The Street in The Obscure Reading Group

Nov 01, 2020 Candi rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics-shelf, historical-fiction, african-american

4.5 stars

“All through Harlem there were apartments just like this one, she thought, and they’re nothing but traps. 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.”

Oh, how I wish I could slap this novel into scores of hands and say ‘read this’. However, those who need to read it the most would never bother to open this up to page one. Then, pe 4.5 stars

“All through Harlem there were apartments just like this one, she thought, and they’re nothing but traps. 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.”

Oh, how I wish I could slap this novel into scores of hands and say ‘read this’. However, those who need to read it the most would never bother to open this up to page one. Then, perhaps books like this need to appear in more and more school curriculums instead. Make them read it!

While this story is mainly about Lutie Johnson, a divorced, young, black woman and a devoted, hard-working mother, it is really the story of all those black women who fight a never-ending battle against racism and poverty. Like any loving mother, what Lutie desires most in life is for her eight year old son, Bub, to have a fair chance at success and happiness. Living in 1940s Harlem, Lutie and Bub are faced with that old devil of an obstacle – white supremacy. If that isn’t enough to get your blood boiling, it seems every time Lutie turns around she is faced with misogyny and the rot of more than one sexual predator. Author Ann Petry was one passionate woman. I was intensely stirred by her impatience and animosity towards a large portion of the human race. I became enraged along with Ann through Lutie while reading, often shouting out for anyone within hearing range to “please listen” to passages like this:

“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. And she began thinking of Pop unable to get a job; of Jim slowly disintegrating because he, too, couldn’t get a job, and of the subsequent wreck of their marriage; of Bub left to his own devices after school. From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in and the wall had been built up brick by brick by eager white hands.”

The Street introduces a number of characters besides Lutie and Bub, and each shares a piece of his or her life through a distinctive voice. The reader gets into their heads, and this was not usually a pleasant place to perch. Dwelling in the mind of William Jones, the superintendent of Lutie’s apartment complex, was especially unsettling. Jones does not have one redeemable bone in his body. He is a prime example of what ‘the street’ can do to a man when he is brought to the depths of inhumanity, both literally and figuratively into the cellar. “You done lived in basements so long you ain’t human no more. You got mould growin’ on you…” Petry’s characterizations are striking and unforgettable. But it’s Lutie that we side with, hoping with all our might that she will prevail, she will rise above the ill-fated street.

“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.”

This might be a work of fiction, but I felt its impact so profoundly that I had a difficult time letting it go. It’s not a perfect work, so I had to think quite a bit about how I would rate this. I think Petry accomplished what she set out to do. She painted a very realistic picture of oppression, its roots and its repercussions. I highly suspect that Petry’s intent here was to knock the reader over the head and say, “look here, this is what can happen if this cycle is not fixed.” It’s a cycle that was very methodically crafted over a long period of years and one that will take an equal length of time to dismantle. But it can be done and it needs to be done. Though written in 1946, The Street resonates fiercely this very instant.

“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. It was a story that all of them knew by heart and had always known because they had learned it soon after they were born and would go on adding to it until the day they died.” ...more

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Oct 20, 2020 Laysee rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Until I joined the Obscure Reading Group on Goodreads, I had not heard of American writer Ann Petry (1908 to 1997) nor her resounding debut novel, The Street. First published in 1946, it is the first book by a female African American author that has sold more than a million copies. The marvel of it all is that its relevance has not diminished over the years and can, in fact, be felt even more poignantly today than ever before.

The setting is Harlem, New York City; 1944 just after World War II. Th Until I joined the Obscure Reading Group on Goodreads, I had not heard of American writer Ann Petry (1908 to 1997) nor her resounding debut novel, The Street. First published in 1946, it is the first book by a female African American author that has sold more than a million copies. The marvel of it all is that its relevance has not diminished over the years and can, in fact, be felt even more poignantly today than ever before.

