The Emerging Self: Young-adult and Classic Novels of the Black Experience
[In the following excerpt from an essay on Petry, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, Gebhard recommends The Street to high school readers who want to understand the search for black cultural identity.]
Three classic African American novels—Ann Petry's The Street, Nella Larsen's Quicksand, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, all eminently suitable for teaching in high school—explore the theme of cultural identity. How do young African American protagonists define themselves in relation to the values of a mainstream, frequently hostile society? A number of young-adult novels, a genre traditionally concerned with definition of self, have also explored the experiences of young African Americans as they seek to establish identities consonant with their cultural ideals.
During the last two decades, fiction written for young adults—formerly a taboo-constrained, white, upper-middle-class enclave—has come of age. Young-adult fiction now probes societal problems with frankness and often with grace. No authors have done more to bring about this change than three African American writers who are leaders in the field: Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, and Walter Dean Myers. Their reflections on growing up black in America offer thematic connections to the work of African American novelists writing earlier in this century: Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston, who were part of the Harlem Renaissance, and Ann Petry, who wrote just after World War II.
Cultural roots of the differences between white and black attitudes toward both legitimate and spurious middle-class values are easy to trace. Propelled by the availability of frontier land and high wages, most white immigrants came to America hoping to achieve upward mobility and material success. Espousing the belief that hard work was justly rewarded, they embraced a lifestyle in which competitive relationships, built upon a “cash nexus,” were the norm. Obviously, African Americans were brought to America as slaves. Until Emancipation, their survival depended upon their ability to nourish a sense of community, partly through a rich folk culture and fervent religious observance. After Emancipation they faced formidable barriers to economic opportunity. As Langston Hughes writes in “Puzzled,”
We remember the job we never had,
Never could get,
And can't have now
Because we're colored.
(1976, 158)
The most bitter presentation of a character caught in the grip of the “cash nexus” occurs in Ann Petry's The Street (1985). Poverty drives Lutie Johnson to leave her husband and baby son to work as a live-in maid for an upper-middle-class white couple in Connecticut. Coming to know her employers' way of life
made her feel that she was looking through a hole in a wall at some enchanted garden. She could see, she could hear, she spoke the language of the people in the garden, but she couldn't get past the wall.
(41)
When the separation forced by her job causes her marriage to fail, Lutie vows that for the sake of her son Bub she will “get past the wall” and achieve middle-class prosperity. Subsequently, she sacrifices much of herself for her dream. By day she works in a laundry, and by night she studies to pass a civil-service test. Once she has a clerical job, she moves out of her father's apartment because she fears the influence of his easy-going ways on Bub. The only flat she can afford is a dingy walk-up on 116th Street. On one of her first nights there, after buying some hard rolls for supper, she remembers Ben Franklin and his loaf of bread, and she grins, thinking,
You and Ben Franklin. You ought to take one out and start eating it as you walk along 116th Street. Only you ought to remember while you eat that you're in Harlem and he was in Philadelphia a pretty long number of years ago. Yet she couldn't get rid of the feeling of self-confidence and she went on thinking that if Ben Franklin could live on a little bit of money and could prosper, then so could she.
(63-64)
Critic Marjorie Pryse has pointed out that Lutie espouses a traditional American attitude, one imbued by the Protestant ethic that hard work will be blessed by success (1985). But, despite her relentlessly hard work, Lutie's rejection of her family and communal roots has dreadful consequences. Eventually, ensnared in the lustful schemes of the demented janitor of her building and those of its white landlord, Lutie commits murder and is forced to abandon Bub. In Petry's naturalistic novel, black aspirations and the American dream of material success are strikingly antithetical.
Works Cited
Hughes, Langston. 1976. “Puzzled.” Understanding Poetry. Ed. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. New York: Holt. 158.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 1990. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper.
Larsen, Nella. 1986. Quicksand and Passing. Ed. Deborah McDowell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP.
Petry, Ann. 1985. The Street. New York: Beacon.
Pryse, Marjorie. 1985. “Pattern Against the Sky: Deism and Motherhood in Ann Petry's The Street.” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana UP. 116.
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