Source of book: I own this.
Quick trivia question: what was the first book by an African American woman to sell over a million copies?
No, it wasn’t something by Maya Angelou or Toni Morrison. It was Ann Petry’s 1946 novel, The Street.
As regular readers know, I choose a couple of books to read for Black History Month each year. This year, I chose Dusk of Dawn by W. E. B. Du Bois, and The Street. It turns out that I ended up reading four total books, because I added Gwendolyn Brooks and Virginia Hamilton. A good month, for sure.
You can find the list of books here. You can read my thoughts on Black History Month here.
Black History Month is more important than ever, in an era when DUI hire Pete Hegseth and his bosses, Trump and Musk, are systematically purging Black History from government websites, firing well qualified women and minorities, and generally trying to Make America White Again.
*DUI: Drunk, Unqualified, and Incompetent
As I have done many times, I encourage everyone to seek out works by black authors. Borrow them from your library. Buy them. Share them with friends. Talk about them in person and online. Call out the assholes who spew bullshit like “only white men have ever accomplished anything great.” Because it is utter bullshit.
Ann Petry grew up at the edge of middle class, and made the most of it. She was the only black teen in her high school to graduate, and she would go on to earn her PhD. She had a few advantages due to her family situation, but she experienced plenty of prejudice, including from a teacher who had her read the illiterate slave parts in books.
Back to this particular book. The Street is not an easy book to read. It is dark, often violent, and pessimistic. It is also powerful because it tells the truth.
I would in some significant ways, compare this book to the social novels of Charles Dickens. Petry exposes the systemic injustice and cruelty that creates and maintains poverty. As in Dickens, children suffer, women suffer, the system grinds everyone in some way or another.
Unlike Dickens, who wrote in a different era, Petry does not merely hint at the sexual exploitation of women. The expectation that attractive women “put out” to survive is shown in all its evil and vulgarity.
I can see why the book sold, however. Petry’s writing is incredible, with descriptions that made the details of the story come alive.
For example, did you know that poverty has a smell? I grew up in working class neighborhoods, which were a combination of people living in reasonable security, and households that were constantly on the brink of bankruptcy. There is absolutely a smell, that anyone who knows, knows. I can’t explain it, but Petry re-creates it in the book.
She also captures the grossness of entitled men looking for a woman to fuck and dump. The obese old white man who gets off on young black women. The ex-military super who simmers with fury that his youth and charm has faded, leaving him unable to get laid at will. The sleazy quasi-gangster who figures to get a piece of what his white boss expects. It’s all very gross, and the writing is so good that it will totally creep you out.
Petry also captures the dynamics of poverty so well. Which also intersects with the issues that white people love to dismiss as “black culture,” but which are really rooted in systemic racism. And also with the way the American Dream is largely a lie - particularly the part that says anyone can raise themselves from poverty by simply saving more.
The other reason why the book likely sold well is that it is more than a little lurid. I won’t reveal the twist in the final chapter, but I can guarantee you it isn’t what you expect to happen.
I won’t give away the plot, but I think for purposes of understanding the themes, at least the premise is necessary.
The book is mostly from the perspective of Lutie Johnson, a young mother who is trying to find a better life for her son. (There are other perspectives here and there in the book, which makes things interesting. All the characters, good and bad, have interesting back stories, and are far from caricatures - they have a mix of good and bad.)
The problem is, life has dealt Lutie a bad hand.
Initially happily married, the marriage goes south, and for an entirely predictable reason. Then as now, black men have the highest unemployment rate in the country. There are a whole host of intersecting and related factors for this (check out this Brookings breakdown), but they all stem from systemic and historic factors including poor schools, lack of job offers made to black men, and low quality of those offers.
So, Lutie’s husband can’t get a job. What to do? Well, eventually, not wanting to starve and all, or have her child starve, she takes a job working as a domestic servant in a white household. This pays the bills, but…
It’s a big but. Her husband, feeling emasculated, finds his virility with another woman.
This is an underrated reason why impoverished family tend to break up. I have seen a lot of it in my practice over the years, and it is tied to psychological factors: male worth and virtue is equated with money, and systemic social issues: good jobs are not available for many men - not just black men, although they bear the most burden here.