The setting is Harlem, New York City; 1944 just after World War II. The jewel of this story is Mrs. Lutie Johnson, a single, beautiful, black woman who is seeking a better life and future for herself and her 8-year-old son, Bub. The novel opens on a blustery winter’s day with Lutie hunting for a her own place to live in hopes of removing her child from the contamination of the home she has been sharing with her bootlegger father and his trampy girlfriend. Despite her poverty, Lutie is optimistic and confident. She derives hope from Benjamin Franklin’s conviction that “anybody could be rich if he wanted to and worked hard enough and figured it out carefully enough.” I cheered Lutie on in her hopes of securing a better life. However, 116th Street is no haven. Cheap housing in a seedy neighborhood is all she can afford. Lutie senses straightaway that Jones, the superintendent of the apartment building, has the roving eyes of a sexual pervert. I mentally willed Lutie not to take the tenement room. How could alternative housing on this street be any safer for Lutie and Bub? Petry was very convincing in conveying Lutie’s vulnerability, her beauty serving to attract only unwanted attention from predatory men.

Besides Lutie, there are other colored individuals who too are well acquainted with poverty, racism, sexism, and social injustice. Petry adopted shifting points of view, which shone a light into the innermost thoughts of her characters. It was a brilliant device that helped to confirm the gut reactions the women felt instinctively toward a sexual predator like Jones. By peeling back their scarred history, Petry laid bare the characters’ desperation, anger, bitterness, fear, and pain. Min (Jones’ abused live-in girlfriend) and Mrs. Hedges (the black woman who runs a brothel in the apartment building) have lived through scourging and fire, respectively. Shockingly, the black people who have managed to survive hardship (such as Mrs. Hedges and Boots Smith, the band leader who runs a casino for Junto, a white man) become oppressors who manipulate and exploit their own kind. The impoverished black individual lives within the impregnable prison of destitution. Lutie’s capacity to operate as a free agent is an illusion.

Petry wrote palpably about racial animosity in 1940s NY City. The white people speak openly of their distrust of the black community, the women assuming their husbands are never safe with beautiful black women. White teachers in Harlem despise their black students who then are socialized from a young age to hate those who treat them like scum. No wonder children like Bub take pleasure in snubbing their teacher, “Miss Rinner, the sinner.” The black men are categorically unable to find jobs. Even in wartimes, there is a separate black army to fight the Germans. The prejudice and hatred between the black and white folks is mutual, deep-seated, and laced with the bitterest gall and venom.

Lutie’s aspirations to earn sufficient money to move to a better neighborhood provided the momentum for this story, the plot thickening as the forces of evil on 116th Street close in on her and her son. Petry told a riveting story that kept me on tender hooks, hoping in vain for their deliverance. It also made me very angry at scumbags like Jones, Boots, and Junto, and wish they will get their comeuppance. Like Diane, one of our Obscure Reading Group members, said to our amusement, “Some people just need killin'.” This saintly reviewer agrees.

The Street is a powerful social commentary on the irreparable physical, emotional, and psychological damage that individuals suffer from being trapped not just in airless, dingy houses but in a divisive society that persists in making racial prejudice and discrimination a way of life. Interestingly, when I finished reading this book, I was listening to an unrelated podcast on ugliness and beauty, and a line caught my attention: “We can be equal only when we are all different.” Profound but true.

Read The Street. As a debut work, it is not flawless, but it has a very strong voice. You hear the sorrows of the colored folks during the Jim Crow era of American history. A book like this has broadened my understanding of what it means to live the life of minority individuals reduced to nothing more than the dust of the earth - despised, demeaned, and dehumanized. ...more

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Oct 15, 2020 Matthew Ted rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century, read-2020, lit-american

155th book of 2020.

The most scathing comment I ever received from a lecturer about my own writing was this: “Don’t confuse being literary with having no plot”—straight through the chainmail. The Street is a novel that is both brilliantly written and plotted; I don’t often mention a book being “well-plotted” because although many probably are, I don’t notice them as I did here. Petry has a true gift for moving between characters and their heads, never leaving the reader confused (that’s the first 155th book of 2020.

