Harlem Nocturne (13 page)

In her fiction, then, Petry sought to give a fuller, more complex picture of the social problems she encountered as a reporter; in her activism, she sought to address these problems through organizing. It's not surprising that her journalism reported both the issues and the efforts to address them. Her fiction elaborates upon the human cost and resulting frustration, but it rarely gives life to activists' efforts. In an interview with
the
Daily Worker
, Petry noted, “I feel that the portrayal of a problem in itself, in all its cruelty and horror, is actually the thing which sets people thinking, and not any solution that may be offered in a novel.”
¹⁷

Still on our tour of Harlem's streets to see what Petry saw, we might accompany her, after leaving the offices of the
People's Voice
, to any number of civic or artistic meetings or events. If the Harlem Riverside Defense Council, where Petry was assistant to the secretary, was not meeting, we would attend a meeting of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, where Petry served as publicity director. She was in the thick of the association's efforts to become part of the National Association of Graduate Nurses and to integrate the wartime nurses corps.

The war provided African Americans a perfect opportunity to challenge every aspect of segregation. Jim Crow laws and practices were seen as the primary challenge to American democracy, especially during the war years, when America's claims to freedom and equality were in the spotlight. Because black people had been barred from professional organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association, they founded their own, the National Medical Association and the Negro Bar Association. The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses was founded in 1908 in response to the exclusion of black women from white professional associations and their lack of access to education and state licensing. In 1948, the American Nurses Association (ANA) became integrated. Unfortunately, black women still
found themselves denied leadership positions in the ANA, and their contributions were rarely recognized. In 1971, during another period of heightened militancy, black nurses founded the National Black Nurses Association. But in the early 1940s, black professionals were still dedicated to the fight to integrate American society. Petry, like others of her generation, was never a separatist; she believed in and fought for integration.
¹⁸

While still actively involved in civic organizations, Petry soon began to devote most of her time and energy to a new organization that she helped to found with Dollie Robinson: Negro Women Incorporated. In fact, the organizing meeting was held in the offices of the
People's Voice
. The organization seems to have been the outgrowth of an earlier effort, the Harlem Housewives League, for which Petry served in a number of administrative capacities. The newer, more militant group was, according to its founding document, “a Harlem consumer's watch group that provide[d] working class women with ‘how-to' information for purchasing food, clothing, and furniture.” In fact, the organization sought to do much more than provide women with information. Other founding documents noted that it would “organize women for mass participation in the war effort.” One event, “Negro Women Have a Vote—How Shall They Use It?” was an effort to encourage black women to recognize themselves as political agents. The speakers included prominent black women liberals and leftists, including Communist journalist Marvel Cooke, Civil Rights Congress leader Ada B. Jackson, and the Communist city councilman, Ben Davis Jr.
¹⁹

An invitation to the Negro Women Incorporated's first meeting appeared in the May 2, 1942, edition of the
People's Voice:

War economy upsets and dislocates everything. First Aid, Nutrition—[we want] a community alert, consumer information centers, [we] believe in fighting for the rights of Negro women, Fighting rising food cost, disseminat[ing] info on women's organizing in Harlem. Deluge LaGuardia with postcards and letters protesting the end of children's art classes at the Harlem Art Center. IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN YOURSELF AS A WOMAN, IN HARLEM AS A PLACE TO LIVE DURING AND AFTER THE WAR IS OVER, COME TO THE FIRST MEETING. LET'S GO PLACES!

What is striking about this invitation is that it was a call to build a movement and was filled with language demanding active, forward-moving momentum. The invitation acknowledged that the war economy had left women—many of whom were fighting these battles alone while their husbands were fighting overseas—with a sense of flux, of chaos. But in chaos is possibility, the invitation intimated, and chaotic energies organized can generate constructive movement, action: “Deluge” LaGuardia, “protest,” “fight”—and the final call, which could serve as the mantra of black America at this time—“Let's Go Places!” Thousands of blacks were migrating from the South and the Caribbean into Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York for wartime jobs; hundreds of thousands were serving as soldiers overseas; and untold numbers
were willing to march and protest segregation at home, even threatening to march on Washington. The invitation captured a sense of movement, action, confidence, and political optimism, for agents of change were finally on the move. It was the same spirit that was embodied by campaigns like the “Don't Buy Where You Can't Work” protests led by Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Through these efforts, Harlem streets were stages for political theater; street-corner speeches, protest marchers, and rallies all energized the neighborhood.

Nonetheless, Petry was acutely aware that large numbers of black people had not yet been swept up in this sense of possibility. For them, the changes and the pace of the movement only brought a sense of overwhelming disruption. If her journalism focused on the movement, on the possibility, if her civic and political work tried to organize this energy, her fiction focused on those ordinary Harlemites whose lives escaped the containing narratives of organized protest. The people of her fiction are mobile, walking in crowds and riding on buses, subways, suburban commuter trains. The pace of her fiction is fast, and yet there is no sense that her urban characters ever transcend the limitations placed upon them and “arrive.”

