Harlem Nocturne (15 page)

In this way they inherited a great deal from earlier artists such as Zola, Dickens, and Dreiser, who were all among Petry's most cherished authors. Richard Rorty includes American writers like Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and John Steinbeck as part of
the literary legacy of the American Left: they were writers who depicted social problems as a means of encouraging readers to address and alleviate them. If Lutie claimed Benjamin Franklin, Petry could claim all of these writers as her own literary ancestors.

Black social realists did not profess that the working classes were class-conscious or revolutionary, although, during the course of their novels and stories, their protagonists do seem to acquire a degree of critical consciousness. They portray them as a population with the potential, if they were enlightened and organized, to become revolutionary. Petry differed from her contemporaries in a few important ways, most notably in her willingness to provide a number of viewpoints in order to counter any sense of a monolithic black community, even among the working poor. Furthermore, her attention to gender, especially to the specific nature of black women's oppression, brought a new perspective to those marginalized black women who had been ignored or stereotyped in earlier black fiction and in the work of her male contemporaries.

During her years in Harlem, Petry began to develop her own aesthetic—an aesthetic she would elaborate upon more fully in an essay entitled “The Novel as Social Criticism” that appeared in
The Writer's Book
in 1950. In this essay, her most sustained critical statement, Petry defended the “sociological novel,” which had come under great scrutiny during the years following World War II, especially because of its overt leftist politics. Just one year before her essay was published, a young James Baldwin had published his scathing critique of Harriet
Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin
as well as
Native Son
by Wright—who was his mentor. According to Baldwin, the focus on protest in these novels took away from the creation of emotionally and psychologically complex black characters.

Petry addressed critiques like Baldwin's head-on in “The Novel as Social Criticism.” She wrote, “Being a product of the twentieth century (Hitler, atomic energy, Hiroshima, Buchenwald, Mussolini, USSR) I find it difficult to subscribe to the idea that art exists for art's sake. It seems to me that all truly great art is propaganda, whether it be the Sistine Chapel, or La Gioconda, Madame Bovary, or War and Peace.”
³⁷
Petry argued for the continuing significance of sociological fiction, identified its deep roots in Western culture, and distanced it from charges of Marxist propaganda, but without denying the significance of Marxism. “Not all of the concern about the shortcomings of society originated with Marx,” she wrote. “Though part of the cultural heritage of all of us derives from Marx, whether we subscribe to the Marxist theory or not, a larger portion of it stems from the Bible.”
³⁸
Petry situates Marx in the context of Western thought, saying his thought had influenced Western society in much the way Freud's had—one need not have read either to have experienced their influence. The same might be said of the Bible—although most westerners were even more familiar with the stories of the Bible than they were with the ideas of Freud or Marx, especially the Bible stories meant to inform our behavior and morality. And certainly, especially during the Cold War, even the most right wing of readers would not argue with the importance of biblical injunctions.

From here, Petry argues for the importance of sociological fiction in a number of ways. First, she grounds the tradition in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament story of Cain and Abel, whereby Cain asks God, “Am I my brother's keeper?” Petry also argues against art for art's sake while insisting upon the importance of craft, especially in the development of full, complex characters. According to Petry, that which distinguishes successful novels from their more didactic cousins is craftsmanship and the author's development of characterization and theme: “Once the novelist begins to manipulate his characters to serve the interests of his theme they lose whatever vitality they had when their creator first thought about them.” “The Novel as Social Criticism,” like Zora Neale Hurston's essays of the thirties, was an important early presentation of aesthetic theory by a black woman thinker. Along with Hurston, Petry helped to pave the way for novelist-critics like Toni Morrison.
³⁹

In spite of Petry's protests, the novel of social criticism did fall out of fashion with the emergence of writers such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, whose first novels were published in 1952 and 1953, respectively. Baldwin and Ellison wrote formally complex, modernist works that focused on the individual psychology of their characters. Furthermore, in keeping with a rightward, more conservative, anti-Communist shift in American political life in general—and the mainstream civil rights movement in particular—neither writer launched major left-leaning critiques. Publishing companies and white liberal intellectuals found this work more to their liking, and the window of opportunity for the social realists quickly closed.

The Street
is perhaps Petry's most complete literary example of what she argued for in “The Novel as Social Criticism,” but the aesthetic principles she outlined there are apparent in all of her fiction. In one of her most highly crafted but least appreciated short stories, “In Darkness and Confusion,” published in 1946, she tackled one of the most significant events to happen in New York during the war years—the Harlem Riot of 1943.

Suppose the day we spent walking through Harlem was Sunday, August 1, 1943. It was hot. That morning we read a story in the
Amsterdam News
about a black sergeant in Georgia who was executed because he'd gotten into an altercation with a state police officer. Say we have heard a number of stories about the mistreatment of black servicemen in the racist South. We may have attended services at one of the many Harlem churches—maybe the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr.'s Abyssinian Baptist Church—but the pastor didn't preach because he was out of town. After church, we may have gone to see
Stormy Weather
with Lena Horne and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson at the RKO Alhambra at 126th and Seventh. Horne was becoming famous for the title song, which had previously been sung by Ethel Waters and Billie Holiday. Horne was the bronze pin-up for the brown boys overseas. In fact, they so loved her that the Marines of the 51st Defense Battalion named a gun after her in 1945. She was later considered for the role of Lutie in the film version of
The Street
, which was never made. Or, since this was Sunday, our day to relax, maybe we had planned to catch Cootie Williams and his band at the Apollo on 125th Street. Williams's band played both bebop
and rhythm and blues,
⁴⁰
and this made it an embodiment of the transitional nature of black urban life during the war years—a life still grounded in the advances and traditions of the first Great Migration and the New Negro movement but sitting on the verge of something new and consequential.

