Ann Petry's The Street - ep. by Angel C. Dye

A short take on Ann Petry's The Street.
Written by Angel C. Dye
Read by Kassandra Timm

Transcript

 Ann Petry’s work is often left out of conversations about the canon of African American literature. Petry was a household name in the 1940s, part of a powerful line of Black protest literature initiated by Richard Wright’s famous 1940 novel Native Son. Yet, over the years, somehow her work was buried in favor of newer rising voices.

Decades later, scholars have returned to Petry’s work, especially her astonishing 1946 novel, The Street, which sold 1.5 million copies when it was first published.

You’re listening to Remarkable Receptions – a podcast about popular and critical responses to African American novels and more.

The Street is a protest novel about one young black woman, Lutie Johnson, and her struggles to raise her eight-year-old son on an overcrowded, violent, and deeply racialized block in Harlem. Lutie’s grip on security and upward mobility is thwarted at every turn, and not just by the fact of her single motherhood but by the absoluteness of her gender, race, and class.    

While intimate details about Petry’s life are unknown, Lutie’s experience shows what living as a young black woman in the forties was like. One of the most fascinating—and infuriating—qualities about Lutie is what the novel continuously describes as the rarity of her physical attractiveness. She is a good mother, a hard worker, and a talented singer, but it is her appearance that makes her prey, always subject to threats of sexual violence.

Scholars of African American Literature have begun to revisit The Street as its own nuanced project, not just the feminine counterpart to Richard Wright’s famous 1940 novel Native Son. Petry’s masterful writing of Lutie and the setting of The Street is reason enough to give this novel the attention it demands.

With time and more critical dialogue, The Street can have its place in the African American literary canon in a way that honors Petry’s contributions and reflects its original reception in 1946.

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This episode was written by Angel C. Dye. The episode was edited by Elizabeth Cali and Howard Rambsy.

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This podcast, Remarkable Receptions, is part of the Black Literature Network, a joint project from African American literary studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the History of Black Writing at the University of Kansas. The project was made possible by the generous support of the Mellon Foundation.  For more information, visit blacklitnetwork.org.