The other city: Harlem in Ann Petry's the street

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos. 11! 4 ( 1996). pp. 107 -112 THE OTHER CITY: HARLEM IN ANN PETRY'S THE S1REET MANUELA MATAS LLORENTE Universidad de Sevilla In 1949, Ralph Ellison asserted that Harlem was nowhere. Living in Harlem, says Ellison, is to dwell in the very bowels ofthe city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires and crosses of churches and clutter under foot with garbage and decay. Harlem is a ruin- ... Overcrowded and ex ploited politically and economically, Harlem is the scene and the symbol of th e Negro 's perpetual alienation in the land of his birth (295-96). A few years earlier, in 1946, Afro-American woman novelist Ann Petry had already captured that same symbolic character of black Har lem and tumed it into a successful piece of fiction: The Street. In spite of its quality asan urban novel, insofar as it takes place in New York City and deals with several aspects of city life, many of the pages devoted to Petry's first work tend to focus on its protagonist, on the characters surrounding her, and the myths involv ed in her pursuit of success and her ultimate, doomed failure1• Strange enough, little or no room has been made for one of the rnost significa nt elements in the novel: th e street which gives a title to Petry's account ofhow Lutie Johnson, a young mulatto woman, abandon ed wife and eager mother, struggles to find a place for herse lf and her eight-year-old son, in a world dominated by white power. However, one could argue that, as much as Lutie's destiny is marked by her being a good-looking, black woman 1. See Yemon E. Lattin «Ann Petry and lh e American Dream» in Black America11 literature Forum (vol. 12, No. 2, 1978. pp. 69-72), Bemard W. Bell «Ann Petry's Demy th ologizing of American Culture and Afro-American Character» in Conjuring (Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers eds. Bloomington: lndiana U.P.,1985. pp. 105 -115) and Marjorie Pryse «Paltem Against tite Sky: Deism and Motherhood in Ann Petry's The Street» in Conjuring (Marjorie Pry se and Hortense Spillers eds. Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1985. pp. 11 6-13 l). 108 Manuela Matas Llorente (the classic «tragic mulatto»), it is determined by her reading, or rather misreading, of that street in Harlem from which she desperately hopes to get away, and eventually destroys her. lt seems then important to explore the black inner city in its manyfold implications, to look through the mirror where one can actually see the deep anihilation of it~ inhabitants. The potential of Harlem as a literary metaphor goes beyond its association with black ghetto life. An example of what Spanish architect and Art historian Femando Chueca Goitia calls «Ciudad sin alma», this area of New York shares with the slum of paleotechnic cities its being «Un hacinamiento de gente en un lugar que puede ser designado con nombre propio a los efectos postales ... sin adquirir la más leve de las instituciones que caracterizan a una ciudad en un sentido sociológico» (19). But the Harlem in The Street eludes any apprehension as a complete whole. As Petry seems to suggest, it is a world of opposites. Depending on your position (within the black commnunity or outside in the white world) who you are and what you need, Harlem may be a place of excitement and hope or tum into a symbol of alienation and frustration. It is its very elusiveness what makes it the ideal setting for Lutie Johnson's rise and fall. The novel opens with a foil description of the scene in which the tragedy of our heroine is going to take place. Befare even knowing who she is going to be, the reader encounters a windy, November night on l 16th street, in Central Harlem. One of the walkers in this hostile environment, in a clear fight against natural forces, is Lutie Johnson, desperately looking far an apartment where she and her son can start a new life. Through her thoughts and comments, we are introduced to the world of the street, we see Mrs. Hedges'eyes « Still and malignant as the eyes of a snake» (6), we feel the instintive fear she felt when she met the Superindendent of the building, who will later try to rape her and will manage to get her son in prison, we are told of «tales about things that people sensed befare they actually happened» (15) but, after having the signs interpreted, we discover that, despite the bad omens and premonitions, this section doses with Lutie's optimistic assessment of her new home: «Now that she had this apartment she was justa step farther up in the ladder of success» (25). How can she be so utterly deceived? As a place defined by difference, Harlem may be both the symbol of material prosperity and the farm of a new way of colonization. On the one hand, Harlem represents far Lutie and many of its inhabitants the setting far the fulfilment of hopeless expectations, a new beginning. For sorne others, it is just the last painful step in their climbing down the social ladder. The site of sexual freedom and abandon in Harlem Reinassance mythology, places like the Juntoa white-owned bar where blacks l in g er in the hope of forgetting their reality - signify the dream of possibility and equality that cannot be faund in the outside world. Working men, unemployed, old and young women, ali of th em find there something they lack. However, everything