December 2023. The Street by Ann Petry
1946, Little, Brown, 253 pages. Written in English, read in English.
The cover of the edition I’ve read of The Street shows the silhouette of a dignified woman, dressed in a cotton dress and a hat, clutching a small purse, looking outside of the realm of the cover with what appears to be a mixture of hope, fear and determination. I’m mentioning this because there’s a lot of discussion about the evolution of the cover of this novel in the forward written by author Tayari Jones (whose novel An American Marriage shares a similar theme of people trying to navigate in a world in which events out of their control shape and shock their lives) — from the type of cover that best befits a forties cheap paperback thriller, to this cover that is more in line with a great, important novel, The Street has been through a lot. Jones also mentions that during her college course she instructs the reading of this novel just after Richard Wright’s Native Son, and the juxtaposition of these two novels is important, because of their shared main themes — hopelessness and helplessness.
The woman on the cover is Lutie Johnson. She is a young mother of an eight year old child, referred to in the novel as Bub. She is attempting to reset her current trajectory, to provide a better future for her son by attempting to move with him to a new apartment in a different street, away from the influence of her father and his current girlfriend, away from the history of work for a wealthy white family and a duplicitous husband. The eponymous street is 116th street — I don’t know enough of Harlem history to determine if the particular street has any social or historical significance, but in any case it serves as a symbol of the type of street in which people with no other means find accommodation, and therefore find themselves surrounded by other people with no other means.
Johnson’s narrative is soon interspersed by other characters that enter her life and the story — Jones, the superintendent who lusts after Johnson to a point of collapse and danger; Mrs. Hedges, a brothel madame living on the first floor of the building, providing both a driver of the narrative and a deus ex machina at times; Boots Smith, a bandleader who Johnson believes will aid her salvation from the street by allowing her to make a living by singing with his band; and Junto, a white kingpin who begins the story in the background but may not finish it in the same place. As the story moves forward, we discover, through a series of flashbacks, how some of these characters have been connected to each other previously, and as the story moves forward we discover how they continue to influence each other. Each of the characters — Lutie Johnson, her son Bub, Jones the superintendent, his girlfriend Min, Boots Smith, Mrs. Hedges and Junto — is in the process of formalizing and implementing a plan that will get them to a better place than the one they happen to be in at the moment. Each of them needs somebody else to behave in a certain way for their plan to succeed, each of them reacts to partial or misread information, and each of them will reach a different level of the assurance that by the end of the novel, nobody wins.
At the time of its first publishing, in 1946, The Street has been the first novel of its kind to be written by a woman. All of the previous stories of urban despair and helplessness were written from the point of view of men, frequently from the perspective of a thriller or a detective novel. Here is a first display of narrative, told from the compassionate viewpoint of a female author with similar experiences, of an African American woman in the forties, trying to navigate through an unjust world which ground rules have already put her in a disadvantage which it will be all but impossible to step up from. Petry, through her protagonist, fights until the end to extract from hopelessness, hope, and from helplessness, trying to come to terms with the fact that the only help in that world is one’s own help.
The January 2024 selection of the David Bowie Book Club will be City of Night by John Rechy.
