A World Made Cunningly: A Closer Look at Ann Petry's Short Fiction
[In the following essay, Washington analyzes the style, structure, and characterization in the stories in Miss Muriel and Other Stories and urges more critical attention to Petry's works.]
In the September 1979 issue of the CLA Journal, Rita Dandridge calls attention to the fact that the novels of black women have received much less critical attention than those of their male counterparts. She points out that the critics, being mostly male and frequently white, have generally dismissed the novels by black women with merely a perfunctory glance; and on the few occasions when they have deigned to take a close look, they have approached these works with “apathy, chauvinism, or paternalism.” She further asserts that while these approaches differ, they have a pernicious similarity in that each tends to “minimize the worth of the black woman's novel.” Professor Dandridge concludes that if any fair and equitable assessment of these novels is to be made, that assessment must be made by a different breed of critic, and she sets guidelines for the new critics to follow. She admonishes them to
examine each novel within the context of the writer's purpose; … [to] exhibit an understanding of the conditions under which the novelist has worked and by which her intentions have been molded; … and finally, … [to] make known the contributions that the black woman's novel has made to Americans generally and Afro-American specifically.1
The charges that Professor Dandridge levels at the critics for their failure to make any serious attempt at an evaluation of the fiction written by black women are certainly valid. However, if the novels have fared poorly at the hands of the critics, the short fiction has fared even worse, since the short story traditionally has commanded less attention than the novel. It is not surprising, then, that the short fiction written by black women would fall into a special category of critical neglect. So it is with the fiction of Ann Petry, who, in my opinion, is one of the most important, yet most neglected, black women fiction writers since World War II. In 1945 Miss Petry won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Scholarship, with which she was able to complete the writing of her first novel, The Street. This work, published in 1946, brought her to the attention of the literary world and gained for her rather wide recognition as a literary artist. Since this publication, however, she has received little critical attention by either black or white, male or female critics. Despite the fact that Miss Petry's novels have been published consistently by a major publishing company, and despite the fact that many of her short stories have appeared in major anthologies, the critics have remained strangely silent.
To examine the canon of Miss Petry's work is to discover a very talented and versatile artist, one who is possessed of a brilliant wit, a fine sensitivity, and a creative genius of the highest caliber. Even the often extreme negativism of a critic like Robert Bone diminishes as he approaches the work of Ann Petry, whose novel A Country Place he considers “one of the finest novels of the post war [World War II] period.”2 Also, David Littlejohn, in Black on White, commends Miss Petry for her “solid, earned, tested intelligence” and for her wisdom—a wisdom, he says, that
reveals itself in a prose that is rich and crisp, and suavely shot with the metallic threads of irony. It is a style of constant surprise and delight, alive and alight on the page. It is so charged with sense and pleasure, you can taste it—and yet never … is it mere display.3
With the exception, then, of these brief, albeit laudatory, comments, together with some few other scattered bits of criticism, the works of this most important writer have been virtually ignored. Further, of the few critics who have treated Miss Petry's fiction, almost none have given more than a brief consideration to the short stories. Being thus convinced that the fiction of Ann Petry, most especially the short fiction, deserves a closer look, I propose here to undertake an examination of her short fiction through a consideration of those short stories contained in the volume entitled Miss Muriel and Other Short Stories, a collection which, I believe, provides a panoromic view of Ms. Petry's world—its topography, its inhabitants, its traditions.
The world of Ann Petry is, to appropriate a phrase from John Donne, “a World made cunningly”—a world crafted with the skill and artistry of a writer intensely aware of her art and very keenly attuned to the nuances of the world about her. Moreover, Petry's world is a world inhabited by real people—good and bad people, warm and loving people, frustrated and angry people, black and white and brown people, natives and foreigners, adults and children. It is also a world of animals and trees and flowers; it is urban and rural, cramped and wide, liberal and prejudiced. Petry's world is a microcosm of the real world inhabited by real people coping with real problems and enjoying real pleasures. It is also a world in which the black experience in America is central—sometimes tragic, sometimes joyous, but always intense and personal.
The thirteen stories that comprise Miss Muriel and Other Stories, the briefest consideration of which reveals the breadth of Ann Petry's world, fall into two distinctive groups. One group depicts a small-town world of simple people enjoying simple pleasures—people whose lives, on the surface at least, are quiet, serene, and uncomplicated. The other group of stories depicts life in the cities and reflects all the tensions and frustrations that are traditionally associated with the urban scene. Petry's small-town world is a world that is placid and “innocent” and appropriately viewed through the eyes of a child. It is a world of pleasant backyards, with lovely gardens, fragrant cherry trees, and “talking honey bees.”
This world begins to take shape in the first two stories, “Miss Muriel” and “The New Mirror,” which recall incidents in the life of the Layen family, the only black family in Wheeling, New York. Samuel Layen, the town druggist, resides here with his wife, her sister, Sophronia, and the Layen's young daughter, who narrates the stories. Through the eyes of the narrator, the reader is able to experience family gatherings in the Layen backyard—one of her coveted “private places”—where the family sits on summer nights after the drugstore is closed. It is here that
[o]n warm June nights the fireflies come out, and there is a kind of soft summer light, composed of moonlight and starlight. The grass is thick under foot and the air is sweet. Almost every night my mother and father and Aunt Sophronia and I, and sometimes Aunt Ellen and Uncle Johno, sit there in the quiet and in the sweetness and in the curious soft light.4
Having grown up in the small town of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Ann Petry knows quite intimately the scene that she describes here, and she invites the reader into her private place to share her reverie, to experience with her a simple, less-complicated time when one might enjoy the pleasurable sensation of a soft summer night and bask in the warmth of family and friends.