The most scathing comment I ever received from a lecturer about my own writing was this: “Don’t confuse being literary with having no plot”—straight through the chainmail. The Street is a novel that is both brilliantly written and plotted; I don’t often mention a book being “well-plotted” because although many probably are, I don’t notice them as I did here. Petry has a true gift for moving between characters and their heads, never leaving the reader confused (that’s the first challenge) or unsatisfied (the ultimate challenge: to be stuck in a character’s head we don’t care for, or feeling like we are being drawn away from the action elsewhere are common feelings with perspective hopping); I felt neither of these feelings for the 400 pages Petry kept me.

“The Street was a literary event in 1946, the first novel by a black woman to sell more than a million copies…Her work endures not only because it illuminates reality, but because it harnesses the power of fiction to supplant it.”
—New York Times

The roster is small: Lutie Johnson, single mother in 1940s Harlem, trying to raise her 8-year-old son, Bub, amidst poverty, racism and “predators at every turn”. Bub, young and naïve, afraid of the dark, and caught between being a child and a man. Jones, the super of their building (116th street, Harlem), a rather mean, dog-kicking, neurotic, jealous man. His girlfriend, Min, who is caught with a man who is both obsessive and violent, looking for escape and freedom (something all the characters yearn in one way or another, making the novel suffocating). Mrs Hedges, a woman who lives upstairs, like the Big Brother of the street—watching. Junto and Boots, two men who are drawn into the story through Lutie’s desperation of earning money.

”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.”

With a smattering of other characters, The Street is made up almost entirely from the names above, dipping into their heads, their lives and ultimately, a great number of flashbacks too (also, risky; it is a miracle this book doesn’t fail). Petry effortlessly and seamlessly glides through their heads and their pasts as they struggle, in their own ways, around 116th street and Harlem itself. Though the novel is “realist”, in the way Raymond Carver is described as realist, there is a shocking amount of tension in the novel. It is 400 pages long but felt like 200. I was uncomfortable, angry and in awe for the entire novel.

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.

A literary, social commentary, page-turner attacking race, sexism and the American Dream in a single novel; it is a rare book: tense, sad, ambitious, and no doubt, seminal.

I was too angry to be sad while I was reading it, but that had worn off by the end; by then my anger and my sadness were level with one another. ...more

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Jan 21, 2019 Kathleen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2019-challenges, women-writers, classic

Original Review: January 2019

“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.”

It’s easy to think you understand the impacts of racism, the need to break the cycle of poverty, the ramifications of oppression. But what art can do, what fiction specifically can do, is enhance that understanding, by bringing you right up to the reality of it--as close as you ...more

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Nov 16, 2022 Cherisa B rated it it was amazing

Shelves: aoc, 2022

116th Street near St. Nicholas Boulevard in Harlem, NYC, is the eponymous setting for this story, but it is a metaphor for the narrow, constrained and oppressed way of life for the black, red-lined residents, a linear stand-in for the bounded ghettos created by prejudice, racial animus, hatred. The adjective heartbreaking is used again and again in reviews for this story, rightly so, and yet the word that springs to mind for me is motherfuc**ers. Anger, disbelief, horror, sorrow, empathy, back t 116th Street near St. Nicholas Boulevard in Harlem, NYC, is the eponymous setting for this story, but it is a metaphor for the narrow, constrained and oppressed way of life for the black, red-lined residents, a linear stand-in for the bounded ghettos created by prejudice, racial animus, hatred. The adjective heartbreaking is used again and again in reviews for this story, rightly so, and yet the word that springs to mind for me is motherfuc**ers. Anger, disbelief, horror, sorrow, empathy, back to anger again. My emotions ran high throughout a tale that is an indictment of America's racial legacy, borne heavily by both black men and women unequally, though both awfully. Not given precisely, the time frame seems to be after WWII, though before Civil Rights became a big movement.

