Harlem Nocturne (12 page)

In her fiction, Petry portrayed a Harlem that sent its sons off to a Jim Crow military and left its daughters to fend for themselves in a world that saw them as easy prey. She also portrayed the Harlem of those who remained behind: the working poor, the southern migrants. Though more often than not, Petry saw the contradictions in the promise of American democracy and the American Dream, she nonetheless maintained a belief in her nation's ability to change. Like other activists of her generation, she strove to “achieve” her country's possibilities by working to consistently point out these contradictions, particularly with regard to race, but with regard to class and gender as well. She sought to remedy those problems by working with political organizations as well as within local government. Through her fiction, she sought, time and again, to demonstrate the high social costs of the most fundamental paradox of American democracy: its treatment of its black citizens. This perspective is one she may have inherited from over a century of black thought, but it was crystallized during her Harlem years, the years that inspired her most prolific period.

Petry worked closely with Communists and would later defend them. She believed they were equally devoted to resolving the contradictions of the American Dream. But, unlike Primus, Petry was never a member of the Communist Party. In fact, like a number of African Americans of earlier generations, Petry was a lifelong Republican. However, with the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower, she voted for Democratic presidential candidates. She was active on the Old Saybrook Republican Town Committee and served on Saybrook's Board of Education as a Republican. For a number of blacks, the Republicans were the party of Lincoln, and, like many of them, Petry could not reconcile herself to the presence of “Dixiecrats,” southern Democrats who supported segregation, in the Democratic Party.

So, let's take a walk with Ann Petry through Harlem, circa the early 1940s—anytime before the Harlem Riot of August 1, 1943. If it is a weekday we might head to the offices of the
People's Voice
, where Petry served as the “women's editor” from 1941 to 1944. The
People's Voice
offices were located at 210 West 125th, on top of Woolworth's and across the street from the Apollo Theater, right in the heart of Harlem. As we walk west on 125th, past Lenox to Eighth, we see soldiers in their khakis and a sailor or two. Women walk swiftly, with a sense of urgency and purpose, hats on, purses held tightly, wearing round-toe heels and pumps. A group of men linger outside a record store, flirting with the young women who walk by them. There's a particularly flirty young beauty dressed in the tightest
of skirts, curls piled atop her head; she looks a little like the delightful Hazel Scott about the eyes.
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At the
People's Voice
, Petry not only worked as the women's editor but also had a weekly column, the “Lighter Side,” documenting the activities of Harlem's elite. In addition, she wrote feature news stories and occasional profiles of civic leaders and celebrities, including an interview with the green-eyed Fredi Washington, one of black America's first movie stars and sister-in-law of the
Voice
's illustrious publisher, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. He would eventually divorce Washington's sister Isabel to marry Hazel Scott in 1945.

Along with the
Amsterdam News
and the
New York Age
, the
People's Voice
was the newest of Harlem's three weeklies. Powell, an activist, preacher, and politician, the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and a New York City councilman, had founded the
Voice
in 1942. The paper ran from February 14, 1942, to April 24, 1948. Powell referred to it as “the Lenox Ave. edition of the
Daily Worker
.” As part of the vast network of black newspapers, the
People's Voice
joined others in the black press as they insisted upon the eradication of segregation in housing, access to education and wartime jobs, an end to lynching, and, most importantly, the desegregation of the armed services. One government report found that although most blacks in New York listened to the same radio stations and read the same newspapers as whites, especially the
New York Daily News
, the black press had a tremendous impact on black public opinion. According to the report, “the overwhelming majority of blacks—more than eight out of ten—
read some black newspaper, usually either the
Amsterdam News
or the
People's Voice
.”
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In fact, the government was especially interested in the black press during World War II because of its vocal critique of American racism and its commitment to Double V. Such criticism of American society and government was seen as potentially subversive to the war effort. A number of newspapers were under investigation; J. Edgar Hoover felt that the Roosevelt administration should use wartime sedition powers to indict members of the black press. While there were no indictments, black newspapers were encouraged to tone down their critiques of racism and racial segregation. The
People's Voice
was a special concern for Hoover. He observed that although the paper claimed to support the war effort and the administration, it nonetheless published articles that he felt “contributed to the breach and extreme feeling between white and colored races.” Hoover was expressly troubled about an editorial cartoon depicting a black soldier who represented 450,000 black servicemen. There were chains on his wrists to dramatize the way blacks were kept from combat. The paper was also considered pro-Communist because of the tone of its editorials and the presence of Communists on its staff.
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Without question, the
Voice
was the most radical of the Harlem papers. Upon its founding, Powell, whose political campaigns had been supported by progressives, liberals, and members of the Communist Party, immediately hired a number of important black Communist intellectuals. By the end of the decade, he would fire all of them as part of a Communist
purge encouraged by the growing influence of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and by what Powell saw as a threat to his own political ambition. But initially, the paper's editorial leadership was largely Communist. It included Executive Editor Doxey Wilkerson (who later left to become editor of the
New York Daily Worker
), reporter Max Yergan, and the “de facto” managing editor, Marvel Cooke. Civil rights and union activist Wilkerson worked for Roosevelt's Advisory Committee on Education and was also a columnist for the
Daily Worker
. He served on the national committee of the Communist Party, but resigned in 1957 following revelations about Stalin's atrocities, which shook much of the American Left and undermined their commitment to the party.
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Activist and journalist Marvel Cooke was the first woman journalist at the
Amsterdam News
and the first African American or woman reporter at the white
Daily Compass
. Her well-regarded investigative piece “I Was a Slave” was published in the
Compass
in 1950. It focused on the exploitation of black domestic workers at the Bronx Slave Market, the name given to the corner where white women hired black domestic workers to clean their homes for the day. Max Yergan was a highly regarded leftist activist who served as president of the National Negro Congress, a coalition of African American labor, religious, and fraternal organizations.

