summer beach read, The Street is not. At times it feels tedious, but that’s the point: the repetitive, detailed descriptions underscore the street’s terrible, inescapable influence.
In her introduction to The Street, Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage, praises the “transformative power” of Petry’s novel. The novel changed me by challenging me to empathize with characters to whom I would be the villain.
To my colleague and my student, I probably was. I ignored my student’s needs. I mistook tradition for integrity. I taught a curriculum, however well-intentioned at some point, that harmed my student. If that's not a villain—a villain deserving of the title—I don't know what is.
I gave up teaching Of Mice and Men years ago (that’s a debate for another newsletter/PLC meeting) in favor of other titles with similar themes and diverse characters. Not much in my classroom or on my syllabus resembles that early version of my teaching self. Mine is not a perfect classroom, but it is a hopeful one. Tayari Jones argues that The Street, while “riddled with pain” is ultimately “powered by hope.” Even when Lutie follows through on an act she can never undo, she still hopes for her son's future. Even when I falter in my classroom, even when I fail to listen or when, in my laziness or ignorance, I allow ritual to outweigh rightness, I also hope I've built an environment where students feel comfortable enough to speak up when they are uncomfortable, where students who challenge me can expect me to listen.
I wrote recently about Catherine Lacey’s Pew, in which characters let ritual outweigh rightness. It’s a lesson I’m still learning myself. I’m grateful to The Street for contributing to that process. We should all read a book that challenges us now and then.
Need-to-Know
Pub Date: 1946
Setting: Harlem, 1940s
Length: 435 pages, 13.5 hours
Narrator: close 3rd, shifting POV
Fun Facts: 1st novel by black woman to sell 1 million copies
Content Warning: suicide, sexual violence, n-word
Book Club
All of the characters, minus eight-year-old Bub, have flaws, and yet they are still empathetic. Even Jones, perhaps the most despicable of all, is cast to some extent as a victim of his circumstances. Who did you sympathize with most? Why? Discuss the characters’ complexity. Choose a character and find a scene that depicts their full, flawed humanity.
When Lutie works for the Chandlers, she observes that the only thing the family wants “[is] to be rich–‘filthy’ rich.” The Chandlers and their friends pat themselves on the back for living in the “[r]ichest damn country in the world” where “[a]nyone” can “[o]utsmart the next guy” to become wealthy and successful. How does Lutie’s story challenge that notion? What about Boots?
Close Reading
The opening pages stunned me when I listened to this audiobook. Take a look:
“There was a cold November wind blowing through 116th Street. It rattled the tops of the garbage cans, sucked window shades out through the top of opened windows and set them flapping back against the windows; and it drove most of the people off the street in the block Seventh and Eighth Avenues except for a few hurried pedestrians who bent double in an effort to offer the least possible exposed surface to its violent assault.
It found every scrap of paper along the street—theater throwaways, announcements of dances and lodge meetings, the heavy waxed paper that loaves of bread had been wrapped in, the thinner waxed paper that had enclosed sandwiches, old envelopes, newspapers. Fingering its way along the curb, the wind set the bits of paper to dancing high in the air, so that a barrage of paper swirled into the faces of the people on the street. It even took time to rush into doorways and areas and find chicken bones and pork-chop bones and pushed them along the curb. …
The wind lifted Lutie Johnson’s hair away from the back of her neck so that she felt suddenly naked and bold, for her hair had been resting softly and warmly against her skin.”
I once took a class with Julie Buntin, who talked about how writers teach readers how to read their work. In the opening lines or pages (depending on the work’s length), readers learn:
Who to care about
What that person cares about
Where we are in space & time
Hints about developing themes
I use this framework in my classroom all the time. Ann Petry offers an excellent example here. We immediately know it’s a chilly November day in New York City. It’s not just cold or breezy. The wind is personified in this evocative participial phrase: “Fingering its way along the curb.” Petry depicts it not as a weather phenomenon but as a living force that revels in antagonizing anyone unfortunate enough to be caught outside. We know the wind enjoys causing misery because it sets trash “dancing . . . into the faces of the people on the street.” The old food containers and thrown-out newspapers get to dance and enjoy themselves; the people do not. When Petry introduces us to Lutie in the fourth paragraph, the image is of a “naked and bald” woman. The wind has stripped Lutie not only of her comfort but of her privacy. This air, and the street it permeates, has it out for Lutie, and as readers, we know we are on her side. Her struggle in this initial scene sets a path for a theme to develop, and we know we can expect to understand suffering differently by the end of this story.
Creative Writing
Fiction: Lutie is only happy when she’s singing and dreaming of another life. When Boots invites her onstage, she loses herself: “The music swelled in back of her and she began to sing, faintly at first and then her voice grew stronger, clearer, for she gradually forgot the men in the orchestra, forgot even that she was there in the Casino and why she was there. Though she sang the words of the song, it was of something entirely different that she was thinking and putting into the music: she was leaving the street with its dark hallways, its mean, shabby rooms; she was taking Bub away with her to a place where there were no Mrs. Hedges, no resigned and disillusioned little girls, no half-human creatures like the super.”
Give a character a dream of a life totally different from theirs. Forget how they’re going to get it. Just have them embody it for a moment. How does it feel? How does shift them on the inside?
Nonfiction: In her introduction, Tayari Jones writes, “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.” What gives you hope? Write about a painful situation that allowed you to feel uplifted in some way. What layers existed in the situation? How did you sink or rise through them?
Sentence Study
I struggled to find a single sentence to pull out because Petry strings sentences together so expertly that their effect is cumulative. Take this passage:
“Her thoughts were like a chorus chanting inside her head. The men stood around and the women worked. The men left the women and the women went on working and the kids were left alone. The kids burned lights all night because they were alone in small, dark rooms and they were afraid. Alone. Always alone. They wouldn’t stay in the house after school because they were afraid in the empty, silent, dark rooms. And they should have been playing in the wide stretches of green park and instead they were in the street. And the street reached out and sucked them up.”
Lutie has just returned home to find that Bub is gone; the police have taken him to the station for stealing. Petry starts this moment with a simple simile, comparing Lutie’s thoughts to a chorus. She extends the analogy in the next three sentences with language that sounds chant-like. The diction is simple because Petry wants to make sure we understand the cause-effect chain of events on the street. First, we learn that the men loiter while women work. Petry nearly repeats that sentence and adds another clause about the kids. Then she starts a new sentence about the kids, which shifts the paragraph’s focus to their predicament for the rest of the paragraph. By starting the final two sentences with the conjunction “And,” Petry creates the effect of piling on, which mimics how “the street,” personified here again, will not show mercy to kids like Bub.
Honestly, content aside, you should read this book just because Petry’s writing is so symphonic.