Petry focuses on Lutie Johnson, single mother of an 8 year son, still young, very pretty, long separated from her husband with whom she and her son have no contact any longer. Looking for a new place to live to get away from the bad influence of her father's household, we see immediately how limited Lutie's choices are. All she can afford and all that's offered is dark, dirty, airless, and cramped. So except for choosing to leave her father, her first choice, a new place on "this" street is hardly a choice at all.

Limited opportunities, lesser of evil choices, constant stress and worry about money and safety, dreams with no possibility of coming true, these are the realities of life for residents on the street. We see how the men can't find work regardless of how willing and able they are. How if they do have jobs they are either the bottom rung or so humiliated that self-image and relations are poisoned. How women find jobs more easily but make very little, leaving their children unsupervised, their men idle, and all that entails, with little or no opportunity for doing anything else.

There is a thick thread of sexism to be teased out in the story. A pretty black woman is in the center, and men of all stripes project their desires, neuroses, plans, hatreds onto her, but Petry gives us other women to see through the lens of female experience, too, Mrs. Hedges, the woman who has the ground floor window apartment, Min, who lives with the building super, girls with small, almost walk-on parts, in the street, and Lutie's father's various girlfriends. All trying various ways to scrabble together a living and a way to get through this hard world in one piece.

A few white people appear, including Junto, local businessman who sits like a hulking spider at the center of the web of Harlem economics, Bub's schoolteacher, a cop on the take and a grifting lawyer, stand-ins, and indictments for, business and social policies of the government that made the ghettos so awful. A suburban white family and their circle also show how escape from the city really won't help Lutie escape racism and humiliating oppression either.

And yet I don't want to give the impression this is a hard book to read. It's well-written, really engaging, kept me riveted, tells what feels truthful and real, in all its injustice and oppression. An important read but also a really good story that will stay with me, in spite or perhaps because of that generalized rage it engendered. ...more

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Oct 11, 2020 Ken rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: finished-in-2020

On the radio this week, I heard someone quote someone (and wish I could recall the NAME of that someone) who said that Jim Crow hasn't gone away. He's still here, only as James Crow, Esquire, in the courts, working his ass off to make voting harder for Americans -- especially minority Americans -- in the courts. And it's working, too, mostly in the South and in deeply Conservative and ~~Republican~~ Trumpist states.

While Jim Crow isn't mentioned by name in Ann Petry's novel, he's lurking on every co ...more

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Oct 17, 2020 Cindy Tebo rated it really liked it

Author Ann Petry's descriptive powers in her first novel, "The Street," transport the reader immediately into the scene. The cold November wind that whips through 116th street is both raw and tangible.

The wind is personified to such a degree it becomes its own character. At one time or another, it "fingers curbs, rushes into doorways, and violently assaults pedestrians" (Petry 1). And this is just the first page.

However, the wind is just a prelude that foreshadows the next scene where the prot Author Ann Petry's descriptive powers in her first novel, "The Street," transport the reader immediately into the scene. The cold November wind that whips through 116th street is both raw and tangible.

The wind is personified to such a degree it becomes its own character. At one time or another, it "fingers curbs, rushes into doorways, and violently assaults pedestrians" (Petry 1). And this is just the first page.

However, the wind is just a prelude that foreshadows the next scene where the protagonist, Lutie Johnson, is looking for an apartment. She meets the Super who also goes by the last name of Jones. In many ways, he is more threatening than the wind. After Lutie meets Jones, the tension is palpable. She explains away her gut feeling by thinking she is just tired and overreacting. In the end, her desire to move into the apartment wins over her apprehension of Jones.

The desire is fueled by Lutie wanting to raise her son, Bub, in a safer environment where she will have more control over his upbringing. She fails to take into account how an eight-year-old child who is alone every day after school might fare while she is out working.

Lutie believes in the work ethic of Ben Franklin whom she admires. If you work hard enough, you'll succeed. You'll be rich. While working for Chandlers, as a cook, maid, and nanny, she gets an inside look at what success is like. The house is beautiful. Everything seems perfect at first. As Lutie gets to know the Chandlers better, the ideal American life is in many respects just as tragic as her own personal struggles. Money can ease burdens but it can't erase the flaws in one's own character.

