Harlem Nocturne (16 page)

For Jones—and in all likelihood, for Petry's readers—the young women are unfamiliar, unreachable, foreign, and just wrong. The refrain “too” suggests he resents their insistence, their exploding beyond the boundaries, their stepping outside the lines, their taking more from life than it tells them they
dare have. They are boldly sexual, which he finds distasteful. He despises their dismissal of proper behavior and respectability. He contrasts them with his upstanding only son, Sam, a scholar athlete who first works as a redcap before joining the military. (Redcap was the nickname given to railroad porters who wore the red hats as part of their uniforms. Most railroad porters were black men. They were also members of the Union of Sleeping Car Porters founded by A. Philip Randolph. These were prestigious, sought-after jobs. Redcaps were greatly admired and respected in black communities throughout the United States.) Sam, the story's Negro soldier figure, is stationed down south in Georgia.

In Petry's story, Jones's son becomes a stand-in for Private Robert Bandy. After learning that his son has been court-martialed for shooting a racist officer, Jones, fed up with the streets he walks, his job, and Annie May, goes to a Harlem bar in an unnamed hotel on a hot August night in 1943. Petry doesn't name it, but this fictional hotel is based on the Braddock. Once there, Jones looks out into the lobby of the hotel and sees a black soldier in uniform, who reminds him of Sam, confronting a white police officer. He witnesses the event that provokes the Harlem Riot. Shortly thereafter, he finds himself in the crowd.

Here Petry's story becomes the story of the crowd, and Jones merely our touchstone to the larger entity. As the crowd continues to move, Jones turns to spot a young thin girl and realizes it's Annie May holding a nude mannequin by the waist and hurtling it through the air. Looking at Annie May, “He felt
now that for the first time he understood her. She had never had anything but badly paying jobs working for young white women who probably despised her. She was like Sam on that bus in Georgia. She didn't want just the nigger end of things.” In darkness and confusion, Jones identifies with Annie May and he abolishes the distinction he had been making between them—between the “good” Sam and the “bad” Annie May. Similar fates awaited both of them; neither of them had any future. Both of them are only guilty of trying to assert their dignity, of standing defiantly in the face of old racist practices that confront them on a daily basis. Petry makes the ordinary, anonymous participants of the Harlem riots the central figures of literary fiction. This is her major contribution as an artist: to give voice and complexity to those people who remain nameless in official accounts. She portrays their humanity, their frustrations, their anger and fear. She gives them names. Many people wrote about the riots. Few wrote about the rioters with such compassion and detail.

Young men and women like Sam and Annie May represented a new generation of African Americans. They were unwilling to tolerate second-class citizenship, unwilling to wait for the slow process of incremental change. Annie May is a fictional representative of the women described by a
New York Times
article that appeared on August 3, 1943, entitled “500 Are Arraigned in Harlem Looting: 100 Women Among Prisoners Crowding Courts After Night Disorders.” The story's first line reads: “More than 500 prisoners, among them 100 women, many of them carrying the loot they had at the time of
their arrest, were arraigned during the day and evening yesterday. . . . Many of the defendants were youths. Several wore zoot suits.” Records from the Harlem Magistrate's Office do show that more young women, like Hughes's Margie Polite, were arrested for “disorderly conduct” on the night of the riot than on any other night preceding or following it—however, I have not been able to locate a record of the 100 women reported arrested by the
Times
. Perhaps they were arraigned in different magistrates' offices, but they seem to have quietly disappeared into the Harlem night.
⁴⁴

Police arrest young women during the riots in Harlem, 1943. Copyright Brown Brothers, Sterling, Pennsylvania.

Although Petry wrote “In Darkness and Confusion” just after the riot, she could not find a publisher for it until 1946. She
initially submitted it to
The Crisis
, a journal that had previously published her fiction. However, the editor, James Ivy, rejected it because of the language, which he encouraged her to keep while she sought other venues for publication.
⁴⁵

Harlem would not immediately recover from the riot. A number of businesses never reopened. Harlem nightlife especially took a hit: fewer white New Yorkers were now willing to risk a trip to Harlem's famed nightclubs and ballrooms. Finally and most importantly, many members of the black middle class also began a quiet exodus to the outer boroughs.

Petry lived in Harlem for only a few years after the riots. Sometime after George's return from the army, the couple relocated to Bronx Park East. Many middle-class African Americans began to leave, relocating, like the Petrys, to the Bronx, or to Queens. Petry would continue to write, and she still set many of her stories in Harlem, but her next two novels would be set in New England.