By the way, two African American authors that I love, W. E. B. Du Bois and Albert Murray, wrote in detail about this issue. It is so easy to blame “culture” for poverty, rather than look at the real problem, which is that poverty itself - specifically the lack of well-paying, stable employment - creates these “cultural” problems.
As the book puts it:
Jim’s face had been open, honest, young. Come to think of it, when she and Jim got married it looked as though it should have been a happy, successful marriage. They were young enough and enough in love to have made a go of it. It always came back to the same thing. Jim couldn’t find a job.
So day by day, month by month, big broad-shouldered Jim Johnson went to pieces because there wasn’t any work for him and he couldn’t earn anything at all. He got used to facing the fact that he couldn’t support his wife and child. It ate into him. Slowly, bit by bit, it undermined his belief in himself until he could no longer bear it. And he got himself a woman so that in those moments when he clutched her close to him in bed he could prove that he was still needed, wanted. His self-respect was momentarily restored through the woman’s desire for him. Thus, too, he escaped from the dreary monotony of his existence.
So, with a young child, Lutie has really only two options. She can live with her father and his latest girlfriend - who plies her child with gin when Lutie is working - or she can find an apartment of her own.
This is what she does, renting a tiny, dark apartment in Harlem. Try as she may, she cannot actually get ahead, and all it takes is a small problem to bring it all crashing down.
Don’t think here that the book is simplistic, or that it simply blames white people. Rather, it personifies “The Street” - which is both the literal Harlem street, and also the overall system which keeps people in poverty. And in that, I can say from my experience living and working with people on the edge, the book is accurate and compelling.
I did want to share some of the truly beautiful writing in this book. I think Petry is up there with other lyricists of the 20th Century. It is true craft.
Let’s start with the opening.
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 between 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. Finger its way along the curb, the wind set the bits of paper 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 areaways and find chicken bones and pork-chop bones and pushed them along the curb.
It did everything it could to discourage the people walking along the street. It found all the dirt and dust and grime on the sidewalk and lifted it up so that the dirt got into their noses, making it difficult to breathe; the dust got into their eyes and blinded them; and the grit stung their skins. It wrapped newspaper around their feet entangling them until the people cursed deep in their throats, stamped their feet, kicked at the paper. The wind blew it back again and again until they were forced to stoop and dislodge the paper with their hands. And then the wind grabbed their hats, pried their scarves from around their necks, stuck its fingers inside their coat collars, blew their coats away from their bodies.
If you can’t find yourself feeling literally on that street… And it also serves as a great metaphor for the street itself and the inexorable grinding of poverty throughout the book.
The mean apartment building gets its own description, and here too, I know what these places are like.
The hall was dark. The low-wattage bulb in the ceiling shed just enough light so that you wouldn’t actually fall over - well, a piano that someone had left at the foot of the stairs; so that you could see the outlines of - oh, possibly an elephant if it were dragged in from the street by some enterprising tenant.
And, of course, the smell of poverty.
She was conscious that all the little rooms smelt exactly alike. It was a mixture that contained the faint persistent odor of gas, of old walls, dusty plaster, and over it all the heavy, sour smell of garbage - a smell that seeped through the dumb-waiter shaft.
The first introduction to Jones, the super, is not flattering. And to be sure, he is one of the villains in this book - perhaps the most nefarious. But he gets half a chapter where his own trauma and backstory and feelings get shown - it’s not a caricature. Lutie, however, senses the darkness inside him.
Granny would have said, “Nothin’ but evil, child. Some folks so full of it you can feel it comin’ at you - oozin’ right out of their skins.”
I also noted a scene in a flashback, where Lutie experiences the way the upper-middle-class white women respond to her. There is this casual assumption that she is out to steal their husbands. After all, black people are hyper-sexual, right? And it has nothing to do with their husbands fetishizing women they can take advantage of without consequence, right?
It didn’t make her angry at first. Just contemptuous. They didn’t know she had a big handsome husband of her own; that she didn’t want any of their thin unhappy husbands. But she wondered why they all had the idea that colored girls were whores.