Petry's emerging ideas about her art were not informed by her journalism and her activism alone. She also found herself becoming part of a community of activist-oriented artists. Some evenings she jumped on the subway or walked up to the New York Public Library at 135th Street, where the American Negro Theater (ANT) rehearsed. Petry joined this troupe shortly after Abraham Hill and Frederick O'Neal founded it in
1940. For one year she performed as Tillie Petunia in Hill's
On Strivers Row
, a social farce set in Harlem and centered around the debut of a young socialite, Cobina. The role of Cobina was played by a young, aspiring actress named Ruby Dee. As Tillie Petunia, Petry was a hypocritical, class-conscious gossip columnist. Dee eventually earned fame for her role in the 1961 film
A Raisin in the Sun
. In 1980, she and her husband, Ossie Davis, would produce a series of programs for PBS, one of which was based on Petry's early short story “Solo on the Drums.” Hill and O'Neal sought to create a community-based theater that would present plays about black life. Of her American Negro Theater experience, Petry would later write: “We put ‘On Strivers Row' on three nights a week. And there were a lot of famous people who had their start, you know, in that theater . . . Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Harry Belafonte.” Like Petry's fiction,
On Strivers Row
focused on Harlem's growing class divide, though it centered on the elite even as it critiqued them. Petry would focus on the working class that animated the play in less prominent, though still important, roles.
²⁰

Belafonte and the young Sidney Poitier took classes and workshops at the actor's studio at the American Negro Theater. The playwright Alice Childress and the director Lloyd Richards worked there as well. The theater's most famous production,
Anna Lucasta
, was later produced on Broadway. The American Negro Theater was a financial cooperative where members shared both expenses and profits. Members who worked in productions outside of the ANT contributed 2 percent of their salaries to the cooperative.
²¹
At the ANT, Petry
was in the center of black theater and surrounded by a number of politically minded young black artists. By decade's end many of her colleagues in the theater would be marked as Communists. Some were under investigation or had been asked to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

In addition to making connections in the theater, Petry also acquired techniques that would help her to hone her craft as a writer. Petry later recalled, “Acting didn't really interest me—but what did interest me was to experience firsthand the way in which dialogue in a play furthers action.”
²²
She used every opportunity to enhance her craft. For instance, in the novella
In Darkness and Confusion
, she used dialogue and fast-paced narrative to change her readers' perceptions: what appears to be a mob becomes a crowd made up of individuals who express their frustration and anger at the conditions they face on a daily basis.

After the run of
On Strivers Row
ended, Petry once again had her nights and weekends free, but not for long. She took piano lessons and advanced courses in tailoring and taught an elementary course in writing business letters at the Harlem branch of the YWCA. She also took painting and drawing classes at the Harlem Community Art Center. At the center, located at 107 West 116th Street, Petry was no doubt exposed to the highly charged political energy of new fellow artists, and her desire to create complex portrayals of ordinary black people would likely have been nurtured and encouraged there. Her instructors might have included great black artists such as Aaron Douglas, Norman Lewis, and William H. Johnson, who
all taught there. The Harlem Community Art Center opened on December 20, 1937, under the directorship of sculptor Augusta Savage. The painter Gwendolyn Bennett led the center from 1939 to 1944. Within a year of its opening, the center had enrolled more than 3,000 students.

Like the South Side Community Art Center in Chicago, the Harlem Community Art Center was one of the venues established by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. Both centers played an important role in developing young black artists.
²³
A young Jacob Lawrence took some of his first classes at the Harlem Community Art Center. Romare Bearden found his way there as well. Petry recalled that as an art student she concentrated on “people, landscapes . . . everything.”
²⁴
Petry's Connecticut landscapes and Harlem street scenes in her novels seemed to benefit greatly from her visual training at the art center. Her later novels are almost cinematic, and in the fifties she would go to Holly wood to a write a screenplay,
That Hill Girl
. Commissioned by Columbia Studios, the film was to have been a vehicle for Kim Novak, but it was never produced.

Black spaces were not the only ones that furthered and supported Petry's artistic efforts. She also attended Mabel Louise Robinson's workshop and course in creative writing at that other august Harlem institution, Columbia University. Petry recalled: “George was in the army; I was working for the
People's Voice
and trying to write short stories, and I was just getting back rejection slips.” Following advice that she found in Arthur Train's autobiography,
My Day in Court
, she applied for
and was accepted to Robinson's writing workshop. Robinson's Columbia workshops were legendary. She taught them for twenty-six years, and students who came through Robinson's class published over two hundred books. Petry later said: “There were only five people in that class, and they were all females; all the men had gone off to war. And so we literally did have her undivided attention. . . . She was truly interested in us, truly committed to our becoming writers.”
²⁵

According to Petry, she learned many things from Robinson, the most important being how to incorporate “true” events into fiction. “They can't just be stuck in like raisins or plums or something. They have to be mixed in,” Petry wrote.
²⁶
This is a lesson she learned well; many of her stories and novels include incidents that she covered as a journalist or that were inspired by newspaper stories she read. Petry recalled that Robinson encouraged her students to read plays and go to the theater because plays told stories only in terms of dialogue. But most importantly, Petry credited Robinson's class with teaching her how to critique her own writing. The experience was to have a profound influence on her writing and her career. She dedicated her third and last novel,
The Narrows
, to Robinson.

While in Robinson's class, Petry finally began to publish her short stories. The network of black and left-wing magazines that published her first short stories helped to develop her reputation as a young writer before and immediately following the publication of
The Street
in 1946. The 1940s witnessed the birth of a number of very important little magazines that published the work of established and emerging black writers.
Among these were
Negro Quarterly
, for which Ralph Ellison served as managing editor;
Negro Story
;
Negro Digest
; and
Harlem Quarterly
.
²⁷
Petry's fiction appeared in these magazines throughout the 1940s as well as in established publications like
The Crisis
and
Opportunity
. She also published in Popular Front publications such as
Common Ground
,
PM
, and
Cross Section
. These journals furthered the Popular Front's mission to produce a people's art.