Harlem Nocturne (11 page)

Portrait of Ann Petry. Photo by Edna Guy.

When
The Crisis
published her short story “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon” in its December 1943 issue, Petry quickly emerged as an important up-and-coming writer. All the elements that would characterize her later work can be identified in this riveting tale. The tensely woven story, only two pages long, was based on a newspaper article about two children who met their deaths in an apartment fire while their parents were at work. Petry focused on the children's father, who, in a series of flashbacks sparked by an air-raid siren, recalls the day he found his burned children. Petry tweaked the facts as she transformed the account into fiction. In her version, the children are left home alone by the man's adulterous wife. The story brought her to the attention of an editor at Houghton Mifflin in Boston, who encouraged her to write a novel. In 1945, she received a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship so she could complete that novel,
The Street
.

A native of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Ann Petry was the descendant of four generations of African American New Englanders. Born on October 12, 1908,
¹
Anna Houston Lane was
the second daughter of Peter Clark Lane and Bertha James Lane. The Lanes were one of fifteen black families who lived in Old Saybrook, a small town located where the Connecticut River meets the Long Island Sound. Petry's father owned the local drugstore and worked as a pharmacist; her mother was a licensed chiropodist—one who treats corns and bunions. Imbued with an entrepreneurial spirit, Mrs. Lane also worked as a beautician and barber and was the owner of Fine Linens for Fine Homes, a business that employed a number of Irish immigrant women as makers of handmade linen and lace tablecloths and napkins. As such, the Lanes were solidly middle class—in status if not always financially.

A bookish, chubby child, Petry lost herself in reading and from a young age aspired to be a writer. Her family had other plans for her. Upon graduating from Old Saybrook High School, she first enrolled in the historic Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia, where other members of her family had gone. Petry's aunts and uncles who had attended Hampton were adventurers, college administrators, and successful professionals. One of her aunts, Anna Louise James, was a licensed pharmacist. Petry's own aspirations were more intellectual and artistic than business oriented, so she felt Hampton was not a good fit. She attended Hampton for a year and a half before returning to Connecticut. She never went back to the school and never spoke publicly about her time there. According to her daughter, Elisabeth, Petry was “dissatisfied with her courses in meal preparation and management of household expenses” and wanted to learn about more than
the domestic sciences.
²
Booker T. Washington had also attended Hampton, acquiring his philosophy of industrial education there. Building upon this foundation, Washington later developed a disavowal of protest politics. Hampton became the model for Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Unlike Washington, Petry actively engaged in protests at Hampton. It appears that she may have even been involved in a student strike. After her death, Elisabeth discovered a copy of student demands insisting that “teachers needed ‘apparent education' above that of the students and that the teachers in the trade school should possess at least a high school diploma.”
³
Eventually, Petry transferred to the University of Connecticut, where she earned a degree from the College of Pharmacy in 1931. Following in the footsteps of her father and her beloved aunt, Anna Louise, who had been the first black woman to receive a degree in pharmacy, Petry worked for a number of years in the family's Old Saybrook store before managing their other property in Old Lyme.

Petry seemed to resent her parents' decision to send her to Hampton and to pharmaceutical college. Her older sister, Bertha, had been sent to Pembroke (Brown University's sister school), but the Lanes' ambitions for their younger daughter seemed decidedly different from those they'd had for their elder daughter. When Petry transferred to the University of Connecticut, she encountered daughters of the black elite who, according to Elisabeth Petry, “were being groomed for race leadership.” One friend, Jane Bolin, was the daughter of
the first black graduate of Williams College and went on to become the first black woman judge in New York State. While Petry met lifelong friends at the University of Connecticut, she nonetheless felt very insecure about her prospects. In a journal entry from 1945, she wrote, “In comparison to all these people I was fat, with no perceptible waistline, had no clothes, no money, no boy friends—and of course all the other social figures were slender, extremely well-dressed, knew how to giggle and be coy and were well-supplied with funds.”
⁴

Petry felt like an outsider when she was among the daughters of the black bourgeoisie, although, given her own family's businesses and educational pedigree, she was not entirely out of her league in terms of status. Though not wealthy, the Lanes were an important black New England family; they were property owners who had been freeborn for generations before the end of slavery. She also grew to be a very attractive woman. Later, her ability to gain entry into black bourgeois circles would prove to be most helpful as she wrote her weekly “Lighter Side” society column for the Harlem-based newspaper, the
People's Voice
. Significantly, though, the black bourgeoisie would not become the subject of Petry's fiction. Perhaps it was because she felt like an outsider and never completely identified with the social world of the black elite. She was always drawn to novels that portrayed social problems, such as those of Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, and Theodore Dreiser, and she began to publish in an era when there was a readership for just this kind of fiction. The critical and commercial success of Richard Wright's
Native Son
(1940) proved there was an audience
for socially conscious, realist narratives by black writers. Petry was one of a number of young black writers who began to publish novels in the wake of Wright's success.