Of course, it isn’t just women of color who are dismissed as whores. The Madonna/Slut dichotomy is alive and well. This line, though, really resonated with me, having put up with a decade and a half of my sister making these kind of false accusations against my wife, who was clearly out to seduce each of my sister’s partners in turn. Just like this wore on Lutie, it wore on my wife.
Unfortunately, for Lutie, it wasn’t her that cheated - it was her husband, looking to restore his lost machismo.
Another scene that was memorable is one involving Min, the super’s live-in lover. Or whatever she is, now that he has eyes only for Lutie and wants to get rid of her. She would rather get him back, so she goes to see this magic guy called The Prophet, for charms to get her way. (For more about this sort of practice, check out Zora Neale Hurston’s ethnographic work, Mules and Men.)
This is interesting because, unlike Hurston, who seems to take voodoo as if it worked, Petry describes it as “working” because the super and Min believe it does. There is no magic, just the psychology that the super won’t or can’t touch a magic cross.
And also, Petry is entirely right about why The Prophet is so successful.
Then he shook hands with her and she thought talking to him had been the most satisfying experience she had ever known. True, he hadn’t said very much except toward the last when he was telling her how to use the things. The satisfaction she felt was from the quiet way he had listened to her, giving her all his attention. No one had ever done that before.
This is in contrast to her doctors, and the many others she sought help from at various times. I find that listening is a big part of lawyering too - one that can’t really be replaced by AI or a website.
Lutie tries her best to find some way of bettering herself. She is hard working, frugal, and intelligent. But domestic work simply doesn’t pay enough, and she doesn’t have other options. She briefly thinks she may be able to get a singing job from Boots Smith, but the problem is - like it is in so many other ways of getting money - that the price is something she refuses to pay. “There wasn’t any inducement he could offer that would make her sleep with him.”
And when I say Lutie is frugal, the whole street really is. Food deserts aren’t anything new, as this passage notes.
She thought about the stores again. All of them - the butcher shops, the notion stores, the vegetable stands - all of them sold the leavings, the sweepings, the impossible unsalable merchandise, the dregs and dross that were reserved especially for Harlem.
Boots has made his money, essentially by being a lackey to Junto, the white slumlord and shady proprietor. He has his own car, and Petry describes so well the way it makes him feel. Keep this in mind when you hear white people complain about black people with fancy cars.
Because in that one moment of passing a white man in a car they could feel good and the good feeling would last long enough so that they could hold their heads up the next day and the day after that. And the white people in the cars hated it because - and her mind stumbled over the thought and then went on - because possibly they, too, needed to go on feeling superior. Because if they didn’t, it upset the delicate balance of the world they moved in when they could see for themselves that a black man in a ratclap car could overtake and pass them on a hill. Because if there was nothing left for them but that business of feeling superior to black people, and that was taken away even for the split second of one car going ahead of another, it left them with nothing.
Did I mention how much I love Petry’s writing? That’s downright poetic.
I also want to mention another scene, with Lutie having to go out at night to sing, and 8 year old Bub left home alone in the dark.
It was worse with his eyes open, because he couldn’t see anything and he kept imagining that the whole room was changing and shifting about him. He peered into the dark, trying to see what was going on. He sat up and then he lay down again and pulled the covers over his head. There was an even stranger quality to the black under the covers. He shut his eyes and then opened them immediately afterward, not knowing what he expected to find nestling beside him under the sheets, but afraid to look and afraid not to look.
Another perceptive passage is about making music at a club or event or wedding. If you know, you know.
It doesn’t really make much difference who sings or whether they sing badly or well, because nobody really listens. They’re making love or quarreling or drinking or dancing.
I’ll end with this description, which is another brilliant bit of observation.
Yes, she thought, if you were born black and not too ugly, this is what you get, this is what you find. It was a pity he hadn’t lived in the days of slavery, so he could have raided the slave quarters for a likely wench any hour of the day or night. This is the superior race, she said to herself, take a good long look at him: black, oily hair, slack, gross body; grease spots on his vest; wrinkled shirt collar; cigar ashes on his suit; small pig eyes engulfed in the fat of his face.
Remind you of anyone in the MAGA movement? The superior race indeed…
Despite its dark tone, the book moves quickly and keeps you reading. And, as I said, that surprise at the end - it’s definitely more than expected.
