Review of The Street by Ann Petry
Review by Michael Quinn
Even successful books, continuously in print for generations, eventually fade into the background. New editions, repackaged with fresh cover art and introductions by contemporary authors, give us reason to see them with fresh eyes. Such is the case with The Street, Ann Petry’s critically-acclaimed 1946 novel (with an insightful introduction by author Tayari Jones) about a single Black mother in Harlem trying to rise above the racism, sexism, and poverty her life is mired in.
On a cold, windy night in 1944, Lutie Johnson looks for a new apartment for herself and her eight-year-old son, Bub. She’s determined to make a better life for the both of them. Lutie’s options are limited by two things: her low-level office job income, and her race.
Despite having given it her all, Lutie’s marriage has fallen apart, collapsing under the strain of finances. Husband Jim just couldn’t find work. “‘God damn white people anyway,” he grouses. “I don’t want favors. All I want is a job. Just a job. Don’t they know if I knew how I’d change the color of my skin?’”
Lutie had tried to make ends meet, taking in foster children for the supplemental income they provided, then a job as a live-in maid to a white family in Connecticut, sending home her earnings to support her husband and son in Jamaica, Queens. When Lutie comes home for an unexpected visit, she finds another woman in her place. She then takes Bub to her father’s, but is afraid of Pop’s influence on her son. He’s a hard drinker and lives with a loose, voluptuous woman.
The three rooms of the top-floor apartment Lutie winds up renting are oppressively small and dreary, heavy with the “faint persistent odor of gas, of old walls, dusty plaster, and over it all the heavy, sour smell of garbage.” Worse, still, are the other tenants.
Mrs. Hedges, the first neighbor Lutie meets, sits perched in her window, watching everyone’s comings and goings with “the eyes of a snake,” speaking to them with a sugary tongue. She calls everyone “dearie.” Lutie has a strange feeling of Mrs. Hedges “reading her thoughts, pushing her way into her very mind.” Mrs. Hedges’ apartment is the front for a brothel; the tightly-wrapped bandana she wears around her head hides a different kind of secret.
The creepy super, Jones, has his eyes on Lutie from the start, making her walk up the stairs ahead of him, the first time he shows her the apartment, in order to admire her from behind. With the electricity turned off, Lutie is forced to inspect the place by flashlight, and can feel Jones in the dark beside her, ready to pounce. He later befriends Bub as a way to get closer to Lutie, snooping around her apartment when she’s not there, sniffing her powder, rifling through her drawers, squeezing a blouse, imagining the shape of her breasts inside of it. He carries the threat of violence with his every move.
The resourceful Min is the toothless woman who lives with Jones, one of a series of her “husbands.” She’s dependent on him for practical reasons (she needs a place to stay). She cooks, cleans, and otherwise tries to make herself invisible. Realizing that Jones is about to throw her out in order to make the moves on Lutie, Min seeks help from an occultist, who gives her magical powders and potions. The results are good, yet what really makes a difference is something else entirely: “The satisfaction she felt was from the quiet way he had listened to her, giving her all of his attention. No one had ever done that before.”
Lutie, meanwhile, is dispirited by the poverty all around her. Stores are full of “imitation leather pocketbooks, gaudy rayon underwear edged with coarse yellow lace, sleazy blouses—most of it good for one wearing and no more.” She’s horrified to come home one day and discover Bub on the street with a shoeshine box, trying to make some money. Lutie has an unexpected, violent reaction, and slaps him mightily.
Lutie realizes that her son has unconsciously absorbed her financial anxiety. All she talks about is money: the lack of it, and the need for it. Thinking further, she realizes that her white employers, despite their obvious advantages, “didn’t want their children to be president or diplomats or anything like that. What they wanted was to be rich—‘filthy rich,’” as one calls it. This singular motivation for what makes life worth living starts to impress itself into Lute’s thinking as well. This will prove to be her downfall.
Feeling cooped up one night, Lutie goes to the bar on the corner, Junto’s, whose white proprietor observes Lutie drinking a beer, singing along with the jukebox, and being approached by the charismatic yet oily musician Boots Smith, who’s in his employ. Boots takes Lutie for a drive before his nightly band gig. While Lutie’s afraid of the move he’ll next try to make, she’s also exhilarated by the drive, noticing in the moment they’re able to speed past a white driver that it made them “feel good and the good feeling would last long enough so that they could hold up their heads the next day and the day after that.”
Boots asks Lutie to try out as a singer with his band. She fantasizes that this is the break she’s been waiting for. But Junto, the white man, pulls the strings on all of their fates.
The Street is a powerhouse of a novel. What will strike readers is how contemporary it seems and how relevant its ideas still are.
Lutie herself sees 116th Street as more than just the block she lives on. It’s representative of “any place where the women had to work to support the families because the men couldn’t get jobs and the men got bored and pulled out and the kids were left without proper homes because there was nobody around to put a heart into it. Yes, it was any place where people were so damn poor they didn’t have time to do anything but work, and their bodies were the only source of relief from the pressure under which they lived.”
Characters have their unique motivations, to be certain, yet everyone also acts according to society’s strictly-established rules—even when it’s against their will. Even as situations demand softness and understanding, hardness becomes the only way to cope.
About one thing, Lutie is certain. “It all added up to the same thing, she decided—white people. She hated them. And she would always hate them.” Nothing happens in The Street that will change Lutie’s mind. Instead—and this is the reason Petry’s novel continues to resonate seventy-four years later—you’ll understand why Lutie feels that way to begin with. For white readers especially, it’s about time.
The Street by Ann Petry, Introduction by Tayari Jones, 2020, Mariner Books, 378 pp
