What do you think?
Rate this book
435 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1946
Her voice had a thin thread of sadness running through it that made the song important, that made it tell a story that wasn't in the words - a story of despair, of loneliness, of frustration.
She had come this far poor and black and shut out as though a door had been slammed in her face. Well, she would shove it open; she would beat and bang on it and push against it and use a chisel in order to get it open.
Dirty, dark, filthy traps. Upstairs. Downstairs. In my lady's chamber. Click goes the trap when you pay the first month's rent. Walk right in. It's a free country. Dark little hallways. Stinking toilets.
Don't talk to me about Germans. They're only doing the same thing in Europe that's been done in this country since the time it started.Since a grand jury ruled that Daniel Pantaleo should not be indicted for the murder of Eric Garner, a murder committed via an unlawful chokehold that was deemed a homicide and published as a Youtube video a day later, I've been doing some reconfiguring with the help of myriad Tumblr posts cause fuck mainstream media. I'll pay heed instead to a post describing the systematic invalidation of the concept of collective trauma suffered by black people as a result of racism by a high school teacher; a teacher who went on right after to academically delight in the woeful tale of a white boy traumatized by his mother killing a chicken in front of him. I'll keep in mind that every authoritative text written on philosophy and psychology and epistemology by a white man, sometimes poor and sometimes not straight but usually with very little variation in characteristics, is simply that. The text of a white man. In this world of ours, such texts taken as "universal" and "standard" and everything vaguely sadistic in them excused because of the "times" result in a US twenty dollar bill with a genocidal pasty bag of dicks plastered in the circle of honor. Cause, y'know, he was a president.
He could have killed her easy and no one would even have rapped on the door, and he wondered what went on inside these other apartments to make their occupants so incurious.I may perhaps be mislabeling this piece as "Dickensian" because it's been a long time since I last read him and the author doesn't rhapsodize or stereotype or flounder around for the Redemption of the Little White Straight Man, but what I remember most about his reputation is he being a crusader for the poor. Crusader's a horrible term for it when you look at the historical context, but nonetheless I will compare Petry and this book of hers to him because it is on par with Native Son in terms of the socioeconomic ramifications of anti-blackness and even better because black women get more consideration than a girlfriend in a refrigerator. It's not as good as Beloved, but it is evident that this work, published in 1944, was a powerful forebearer.
The glitter on the screen did nothing to dispel her sense of panic. She kept thinking it had nothing to do with her, because there were no dirty little rooms, no narrow, crowded streets, no children with police records, no worries about rent and gas bills.If all thinking by white women gets clumped together under the simplistic and far too often dismissive "feminist" label and thinking by non-white men gets the civil rights/Oriental kicker, thinking by non-white women is barely a poof in the hallowed halls of Endless Reference. This work is not Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, but it's a damn good place of fiction to start. Much like Larsen, Petry cuts to the bone with a few sentences and puts the rest of the works that take at least ten pages to parse their point to neverending shame. Anti-blackness from the perspective of a white woman? Check. Black male misgogyny? Check. White male misogyny/racism? Check. Black woman internalized misogyny? Check. White person sadism/suicide as an inevitable result of their indoctrinated shutting off of empathy in favor of money? Check, check, a myriad of multifarious characters each getting their psychological due in their various places as accorded by anti-blackness, US North New York New York Harlem style.
Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North's lynch mobs, she thought bitterly; the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place.Don't forget the economic imbalance that will exist so long as capitalists need the homeless to feel better about themselves.
I’d sell anything I’ve got without stopping to think about it twice, because I don’t intend to learn how to crawl again.Violence and looting don't solve anything unless you worship the US military and choose to ignore that all your "beautiful holidays" and tree-lighting is built on centuries of one country razing another in pursuit of said loot.
She held the paper in her hand for a long time, trying to follow the reasoning by which that thin ragged boy had become in the eyes of a reporter a 'burly Negro.' And she decided that it all depended on where you sat how these things looked. If you looked at them from inside the framework of a fat weekly salary, and you thought of colored people as naturally criminal, then you didn't really see what any Negro looked like. You couldn't, because the Negro was never an individual. He was a threat, or an animal, or a curse, or a blight, or a joke.P.S. This book doesn't mince around the idea of sex and has one of the best endings ever, if your incentive for reading tends more towards the literary than the humanitarian.
”You don’t want to fight?”
“Why should I?”
“I don’t know. I’m asking you.”
He had pulled a chair out and sat down across from Junto. “Listen, Junto,” he said. “They can wave flags. They can tell me the Germans cut off baby’s behinds and rape women and turn black men into slaves. They can tell me any damn thing. None of it means nothing.”
“Why?”
“Because, no matter how scared they are of Germans, they’re still more scared of me. I’m black, see? And they hate Germans, but they hate me worse. If that wasn’t so they wouldn’t have a separate army for black men. That’s one for the book. Sending a black army to Europe to fight Germans. Mostly with brooms and shovels.”
…
“Don’t talk to me about Germans. They’re only doing the same thing in Europe that’s been done in this country since the time it started.”
Yes, she [Lutie] 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 back 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.
In Connecticut, it made her feel that she was looking through a hole in the wall at some enchanted garden. She could see, she could hear, she spoke the language of the people in the garden but she could not get past the wall. Meanwhile, streets like the one she lived on in Harlem seemed designed to keep Negroes in their place. She was running around a small circle, around & around, like a squirrel in a cage.In fact, "The Street", 116th & 7th Avenue, is almost like a character unto itself but not one very fully developed by the author. Alternately, Lutie Johnson blames herself & the white power structure for her continuing deprivation, concluding that "Harlem gets the dregs & the dross of life & yet people go on living & reproducing in spite of it all."
A lifetime of pent-up resentment went into the blows. First she was venting her rage against the dirty, crowded street. She saw the rows of dilapidated houses; the small dark rooms; the long steep flights of stairs; the narrow dingy hallways; the little lost girls in Mrs. Hedges' apartment; the smashed homes where the women did drudgery because their men had deserted them. She saw all of these things & struck at them.One of the aspects that surprised me in The Street was that while one of the Harlem neighborhood churches might have been a resource for Lutie Johnson, there is no mention of any attempt to reach out for this form of support or the comfort of others like herself at places of refuge within the community.
“A woman living alone didn’t stand much chance.”