"Same Train be Back Tomorrer": Ann Petry's The Narrows and the Repetition of History

1 In interviews and writings from the 1970s and 1980s, Ann Petry frequently laments the decline in the current state of life in urban ghettos, remarking that it is worse than it was when she wrote The Street, a 1946 bestseller. "The sad truth about The Street is that now forty-one years later I could write that same book about Harlem or any other ghetto," she writes in a 1988 autobiographical essay (Contemporary Authors 265). In 1992 she told the Washington Post something similar: where ghetto life and race relations in the United States are concerned, "everything is worse" than it has ever been (Streitfeld E2). Petry's writing, especially Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1953), is preoccupied with this question--is the world getting any better? Surely this is a universal human concern, especially as she asks this question not only of ghetto life, but also of American society and of civilization in general. But the question carries with it some obvious variations and corollaries: "For whom is the world getting better?" and "In whose terms shall we define `better'?" The inquiry into the possibility of moral progress in society maps out, roughly, as a variation on the momentous and familiar question that African American writers have long been asked to address: whether or not to take a stand on matters of politics and sociology. The "yes" side --commitment to politically contentious fiction--implies the possibility of progress, remediation, and transition, while the "no" side--an apolitical aesthetic--implies in its resistance to historicism a belief in fallen human nature, mired in repetition. So the very question of history's progress or stasis occupies the shifting middle ground between what has been labeled sociology and what has been labeled art. In the years shortly following their publication, critics commended Country Place and The Narrows because these novels transcended racial themes. In the past two decades, critics often ignore them for what I suspect is the same reason--there is no clear message about group affiliations, either race or gender.(1) While some critics continue to think political messages preclude artistry, there has come to be considerable disagreement on aesthetic matters. Cheryl Wall charts the slightly more preponderant viewpoint of today when she points out that African American writers, in contrast to writers in the white mainstream of American fiction, are supposed to be political in their intentions (286). Petry's concern in her later novels with historical progress or its lack is perhaps evidence of the alleged non-group-specificity of her themes. In The Narrows, the novel to which I will devote most of my discussion, suffering is often inescapable, an equal opportunity assailant. But the hope of easing racial oppression by decrying it competes with this sense of inevitability, and one significant sign of the world's improvement would be the improvement in the status of oppressed groups. Even allowing for early praise accorded to The Narrows for its universal themes, most of the scholarly work done on Petry has been devoted to her first novel, The Street, an attempt at realistic depiction of Harlem life during the depression. For advocates of a Black Aesthetic that collapses the distinction between politics and art, The Street offers a focused, unrelenting downward spiral that communicates an important sociological message about the hollowness of the American Dream; meanwhile, black feminist criticism is attracted to it for its image of multiple oppression, among the most successful early attempts at such images in black American women's fiction, particularly as its protagonist is a dark-skinned black (see, for example, Gloria Wade-Gayles and Barbara Christian). The Street goes beyond interrogating the categories of race, class, and gender, and in fact shows that when one is a member of several oppressed groups, the condition cannot be accounted for simply by adding or multiplying. …