about it is nothing but a sheer illusion, from the mirror which creates the impression the place is bigger than it really is, to the white waiters whose «Courteous friendliness ... helped rebuild egos The Other City: Harlem in Ann Petry's The Street 109 battered and bruised during the course of the day's work» ( 143). It is people like Boots Smith, who sang their way out of poverty, Mrs. Hedges and her house of prostitution the ones who contribute to feed Lutie's hope for a better life, and perpetuate the my th. A few blocks away, reality breaks into the midst of fantas y. A city within a city, Harlem is segregated from the white world by th e color line which marks the space for blackness and whiteness. Within its limits, in the Black World behind the Veil, as DuBois called the Veil of Race that separates white and black America (The Souls of Black Folk 265), Harlem has a potential for destruction hidden beneath a surface of gaiety and entertainment. In sharp opposition to the novel 's opening image, we follow Lutie 's thoughts into a nice street in a white, rich Conneticut neighborhood where she used to work for the Chandlers. The strange white world they represent «made her feel she was looking through a hole in a wall at sorne enchanted garden. The people on the other side of the wall knew less about her than she knew about them» (41). That wall, quickly built up by ju st adopting the right tone of voice, divides black and white culture and socio-economic values, the same way Mrs. Chandler set s Lutie apart by making clear she is her colored maid. For the white world, ali blacks ar e neatly wrapped in a package labaled «Colored »; «a package that called for certain kinds of jobs anda special kind of treatment» (72). Behind the Veil , black women read as latent prostitutes eager to steal a white man from his wife. In the Chandlers' section «the price of something called Tell and Tell and American Nickel and United States Steel hada direct cffect on emotions» (43). Segregated by color, Harlem signifies the whites' attempt to keep AfricanAmericans in their place: It wasn 't just this city. It was any city where they can s et upa line and say black folks stay on this side and white folks on this side, so that black folks are crammed on top of each other -jammed and packed and forced into the smallest possible space until they were completely cut off from light and air» (206). Conditioned by their lack of possibility, black men, like Lutie 's father, spend thcir time drinking and doing nothing; others, unable to find a job , find themselves a woman, different from their working wives, who can restore in them sorne of their lost self-respect; black women work ali day long in the house of sorne white family and retum to dark apartments from where their husbands have long left. African-Americans, formerly subjugated by slavery are now exploted by the northem world that the city signifies: «They were North's lynch mobs ... the method the big cities us ed to keep Negroes in their place» (323). As supposedly free and independent, they have no right to claim on former ma sters. More an auitude than a simple place, streets like the one Lutie lives on seem to be the cause of black people's destruction: The same combination of circumstances had evidently made Mrs. Hedges ... turn to running a fairly well kept whore house .. . ; and the superintendent of the building -well, the street had pushed him into basements away from light and air until he was being eaten up by sorne horrible obsession; and stiH other streets had tumed Min, the 110 Manuela Matas Llorente woman who lived with him, into drab drudge so spineless she was like a soggy di shrag. (57). Hence, the stratified structure in which the city is divided allows no ba lance, its inhabitants define themselves by th e place where they live and the world where they belong. No wonder, the whole novel is full of symbolic and physical traps wh ich contribute to mantain black people safely enclosed and isolated from the white wo rld beyond th e ghetto limits. The small, dark apartments where they live, the servile jobs offered to kids for early training into thinking that mopping floors is the farthest they can get, the rent they pay every month to the white landlord, the poor leve! of edu cation offered. Even the singing job Lutie is offered hides the secret intention of forcing her into becoming Junto's mistress. Deeply conditioned by guetto life, blacks get trapped inside a vicious circle. Unable to find a position in society, African-Americans' identity is literally nowhere, wandering along the streets of Harlem which become a symbol of their inferiority. For the white comm unic y, Harlem is che mirror image of black s' lack of humanity, the inner city where whites can read them as savages and reassure their reading. Neither the place nor its people are real entities but reflections of their reciproca) filth and primitivism. For Bud's white teacher, unable to overcome her racial prejudices, even the way pas sers - by ignore her in th e streets of Harlem becomes a symbol of their violent character: «she thought of every person she passed as a thre at to her safety» (331 ). Her students terrify her, their smell is offensive «bold, strong, lusty and fightening» (328), the way they act, a complete miscery to her who is not able to distinguish their líes from their truth. White reporters would