Early critics considered Petry part of the Richard Wright school of naturalist black fiction—a designation she deeply resented. Wright was the towering black literary figure of the time, and the success of his work certainly created the audience and market that would read Petry's work. He never served as her mentor, and he never seems to have read her work for publishing houses, as he did Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry. Petry later noted that while she read and admired Wright, Baldwin, and especially Ellison, she had never met any of them. She was part of a group of writers whose reach went beyond that of Wright. Petry, like Chicago's Gwendolyn Brooks,
found inspiration in the lives of ordinary working-class black people, especially migrants and women. To modernist, urban landscapes, these writers added black women as walkers of the city.
⁴⁶

Petry's introduction of figures like Lutie and the “too-too girls” helped to give voice to black women who remained invisible to much of American society. As such, her fictional characters might join the sound of the young Dinah Washington in giving us a more textured understanding of the time. The epitome of the too-too girl, singer Dinah Washington—Miss D—was a child of the Great Migration and the Great Depression. Deeply steeped in gospel, she was first dubbed a blues singer and then a rhythm and blues pioneer. She was both and more. She was a capable interpreter of the blues, country and western, pop tunes, and jazz standards. She joined the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and eventually made Harlem her home. Like Petry with her “too-too girls,” Washington exploded beyond genre and category. Hers was a sexually confident, insistent, and bold voice. In her music and her style, Washington captured the energy, the spirit, and the setting that animate Petry's fiction.

Even though she left Harlem soon after the war ended, Petry's most prolific decade was clearly the result of her deep involvement in and engagement with the neighborhood. Her literary celebrity soared with the publication of
The Street
. When her essay “The Novel as Social Criticism” appeared in the
Writer's Book
, she was published alongside the likes of W. H. Auden, Pearl S. Buck, and Lionel Trilling. Translations of
The Street
appeared in a number of languages including Spanish.
The interest of foreign readers is evidence of Petry's widespread literary significance during this time. Petry recalled, “I became famous, a celebrity, almost overnight.” However, she grew to disdain the fame she'd acquired. “After the publication of
The Street
,” she said, “I began to feel as though I were public property. I was beleaguered by all the hoopla, the interviews, the invitations to speak.” She left New York, and, to a certain degree, the center of her literary life, when she and George returned to Old Saybrook in 1948. There they purchased an old sea captain's house, built in 1790. Petry gave birth to her only child, a beautiful baby girl named Elisabeth, the following year. Petry would live, write, and raise her daughter in Old Saybrook until her death in 1997.
⁴⁷

Petry never suggested that her departure from the limelight and from New York may have been influenced by the nation's changing political climate. There is no FBI file on Petry, and she doesn't seem to have been personally sought out by Hoover or by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The very fact that she was hired by Hollywood to write a screenplay for
That Hill Girl
, a feature-length vehicle for blonde bombshell Kim Novak, during the height of the Red Scare suggests that no one believed her to have been a Communist. However, many of her former colleagues, contemporaries, and friends were. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. broke all ties with his Communist allies in 1947. Benjamin Davis, the black Communist city councilman from Harlem for whom Petry expressed support as late as 1949, was sent to prison under the Smith Act, and Marvel Cooke, her friend and colleague
at the
People's Voice
, was subpoenaed by Joseph McCarthy in 1953. Two of the men Petry most admired, W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, both lost their passports and were harassed by the FBI.

Harlem had lost some of its glitter; like many other black urban communities, with the Housing Act of 1949 the Black Mecca fell victim to urban renewal, which included the development of high-rise housing projects and the destruction of a number of neighborhood institutions. A heroin epidemic ensued. Harlem lost much of its radical and intellectual leadership and much of its middle class. After the war, middle-class African Americans met with increased opportunity for mobility as other areas of the city opened up to black residents, and many of those who could move did so. Those who moved found opportunities for homeownership and entry into the middle class.
⁴⁸

The American Left and the black poor did not fare well during the Cold War. McCarthyism and the Red Scare changed African American politics in New York, as figures such as FBI director Hoover and Senator McCarthy targeted the radical wing of the Left. They challenged the coalition between the labor and civil rights movements, tempered the call of black leaders for economic justice, and sought to silence vocal street protests and grassroots organizing.
⁴⁹
With the rise of McCarthyism, calls for economic justice often were deemed Communist propaganda. Urban renewal efforts to redevelop areas by “eliminating blight,” “clearing slums,” and building high-rise public housing projects also led to the disruption of the community's
networks and the isolation and immobilization of many of its poorer members.

Petry's final piece of writing to come out of her Harlem years would be the gorgeously illustrated essay “Harlem” that appeared in
Holiday
magazine in 1949. Written after she'd left Harlem, the essay closes with a pessimistic vision of New York, a place upon which the sun seemed to have set:

Harlem has been studied and analyzed by sociologists, anthropologists, and politicians. It has been turned and twisted, to the right and to the left, prettied up and called colorful and exotic, defamed and labeled criminal. Sometimes its past has been glorified, more often it has been censured. But looked at head on, its thousand faces merge into one—the face of a ghetto. In point of time it belongs back in the Middle Ages. Harlem is an anachronism—shameful and unjustifiable, set down in the heart of the biggest, richest city of the world.
⁵⁰

Here Petry contributes to a “Harlem as Ghetto” discourse that dominated mainstream representations of the neighborhood for decades. Alternatively, a new generation of activist artists like Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Abbey Lincoln, Louise Merriwether, and Toni Cade Bambara followed in Petry's footsteps and found inspiration in the Black Mecca's social complexity, cultural vibrancy, and political energy.

CHAPTER THREE

ROLLIN' WITH MARY LOU WILLIAMS