People's Voice
newsroom, c. 1942. The woman on the far left is believed to be Ann Petry. Photo by Morgan Smith.

The leftist politics of the paper's leadership is evident in an early editorial announcing the paper's mission: “We are men and women of the people. The people are ours and we are theirs. . . . THIS IS A WORKING CLASS PAPER.” The editorial went on to pledge support for the trade union movement and to fight for lower rent, better housing, and equal access to health facilities and schools. Finally, the editors asserted: “We are against Hitlerism abroad and just as strongly against Hitlerism at home.” This statement linked the paper to the larger Double V Campaign, though the editors were concerned with a much broader platform than Double V, which was largely focused on segregation in the military.
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The
People's Voice
editorial gives insight into Petry's own politics, which were clearly informed by the heady radicalism of her work and extracurricular environments. Her reporting, writing, and activism focused on many of the issues taken up by the newspaper: housing, segregation, equal opportunity,
and the fight against white supremacy at home and abroad. Petry's challenge would be to translate this political stance into a set of aesthetic principles; she did so by situating working-class protagonists at the center of her fiction, creating a language that expressed the urgency and tension of Harlem streets, and demonstrating the psychological complexity of the urban poor. Her own political and aesthetic interests would lead her to focus on gender as much as she did on class and race.

As women's editor, features writer, and columnist, Petry was involved in every aspect of the newspaper and worked very closely with other editors in shaping the paper's editorial policy. Her coworkers included the political cartoonist Ollie Harrington and the photographer Morgan Smith—who, with his twin brother, Marvin, chronicled Harlem's residents, news-makers, artists, entertainers, leaders, and athletes. Like those of Smith and Harrington, Petry's aesthetic approach and political opinions are evident in her work at the
People's Voice
. They were shaped by what she observed and experienced in Harlem. While at the
People's Voice
, she reported on events held by the Harlem elite. The ladies of her “Lighter Side” columns might have been the daughters of the women depicted in the novels of her Harlem Renaissance predecessors Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset: they were light-skinned, civic-minded clubwomen, often the glamorous wives of Harlem's businessmen, politicians, and entertainers. But she also wrote an open letter to New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in May 1943 requesting that he reopen the Savoy Ballroom, which had been closed in the spring of 1943 as a “base for vice.” LaGuardia claimed that 164
servicemen who had met women there had contracted venereal disease. Walter White of the NAACP argued that if this was the case, then the Waldorf Astoria should have been closed as well. Many, including Powell, insisted that the real reason for closing the Savoy was “race mixing.” Petry asserted in her letter that the Savoy was not only an important site of entertainment for Harlemites and other New Yorkers, but also “a place for civic organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League [to hold] events that benefit the community.”
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Petry also petitioned for funding for the Harlem Arts Center as an important place for after-school programs for children. She covered the activities of the many organizations in which she was involved, announcing soirees, fundraisers, and public events in the
Voice
. She wrote feature-length stories on the federal government's warnings to white GI's about Harlem's black prostitutes, including responses from some of Harlem's women. Another feature focused on the trial of three Puerto Rican youths charged with murdering a white man who had solicited prostitutes in their neighborhood.

The relationship between racist stereotypes of black women's sexuality and the public policies and practices that resulted from them also informed Petry's fiction, especially her best-selling novel
The Street
. The novel's protagonist, Lutie Johnson, is constantly assaulted with opinions about and expectations of her sexuality simply because she is a black woman. While working as a domestic in Connecticut, Lutie is frequently insulted by her employer's friends, white women who insist that black servants are sexually promiscuous. In New
York she is often offered money or other favors in exchange for sex. Ultimately, she is the victim of sexual harassment by both black and white men—and two attempted rapes. The vulnerability of black women to sexual abuse and exploitation is a recurrent theme in the novel.

Petry's interest in the children of working-class mothers is evident in both her activism and her fiction. During this time, she also worked for the Laundry Workers Joint Board, preparing programs for the children of laundry workers, and in 1943 she joined Harlem's Play Schools Association Project at Public School No. 10 as a recreation specialist. Petry helped to develop a program for the children of working parents at the school, which was located at St. Nicholas Avenue and 116th Street. She was acutely aware of “latchkey” children, who appeared in Harlem long before they became evident nationwide. While Petry's work and activism sought to provide safe space for these children during the hours between the end of school and the end of their parents' workday, her fiction demonstrated the perils, such as gangs and exploitive adults, that awaited them on the streets of Harlem when such programs were insufficient.
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