Ann Petry

Explores the life and dreams of a young woman who struggles to raise her son in a suffocating ghetto world of racism, human degradation, and uncontrolled violence

The Street

Shelby Doherty

So he will go to reform school, she repeated back. He'll be better off there. He'll be better off without you. That way he may have some kind of chance. He didn't have the ghost of a chance on that street. The best you could give him wasn't enough.

The first blow was deliberate and provoked, but all those other blows weren't provoked. There wasn't any excuse for her. It hadn't even been self-defense. The impulse to violence had been in her for a long time, growing, feeding, until finally she had blown up in a thousand pieces.

The only thing she could do was to go away and never come back, because the best thing that could happen to Bub would be for him never to know that his mother was a murderer.

Why was she standing here holding this glass of liquor that she didn't want and had no intention of drinking? Because you're still angry, she thought, and you haven't anyone to vent your anger on and you're halfway hoping Boots will say something or do something that will give you an excuse to blow up in a thousand pieces.

The sound of her own voice startled her. It was hoarse, loud, furious. It contained the accumulated hate and the accumulated anger from all the years of seeing the things she wanted slip past her without her ever having touched them.

And even under the words Lutie heard the stillness. It was crouched down in the next booth. It was waiting for her to leave. It would walk down the street with her and into the apartment. Or if might leave the shop when she did, but not go down the street at all, but somehow seep into the apartment before she got there, so that when she opened the door it would be there. Formless. Shapeless. Waiting. Waiting.

Outside the theater she paused, filled with a vast uneasiness, a restlessness that made going home out of the question.

Their patience silence filled the room, made her uneasy. Why were all of them colored? Was it because the mothers of while children has safe places for them to play in, because the mothers of white children didn't have to work?

There ought to be more than that to living, she thought, resentfully. Perhaps living in a city the size of New York wasn't good for people, because you had to spend all your time working to pay for the place where you lived and it took all the rest of the hours in the day to keep the place clean and fix food, and there was never any money left over.

All through the house radios went on full blast in order to drown out his familiar, frightening, unbearable sound. But even under the radios they could hear it, for they had started crying with her when the sound first assailed their ears. And now it had become a perpetual weeping that flowed through them, carrying pain and a shrinking from pain, so that the music and the voices coming from the radios couldn't possibly shut it out, for it was inside them.

The men stood around and the women worked. The men left the women and the women went on working and the kids were left alone. The kids burned lights all night because they were alone in small, dark rooms and they were afraid. Alone. Always alone. They wouldn't stay in the house after school because they were afraid in the empty, silent, dark rooms. And they should have been playing in wide stretches of green park and instead they were in the street. And the street reach out and sucked them up...

The women work because the white folks give them jobs - washing dishes and clothes and floors and windows. The women work because for years now the white folks haven't liked to give black men jobs that paid enough for them to support their families... The men get out of the habit of working and the houses are old and gloomy and the walls press in. And the men go off, move on, slip away, find new women. Find younger women.

She started down the stairs, walking slowly, stiffly. Her knees refused to bend, her legs refused to go fast. Her legs felt brittle. As though whatever had made them work before had suddenly disappeared, and because it was gone they would break easily, just snap in two if she forced them to go quickly.

No matter what she knew, he couldn't leave here until he saw Lutie Johnson all broken up by what had happened to her kid.

He couldn't move away from here now. He had to stay and watch her and laugh at her efforts to get Bub out of it. Maybe there was some way of letting her know he had a hand in it. The more he thought about it, the more excited he became.

He'd never acquired the knack of small talk and after a while his silence would weigh on them so heavily that the conversation would slow up, grow halting, and then die completely.

The thought of leaving made him feel free.

'Prophet kept me from being put out, but I don't want to stay no more.' Then her voice dropped so low that Mrs. Hedges had to strain to hear what she was saying. 'Jones really ain't bearable no more,' she said apologetically.

The trouble was she didn't know why she was going. Why was it?... It was because if she stayed here she would die - not necessarily that Jones would kill her, not because it was no longer safe here, but because being shut up with the fury of him in this small space would eventually kill her.

'And a body's go the right to live,' she said softly.

She had held it [the doorkey] in her hand when she left for work in the morning, because the last thing she did before she went out was make sure she had it with her; and at night, too, she'd clutched it tight in her hand when she approached the door on her return. Leaving it here like this meant that she was saying good-bye to the security she had known; meant, too, that she couldn't come back, never intended coming back, no matter what the future held for her.

Jones was sick; at least he certainly wasn't what you'd call well and healthy, so he must be sick.

Funny how she got to believe that not having to pay rent was so important, and it really wasn't. Having room to breathe in meant much more. Lately she couldn't get any air here. All the time she felt like she'd been running, running. running, and hadn't been able to stop long enough to get a nose full of air.

Maybe she should go see the Prophet again. No. He had done all he could. He kept her from being put out, and Jones still wouldn't try to put her out, but she didn't want to stay any more.

The change in him had transformed the apartment into a grim, unpleasant place. His constant anger, his sullen silence, filled the small rooms until they were like the inside of an oven... It had been like that for weeks now, and she didn't think she could bear it much longer.

