The Street

FEW people ever see this version of Negro poverty, because it is a condition that is unspectacular. It is a story of quiet, obscure, fear-laden living, denying the conception of the stereotype, the happy-go-lucky Negro. In winning the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, Ann Petry has given us a better than good novel, written with great honesty and insight. There are thousands upon thousands of girls like Lutie Johnson living in some isolated Harlem in every industrial city of the nation, but to those who know these unhappy sociologic islands only by their night clubs and their violence, she may seem a strange, unreal character,

Lutie and her kind are the direct descendants of other black men and women who fled the hunger and oppression of the rural South in search of the bright but phantom opportunities of the urban North. These families accepted and absorbed the shock of frustration in these harsh, lusterless lands-without-promise in exchange for an assured forty weeks of school for their children. But the ensuing generations discovered that this idolized Education was neither the key to opportunity nor the solution per se to race prejudice.

The girls married men who could not get jobs. They went to work in domestic service, because that was the only occupation abundantly open to them, and left their men at home to rear the children. And, paradoxically, while they kept their employers’ families running smoothly, their own families disintegrated and fell apart.

The instability of the Negro family, seen in its true light, is not a “racial characteristic” but a response to our cidture wherein successful family life depends upon the man’s going out to do a man’s work, and upon the daily presence of both parents in the home. The American man does not flourish emotionally if his virility is shunted for long periods into ungainful employment. Eventually he escapes into some other way of life, good or bad, which holds some promise of restoring his self-esteem. The wives and children of such men go to live in some cruel, ghetto-like street, and gradually drift outside the pale of social services and away from social organization.

Our sociologists have described all of this before, but The Street makes it live through characters who are only partially fictional.

JOHN CASWELL SMITH, JR.