turna skinny, young black into a «burly Negro» killed while trying to hold upa bakery. To the white man 's eyes «The Negro was never an individual. He was a threat oran animal, ora curse, ora blight, ora joke» ( 199). Overwork ed women like Min are laughed at by th ei r white madams as if they were « a deaf, dumb, blind thing completely devoid of understanding .... » (127). Having no real position within the system, no work, no quality, no worth, blacks' lives become meaningless, their existence use!ess. In visible to the whice world, these conditions of displacement tum African-Americans into walking dead whose grave is, Iiterally and symbolicall y, Harlem. Taking up again the ambivale nt character of the black city, P et ry makes the dwelling of the living dead coexist with a Harlem where blacks ca n find their own individuality. As mentioned befare, the streets ofHarlem become the scene forpremature deaths. Literally killed by a whice baker 's knife, a teenager's d ea th gave her sister «a look of resignation, of complete acceptance. It was an expression that said the gi rl hoped forno more than chis from life» ( 197), the same awful look of a sixteen-year -old girl laying hurt on a ho sp ital stretcher. With no hope for an improvement in their condition, they concinue to exist with a dispassionate lack of interest, dragging themselves into another day. The Super and Mr s. Hedges are virtually buried ali ve, cut offfrom the outside world. His life is surrounded by silence, living in «the darkest apartment, the smallest, most unrentable apartment» (7), «No pictures, no rug s, no newspapers, no The Other City: Harlem in A11n Pe11y's The Street 111 magázines, nothing to suggest anyone had ever tried to make it look homelike» (24 ). Horribly scarred in her face and body, Mr s. Hedges is determined «never to expose herself to the prying, curious eyes of the world» (257). The physical conditions of the Harlem apartments (small, dark rooms) may be interprete as their dwellers' symbolic grave whose walls suffocate them, whose silence can be heard under the sound of any other noise: «the thr ee rooms with the silence and thc walls pressing in» (150), a place to bury any hope for transcendence. However, superimposed onto that world of deadly existence, Harlem is able to give its people a sense of humanity they lack in the outside world. Because of its isolation, the black inner city protects its inhabitants from the outer hatred which deprives them from their self. Coming out of the subway, Lutie thinks that «she never felt really human till she reached Harlcm and got away from the hostility in the eyes of the white women who stared at her on the downtown st reets and in the s ubway » (57). Paradoxically, the walls of white prejudice contribute to designa shelter where AfricanAmericans can recreate their identity once they are freed from the contempt in the eyes of the downtown world, they instantly become individuals. Up here they are no longer creatures labeled «colorcd» and therefore ali alike ... The same peop le who had made themselves small on the train, even on the platforrn, suddenly grew so large they could hardly get up the stairs to the street together (57-58). Unfortunately, as we have already seen, this is just one of the many aspects Harlem consists of, enhancing its deceitful nature and its elusive character. At the end, Lutie transmutes into an aggressive and enraged person. The sudden br eaki ng of reality into her world of illusion makes her kili Boots Smith (the one who disappointed her most) whose figure is transformed into «everything she had ha. c ed, everything she had fought against, everything that had served to frustrate her» (429). By striking him, «s he was striking at the white world which thrust black people into a walled enclousure from where there was no escape» (430). Although she manages to get away, nothing in the novel may lead to our thinking that h er escape is nota temporary one in another big city, Chicago, that «Wou ld swallow her up» (434). Harl em is then nowhere and anywhere. The city in The Street or any other would have placed limitations on Lutie. She lacks the power to counteract the forces of the slum. Unable or unwilling toread the signs which fortell her fall, the protagonist acquires her tragic character through her own attempts to overcome her destiny. The harder she tries to get out of the street, the more difficult it is for her to face it. Her believing in Harlem as a place of transcendence, what Petry makes true for sorne of her characters, precipitates her failure. Lutie 's mistake reads like the big mistake in the history of African-Ameri ca ns: aspiring to find in the north «t he apparent peace of a distan! mountain, made sorne fatal error of jud gement and fell into a great c ha sm of maze like passages thac promise ever to lead to the mountain but lead ever against the wall» (Ellison 298). A wall of discrimination and pr ejudice built up to reinforce black people's oppression in white America. 112 Manuela Matas Llorente WORKSCITED CHUECA GOffiA, FERNANDO. Breve historia del urbanismo. Madrid: Alianza editorial, 1993. DUBOIS, WILLIAM E.B. «The Souls of Black Folk» in Three Negro Classics. New York: Avon Books, 1965. ELLISON, RALPH. Shadow and Act. New York: Vint age Book s, 1972. PETRY, ANN. The Street. New York: Beacon Fiction, 1974. (All references are taken from this edition).