Lutie sends money home to support her son and husband, Jim. The reason Lutie takes the Chandler job so far away from home is because her own husband can't find work. This is her solution. What we learn as readers is that Lutie doesn't consult anyone when she makes these decisions. She assumes that everyone will be on board and that her solution is the best one. Her lack of communication with her husband is one of the factors that leads to the breakdown of their marriage.

The protagonist in this novel is a loner. She has no real friends and no support system. She battles the world alone and with tragic consequences. Sometimes the narratives in her own head become her undoing.

Unfortunately, Petry leaves too many loose ends and expects the readers to fill in the blanks. If readers are looking for a feel-good novel with hope and a happy ending, "The Street," will not fulfill those wishes.

Despite the novel's flaws, I feel that Petry did an excellent job in presenting the racism, sexism, and poverty that Lutie struggles with as a mom trying to raise her kid alone. 116th street becomes symbolic of the "main street" that is overlooked by many of us who have never lived on a street like this one. Sadly, every street of opportunity in this story turns out to be a dead end. ...more

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Sep 06, 2020 BarbaraW rated it it was amazing

Well written. You’re the main character. It’s like a giant sucking whirlpool created by white people that you can’t escape no matter how you try. Couldn’t put it down

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Sep 27, 2020 Jan rated it really liked it

Shelves: discussions, race-diversity-equity, women

Lutie is the protagonist of Ann Petry's "The Street." She is a young mother living in Harlem in the 1940s, strong enough to break from a cheating husband yet vulnerable enough to be constantly wary as she plans each next step for simple survival. Readers will watch her calculate, plan, apply for jobs, pinch pennies, and worry about how she can raise her son Bub. She is the person we focus on, yet other stories surface as we read about the context of so many lives. Who suffered what injustice? Wh Lutie is the protagonist of Ann Petry's "The Street." She is a young mother living in Harlem in the 1940s, strong enough to break from a cheating husband yet vulnerable enough to be constantly wary as she plans each next step for simple survival. Readers will watch her calculate, plan, apply for jobs, pinch pennies, and worry about how she can raise her son Bub. She is the person we focus on, yet other stories surface as we read about the context of so many lives. Who suffered what injustice? Why did this person choose this life? When will that new hope come for so many? Why did the characters treat each other so harshly? With backstories that reveal desperate lives and futile striving, the others who live in Lutie's community all find themselves in a world where they cannot break out of grit, violence, poverty, and refuge in self-escape. People are guarded, use and sometimes abuse each other, know each other yet care only as far as their self-protection allows. Well, at least that is what Lutie's ongoing thoughts and observations reveal to us readers.

For me, the second most important character is "The Street" itself. It is where these many characters live, work, scrape, and survive. I'm guilty of knowing very little of Harlem, only the often romanticized brownstones or jazz clubs of the early 20th century or the development from nearly one hundred years later. Ann Petry depicted its mid-century neighborhoods, conversations, traditions, daily pastimes, and numerous types of homes that set the scenes for Lutie and all the people she encounters.

Reading this for a discussion group, I was most compelled by the strong emotions Ann Petry struck with Lutie's choices and actions (nope, no spoilers here). I had read this well in advance of our group interaction, so I found the pointed opinions and questions bracing. I completely enjoyed reading various sections again, and with each review found more nuances and deeper meaning. Through many threads, references, challenges, and personal reflections, we continually noted how much Lutie's Harlem in the 1940s reflects so much of our country today.

This is a fine introduction to a writer who's new to me. I look forward to reading more works by Ann Petrie. ...more

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Mar 24, 2019 Lauren rated it it was amazing

Superb piece of historical fiction. It’s that kind of book you’d get assigned for a sociology, etc. class and end up reading every word. Petry’s writing is sharp and accessible—other folks provide a great discussion in the comments.

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