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Ann Petry

The Street

As the train started to move, she began to trace a design on the window. It was a series of circles that flowed into each other. She remembered that when she was in grammar school the children were taught to get the proper slant to their writing, to get the feel of a pen in their hands, by making these same circles.

Once again she could hear the flat, exasperated voice of the teacher as she looked at the circles Lutie had produced. “Really,” she said, “I don’t know why they have us bother to teach your people to write.”

Her finger moved over the glass, around and around. The circles showed up plainly on the dusty surface. The woman’s statement was correct, she thought. What possible good has it done to teach people like me to write?

The train crept out of the tunnel, gathered speed as it left the city behind. Snow whispered against the windows. And as the train roared into the darkness, Lutie tried to figure out by what twists and turns of fate she had landed on this train. Her mind balked at the task. All she could think was, It was that street. It was that god-damned street.

The snow fell softly on the street. It muffled sound. It sent people scurrying homeward, so that the street was soon deserted, empty, quiet. And it could have been any street in the city, for the snow laid a delicate film over the sidewalk, over the brick of the tired, old buildings; gently obscuring the grime and the garbage and the ugliness.

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Ann Petry

The Street

The air from the street set her skirt to billowing around her long legs and, as she stood there smiling, her face and body glowing with triumph, she looked almost as though she were dancing.

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Ann Petry

The Street

This world was one of great contrasts, she thought, and if the richest part of it was to be fenced off so that people like herself could only look at it with no expectation of ever being able to get inside it, then it would be better to have been born blind so you couldn’t see it, born deaf so you couldn’t hear it, born with no sense of touch so you couldn’t feel it. Better still, born with no brain so that you would be completely unaware of anything, so that you would never know there were places that were filled with sunlight and good food and where children were safe.

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Ann Petry

The Street

She moved the beer glass on the bar. It left a wet ring and she moved it again in an effort to superimpose the rings on each other. It was warm in the Junto, the lights were soft, and the music coming from the juke-box was sweet. She listened intently to the record. It was “Darlin’,” and when the voice on the record stopped she started singing: “There’s no sun, Darlin’. There’s no fun, Darlin’.”

The men and women crowded at the bar stopped drinking to look at her. 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.

Just before the record ended, her voice stopped on a note so low and so long sustained that it was impossible to tell where it left off. There was a moment’s silence around the bar, and then glasses were raised, the bartenders started making change, and opening long-necked bottles, conversations were resumed.

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Ann Petry

The Street

Withered oranges and sweet potatoes, wilting kale and okra, were stacked up on the vegetable stands—the culls, the windfalls, all the bruised rotten fruit and vegetables were here.

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Ann Petry

The Street

It seems like life is going past me so fast that I’ll never catch up with it, and it wouldn’t matter particularly, but I can’t see anything ahead of me except these walls that push in against me.

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Ann Petry

The Street

Bub came to stand close beside her, almost but not quite leaning against her as though he was getting strength and protection from his closeness to her. “Mom,” he said, “why do white people want colored people shining shoes?”

She turned toward him, completely at a loss as to what to say, for she had never been able to figure it out for herself. She looked down at her hands. They were brown and strong, the fingers were long and well-shaped. Perhaps because she was born with skin that color, she couldn’t see anything wrong with it. She was used to it. Perhaps it was a shock just to look at skins that were dark if you were born with a skin that was white. Yet dark skins were smooth to the touch; they were warm from the blood that ran through the veins under the skin; they covered bodies that were just as well put together as the bodies that were covered with white skins. Even if it were a shock to look at people whose skins were dark, she had never been able to figure out why people with white skins hated people who had dark skins. It must be hate that made them wrap all Negroes up in a neat package labeled “colored”; a package that called for certain kinds of jobs and a special kind of treatment. But she really didn’t know what it was.

“I don’t know, Bub,” she said finally.

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Ann Petry

The Street

Someone had told Granny once that the butchers in Harlem used embalming fluid on the beef they sold in order to give it a nice fresh color. Lutie didn’t believe it, but like a lot of things she didn’t believe, it cropped up suddenly out of nowhere to leave her wondering and staring at the brilliant scarlet color of the meat.