By seven, just before dusk, it is still very hot, and we start to hear a new rumor. It is about a soldier who has been shot and killed by a white cop at the Braddock Hotel on West 126th and Eighth Avenue. We knew the Braddock, because it is a favorite haunt of musicians, who sometimes rehearse downstairs. Carmen McRae and Sarah Vaughan are frequently there, and even stars like Dizzy Gillespie.

But tonight, mobs begin to form. Riots have already taken place in Los Angeles (the Zoot Suit Riots), Detroit (at the Sojourner Truth Houses), and Beaumont, Texas. We will later learn that the soldier, Private Robert Bandy, didn't die. He had been with his mother when he saw a white policeman, Officer James Collins, trying to arrest a young woman, Marjorie (Margie) Polite. The officer hit the young woman and Bandy intervened on her behalf. Collins shot Bandy in the shoulder. Bandy was taken to Harlem Hospital, where he was treated and released. But the rumor of a white cop shooting and killing a black soldier in uniform is unstoppable. It quickly spreads, igniting a powder keg of resentment over police brutality, maltreatment of black soldiers, residential discrimination, and a myriad other ills suffered by black Harlemites. Before the end of the day, it will take close to 7,000 New York City police officers and military police, along with as many members of
the National Guard and a number of volunteers, to quell the riot. Mayor LaGuardia will ride the streets of Harlem throughout the night, speaking to the rioters through a bullhorn. He will close off the streets, order a curfew, and close bars and nightclubs. A number of black ministers will join him.

After two days of rioting, property damages were estimated at over $5 million, hundreds were arrested, and six people, all black, were dead. The streets were filled with debris from broken windows and looted stores. Communist leader Benjamin Davis proclaimed that Harlem's residents had “perfectly legitimate grievances” and sufficient reasons for the revolt, including the prevalence of police brutality on the streets of Harlem, even while the nation fought a war against fascism. Rev. Powell issued a statement blaming the riots on the “blind, smoldering and unorganized resentment against Jim Crow treatment of Negro men in the armed forces and the unusual high rents and cost of living forced upon Negroes in Harlem.” A coalition of black leaders from politically moderate organizations, including the National Urban League, met with city officials in the days following the riots. While they agreed that the disturbances had turned into “outbreaks of hoodlumism,” they nonetheless called attention to the social and economic conditions that led to the rioting.
⁴¹

Ralph Ellison wrote about the riot in the
New York Post
in 1943, and then famously fictionalized it in
Invisible Man
, published in 1952. James Baldwin wrote about it in a 1955 work,
Notes of a Native Son
. And Langston Hughes penned a poem inspired by it, “The Ballad of Margie Polite,” which appeared in
the
Amsterdam News
just two months after the riot. It was a thirteen-stanza poem. Stanzas 1, 3, 5, and 7 were as follows:

If Margie Polite

Had of been white

She might not've cussed

Out the cop that night.

. . .

A soldier took her part.

He got shot in the back

By a white cop—

The soldier were black.

. . .

They taken Margie to jail

And kept her there.

DISORDERLY CONDUCT

The charges swear.

. . .

She started the riots!

Harlemites say

August 1st is

MARGIE'S DAY.

About the riot, Petry later recalled, “I can remember walking through 125th Street when the street was filled with the shattered glass from the store windows. It made a crunching sound. I can still hear it.”
⁴²

Petry used these vivid memories to inform her fictional account of the riots and the events that led up to them. William Jones, the protagonist of “In Darkness and Confusion,” shares an apartment with his obese churchgoing wife, Pink, and her teenage niece, Annie May, a southern migrant who is discovering all the temptations of the city. Annie May was inspired by the young women Petry encountered in Harlem who were a bit younger than Lutie Johnson but, like her, also absent from the organizational meetings to which Petry devoted her time. However, young women like Annie May made their presence known on the streets of Harlem. Approaching three of them, Jones describes them with a tone of disdain:

As far as he could see, they looked exactly alike. All three of them. And like Annie May. Too thin. Too much lipstick. Their dresses were too short and too tight. . . . He knew too, that [Annie May] didn't earn enough money to pay for all the cheap, bright-colored dresses she was forever buying. Her girl friends looked just like her and just like these girls. He'd seen her coming out of the movie houses on 125th Street with two or three of them. They were all chewing gum and they nudged each other and talked too loud and laughed too loud. They stared hard at every man who went past them.

Might these “too-too girls” be female counterparts of Ellison's zoot-suit-wearing jitterbugs that his protagonist encounters on the subway platform in
Invisible Man
? In an unsigned editorial just after the Harlem Riot of 1943, Ellison suggested
that black leadership fails if it does not seek to solve the riddle of the zoot. He wrote, “Much in Negro life remains a mystery; perhaps the zoot-suit conceals profound political meaning; perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindy-hop conceals clues to great potential power.” This is a riddle he himself seeks to unravel in
Invisible Man
, and one that would occupy brilliant thinkers after him.
⁴³
The Lindy Hop and the emerging sound of bebop, according to Ellison, embodied the energies and frustrations of these young men—frustrations that led to the chaos and discontent of wartime race riots.

But let's linger a bit longer with the young women, the “too-too girls.” We might ask, Who are they? What are their hopes, aspirations, dreams, and frustrations? What is their style? What songs do they sing as they work throughout the day to ease heartbreak or express a heart's longing? What music plays through their heads as they dress for a night out? What rhythms inspire their work? Imagine them: a flirtatious glance here, a familiar gesture there, hands on hips, head tilted. The spirit of black urban life was embodied by not only the zoot suiters, but also by the “too-too girls.” With only a short passage in her story, Petry introduced them to the fictional page. She dared to represent them, and in so doing asked new questions about her time, place, and people.