The Street in The Obscure Reading Group

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

Shelves: read-2020, 20th-century, 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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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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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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