Mrs. Hedges remained at the window, her arms folded on the sill. She and Bub looked at each other for a long moment. They appeared to be holding a silent conversation - acknowledging their pain, commiserating with each other, and then agreeing to dismiss the incident from their minds, to forget it as though it had never occurred.

"Petry is the writer we have been waiting for; hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose." -- Tayari Jones, New York Times Book Review The Street follows the spirited Lutie Johnson, a newly single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn in 1940s Harlem. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.

Truly timeless. The Street isn't a place, but a living, breathing being feeding on the hope that someday, we'll make it out of here.

On this street, young single Black mother Lutie Johnson comes to find other women in situations that mirror hers - working women that leave good-for-nothing husbands and are barely able to get by on their own. Downstairs in her building, she comes across women that make ends meet by selling their bodies. Down further, in the dimly lit cellars and nightclubs in the dead of night, she finds men that act purely on animalistic impulse and desire, regardless of whether the women they want want them back. 

Lutie is a determined woman, working far too hard with her heart set on earning herself and her son a better living and leaving the Street behind. After working with a wealthy white family in Connecticut, she comes to believe that Better is possible. She can imagine herself and Bub living a life where money isn't the thing that destroys relationships and isn't what encompasses every thought of every day. 

I LOVE this book. I felt like Ms. Petry grabbed me by the collar and pulled me in to its pages as she so vividly illustrated the grim reality that is still so prevalent today, possibly around 7 decades after this book was first published. This is a story that gave me hope, destroyed it, gave me hope once again, and destroyed it all over again in a heart-wrenching cycle as I kept reading. 

joana ashley

Truly timeless. The Street isn't a place, but a living, breathing being feeding on the hope that someday, we'll make it out of here.

On this street, young single Black mother Lutie Johnson comes to find other women in situations that mirror hers - working women that leave good-for-nothing husbands and are barely able to get by on their own. Downstairs in her building, she comes across women that make ends meet by selling their bodies. Down further, in the dimly lit cellars and nightclubs in the dead of night, she finds men that act purely on animalistic impulse and desire, regardless of whether the women they want want them back. 

Lutie is a determined woman, working far too hard with her heart set on earning herself and her son a better living and leaving the Street behind. After working with a wealthy white family in Connecticut, she comes to believe that Better is possible. She can imagine herself and Bub living a life where money isn't the thing that destroys relationships and isn't what encompasses every thought of every day. 

I LOVE this book. I felt like Ms. Petry grabbed me by the collar and pulled me in to its pages as she so vividly illustrated the grim reality that is still so prevalent today, possibly around 7 decades after this book was first published. This is a story that gave me hope, destroyed it, gave me hope once again, and destroyed it all over again in a heart-wrenching cycle as I kept reading. 

crushed me, and forced me to think. i don’t want to say much but i will say that “the street”, that’s a real reality. tough reality this book makes you face, you become of apart of the street too.

donna 

With a new introduction by TAYARI JONES, author of An American Marriage and winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019 * As heard on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime 'Ann Petry's first novel, The Street, was a literary event in 1946, praised and translated around the world - the first book by a black woman to sell more than a million copies . . . Her work endures not merely because of the strength of its message but its artistry' NEW YORK TIMES 'My favorite type of novel, literary with an astonishing plot . . . insightful, prescient and unputdownable' TAYARI JONES New York City, 1940s. In a crumbling tenement in Harlem, Lutie Johnson is determined to build a new life for herself and her eight-year-old boy, Bub - a life that she can be proud of. Having left her unreliable husband, Lutie believes that with hard work and resolve, she can begin again; she has faith in the American dream. But in her struggle to earn money and raise her son amid the violence, poverty and racial dissonance of her surroundings, Lutie is soon trapped: she is a woman alone, 'too good-looking to be decent', with predators at every turn.

Anna Adams

Beautiful writing, heartrending story. I can't say what I want to say without spoiling, so I'm going to leave it here, but I loved reading this book. I'd read Ann Petry's biography of Harriet Tubman when I couldn't find this, and it was also beautiful. She's such an understated but lyrical writer. You are in every scene with her characters. Looking for the rest of her work.

clara

Suzie

Maddie

Bria

Molly M

kaitlan

With a new introduction by TAYARI JONES, author of An American Marriage and winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019. 'Ann Petry's first novel, The Street, was a literary event in 1946, praised and translated around the world - the first book by a black woman to sell more than a million copies . . . Her work endures not merely because of the strength of its message but its artistry' NEW YORK TIMES 'My favorite type of novel, literary with an astonishing plot . . . insightful, prescient and unputdownable' TAYARI JONES New York City, 1940s. In a crumbling tenement in Harlem, Lutie Johnson is determined to build a new life for herself and her eight-year-old boy, Bub - a life that she can be proud of. Having left her unreliable husband, Lutie believes that with hard work and resolve, she can begin again; she has faith in the American dream. But in her struggle to earn money and raise her son amid the violence, poverty and racial dissonance of her surroundings, Lutie is soon trapped: she is a woman alone, 'too good-looking to be decent', with predators at every turn.

The Street

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