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Ann Petry

The Street

She got off the train, thinking that she never felt really human until she reached Harlem and thus got away from the hostility in the eyes of the white women who stared at her on the downtown streets and in the subway. Escaped from the openly appraising looks of the white men whose eyes seemed to go through her clothing to her long brown legs. On the trains their eyes came at her furtively from behind newspapers, or half-concealed under hatbrims or partly shielded by their hands. And there was a warm, moist look about their eyes that made her want to run.

These other folks feel the same way, she thought—that once they are freed from the contempt in the eyes of the downtown world, they instantly become individuals. Up here they are no longer creatures labeled simply “colored” and therefore all alike. She noticed that once the crowd walked the length of the platform and started up the stairs toward the street, it expanded in size. The same people who had made themselves small on the train, even on the platform, suddenly grew so large they could hardly get up the stairs to the street together. She reached the street at the very end of the crowd and stood watching them as they scattered in all directions, laughing and talking to each other.

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Ann Petry

The Street

Granny would have said, “Nothin’ but evil, child. Some folks so full of it you can feel it comin’ at you—ozzin’ right out of their skins.”

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Ann Petry

The Street

The people on the other side of the wall knew less about her than she knew about them.

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Ann Petry

The Street

There was a cold November wind blowing through 116th Street. It rattled the tops of garbage cans, sucked window shades out through the top of opened windows and set them flapping back against the windows; and it drove most of the people off the street in the block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues except for a few hurried pedestrians who bent double in an effort to offer the least possible exposed surface to its violent assault.

It found every scrap of paper along the street—theater throwaways, announcements of dances and lodge meetings, the heavy waxed paper that loaves of bread had been wrapped in, the thinner waxed paper that had enclosed sandwiches, old envelopes, newspapers. Fingering its way along the curb, the wind set the bits of paper to dancing high in the air, so that a barrage of paper swirled into the faces of the people on the street. It even took time to rush into doorways and areaways and find chicken bones and pork-chop bones and pushed them along the curb.

It did everything it could to discourage the people walking along the street. It found all the dirt and dust and grime on the sidewalk and lifted it up so that the dirt got into their noses, making it difficult to breathe; the dust got into their eyes and blinded them; and the grit stung their skins. It wrapped newspaper around their feet entangling them until the people cursed deep in their throats, stamped their feet, kicked at the paper. The wind blew it back again and again until they were forced to stoop and dislodge the paper with their hands. And then the wind grabbed their hats, pried their scarves from around their necks, stuck its fingers inside their coat collars, blew their coats away from their bodies.

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Ann Petry

The Street

A powerful, uncompromising work of social criticism. To this day, few works of fiction have so clearly illuminated the devastating impact of racial injustice. —Coretta Scott King

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Ann Petry

The Street

Forty-five years ago Ann Petry brought the world to its feet with the artistry in this painfully honest and wrenching novel [The Street]. Once again a standing ovation is due for this American classic. —Gloria Naylor

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Ann Petry

The Street

The Street has the narrative drive of a Terry McMillan novel as well as the inner stirrings of Alice Walker and layered language of Toni Morrison. —Edwidge Danticat

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The Street by Ann Petry

Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, Ann Petry's debut, The Street, quickly became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.

Impossible to put down, The Street is full of characters, to borrow Petry’s words, “as real as one’s next-door-neighbor, predictable and yet unpredictable, lingering in the memory.”

“To this day, few works of fiction have so clearly illuminated the devastating impact of racial injustice.” —Coretta Scott King

Read Library of America's interview with the editor of this volume, Farah Jasmine Griffin, here and our Intern Guest post about The Street here.

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Ann Petry

Brilliant, daring, and ahead of her time, Ann Petry (1908–1997) is one of the foremost African American writers of the past century.

In one volume, Library of America gathers Petry’s two greatest works for the first time, along with a selection of her never-before-reprinted essays on the art of fiction and the vibrant Harlem life that inspired her.

This volume is prepared by editor Farah Jasmine Griffin with the assistance of the author’s daughter Elisabeth Petry.

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