Possessed of a strong sense of intellectual and artistic ambition, Petry ultimately decided to pursue her own path in spite of family objections. At home, when she was not working in the pharmacy, she read widely and deeply. She read books by nineteenth-century French, British, and Russian novelists. She read in psychology and economics. Eventually, she tried her hand at writing. Feeling terribly stifled and fearing she would never fully pursue her artistic ambitions in Connecticut, Petry soon set her sights on New York. She began making frequent trips to the city to attend the theater and visit the New York Public Library. As early as March 21, 1936, the
Amsterdam News
ran a small story entitled “Connecticut Druggist Likes Shows, So She Comes Here.” The piece that followed explained that the daughter of a prominent Saybrook family came to see Broadway shows; when in New York, she stayed at the Emma Ransom House, a women's residence at the Harlem YWCA named for an early-twentieth-century black activist. Among the small, close-knit black elite of the time, Petry's family was prominent enough for her comings and goings to be noteworthy.
⁵

New York had other attractions as well. George David Petry was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, but had been sent to New York by his father for high school, since there were few schools in Louisiana that would allow black students to attend.
⁶
He and Ann (she dropped the final “a” from her name) met at the
home of a mutual friend in Hartford, Connecticut. George was an aspiring writer also. Soon after they met, and unbeknownst to Ann's family, they secretly married in a March 13, 1936, ceremony in Mount Vernon, New York; nearly two years later, on February 22, 1938, the couple held a small, elegant ceremony at her family's Old Saybrook home. Even the first date would have made Petry significantly older than most first-time brides of the period. Already, it seems, she had decided to follow a path quite different from that of her peers.

New York was exhilarating for Petry. After officially relocating to New York in 1938, she and George moved to 2 East 129th Street, just on the corner of Fifth Avenue. In New York, Petry left the pharmacy behind. She first found employment selling advertising and writing ad copy for a wig company; then transitioned to journalism, reporting for the
People's Voice
. Soon her schedule was full of cultural activity, reporting, and volunteer work, particularly for children's and black civic organizations. All would provide material for her fiction.

Petry also found time to enjoy Harlem's nightlife. An avid fan of jazz, she attended some of the area's legendary clubs to listen to the music. She met the composer Frances Kraft Reckling, and the two women became lifelong friends. Reckling studied at the Boston Conservatory of Music, arranged a number of songs for big bands, wrote popular and gospel songs, and taught piano. She also owned Reckling's Music Store, which was on the same floor as the
People's Voice
offices. Reckling held book parties and other events at her store. Years later,
Petry seemed stunned by a photograph from one of her own book signings. In a journal entry on August 4, 1982, she wrote: “Frances Reckling sent me a batch of old photographs to look at . . . of Langston Hughes—one of me with Langston and a man I do not remember ever having seen before . . . at a reception at Frances' store—evidently
Country Place
had just been published—me with orchid, holding a coffee cup & cigarette. All of us smiling.”
⁷
If indeed the reception was for her novel
Country Place
, then the event would have occurred sometime in 1947, before Petry left New York for Connecticut, but after she and George moved to the Bronx. The photograph reminded her of her days as a sophisticated urbanite, one of the New York literati. Reckling would always be associated with this image of herself, one who led the exciting, artistically intense cultural life of a young New Yorker.

During her first few months in Harlem, Petry began another friendship that would prove to be influential for her. She met Dollie Robinson, a committed trade unionist and political activist, in 1938, after Petry had written a story about a union for the
People's Voice
. They would go on to help cofound Negro Women Incorporated, a consumers rights group that was also the women's auxiliary of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.'s People's Committee. The People's Committee mobilized Harlemites to protest and picket against a number of issues facing their community. Elisabeth Petry recalled that her mother considered Robinson “one of her guardian angels when Daddy was in the army.”
⁸
Petry drew inspiration from both Robinson and Reckling for her fiction. Members of Robinson's family became the
basis for characters in Petry's third novel,
The Narrows
, and Reckling might be credited with the prominent place of music in her first,
The Street
. In fact, Lutie Johnson, the protagonist of
The Street
, sings Reckling's “Darlin'” while sitting at the bar of a neighborhood club. While Petry and Reckling shared an interest in music, Petry and Robinson bonded over their activist commitments.

On July 3, 1943, Petry's life changed dramatically when George was inducted into the US Army. He entered active service on July 24 at Camp Upton, New York, and remained in the military until his discharge on October 4, 1946, at Camp Pickett, Virginia. Many years later, George Petry still recalled his anger at his country for treating German POWs better than black GI's. But one memory in particular continued to sting. He often told his daughter and others the story of his having been asked, by a priest, to leave a Roman Catholic Church in the nation's capital. He was given a list of churches where he would “feel more comfortable.” According to Elisabeth Petry, her father “never went back to church except to attend the odd wedding.”
⁹

George's treatment as a black man in uniform was not lost on Petry. Indeed, black soldiers and their experiences in a Jim Crow military found their way into much of her fiction. She was not alone in her concern with the “Negro soldier,” either. Much of black America expressed pride in their boys in uniform, but at the same time, they were furious at their treatment by their fellow soldiers, other citizens, and their nation. Consequently, the armed forces became a primary focus of the black press and black activism during the war years. The military was
well aware of this perception. In 1944, the army created the propaganda documentary
The Negro Soldier
, directed by Frank Capra as part of his morale-boosting series Why We Fight. The film countered the racist stereotypes that still prevailed in Hollywood. Instead of showing blacks as cowardly servants and minstrels, it narrated a history of dignified and dedicated individuals who contributed to US military history. In reality, black enlisted men were still relegated to menial roles and subjected to harassment and worse. However, on the streets of Harlem and in other black neighborhoods, they were treated as heroes.