The natural beauty of the landscape occupies a very special place in Petry's memory, for she returns to it again and again in her stories. In “The New Mirror,” for instance, the young narrator alludes to the the delicate fragrances that come from all of the flowering shrubs—from “the cherry blossoms and from the small plants—violets and daffodils,” and to the music of the song sparrows. She recalls, with special fondness, her father, standing beneath the trees, smelling their fragrances and listening to the “talking” honey bees, “holding that one note—E flat below middle C” (p. 61). Intensely moved by the sheer beauty of the scene, she writes:
[I]f I were a maker of perfumes, I would make one and call it “Spring” and it would smell like this cool, sweet early morning air and I would let only beautiful young, brown girls use it, and if I could sing, I would sing like the song sparrow and I would let only the beautiful young brown boys hear me.
(p. 61)
With her eye for detail and her keen sensitivity to the sights, the sounds, the smells, the natural beauty of this small town, so similar to the small New England town of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, where she grew up, Petry creates a quiet, peaceful world—a world in which the pressures and frustrations of life seem nonexistent.
While Petry's private world is a world of tranquil and fragrant backyards, it is also a world of lazy summer days spent lying in the sun, enjoying a favorite fishing spot. In “Miss Muriel,” for example, when Johno comes to spend the summer with the Layens, the Layens' daughter, Uncle Johno, and Dottle (a friend of John's) take their fishing poles, their lunch, and a thermos bottle filled with lemonade and set out for the creek. The young narrator describes the experience in the following manner:
[I]t was a two-mile walk from where we lived to the creek where we caught crabs … The water in the creek was so clear I could see big crabs lurking way down on the bottom; I could see little pieces of white shells and beautiful stones. We didn't talk much while we were crabbing. Sometimes I lay flat on my stomach on the bridge and looked down into the water, watching the little eddies and whirlpools that formed after I threw my line in.
(p. 33)
Scenes such as the one described here serve to remind the reader not only of some of the more pleasant aspects of the black experience in America but also of the bittersweet nature of that experience; they are reminders of the fact that the bleakness of life for black Americans has often been relieved by the simple pleasures of life—pleasures that other people enjoy; for as Langston Hughes has observed, “being colored doesn't make me not like the same things other folks like who are other races.” This fact, too frequently ignored by black writers, but so very central to black survival, is always evident in the fiction of Ann Petry.
As Petry's small-town world continues to unfold, the reader is invited into some of the homes in Wheeling where the domestic lives of the inhabitants are revealed. The Layens' living quarters above the drugstore, as well as the living quarters of the town cobbler, Mr. Bemish, provide an intimate view of the lives of the people. The Layens' home, consisting of a few rooms above the drugstore and a down-stairs parlor, is a very special place for the young narrator of the story. The parlor, she says, is “cozy in winter,” and she describes it in minute detail. The “turkey red curtains” at the windows, the deep, soft carpet on the floor, the piano, the “old-fashioned sofa with the carved mahagony frame,” and the round stove that occupies the center of the room all combine to create a sense of warmth and friendliness. This same atmosphere is apparent in Mr. Bemish's cobbler shop, “with the high laced shoe” sign above the door, another one of the narrator's favorite places. On the “black iron stove” there is a tea kettle, and “usually there is a stew bubbling in the pot” (p. 5). In the sleeping area is a shiny brass bed with “intricate designs on the headboard and footboard” and a “chest of drawers with a small gold framed mirror.” The wash bowl and a pitcher on the dresser are decorated with pink rose buds, and there is a “bit of flowered carpet” in front of the bed. Such careful attention to details is a hallmark of Ms. Petry's distinctive style and is doubtlessly attributable to her work as a journalist during the early period of her literary career.
This small-town world, however, is not entirely a private one; indeed, it is also a more public world that includes the town drugstore, the Wheeling Inn, and the stately houses occupied in season by the wealthy summer people. Several of the stories in Miss Muriel have as a focal point the Layen family's drugstore. All of the inhabitants of this town pass through its doors at one time or another. The long wooden steps that stretch across the front of the building provide a good perch from which the young narrator of the stories can observe and eavesdrop unnoticed. With fancy scrollwork on the screen door and the word “druggist” painted on the windows with “the most wonderful curliques and flourishes,” it is a favorite haunt of the Layen girl. She is continuously fascinated by the shelves of gleaming bottles and jars inside dark mahogany, glass-enclosed cases—jars which, she fancies, “could have held wool of bat and nose of turk, root of mandrake and dust of toad” (p. 83). She notes that the soda fountain, “in a separate room rather like a porch with a great many windows,” has “mouth-watering syrups” and that the “cherry and lemon syrups smelled like a fruitstand on a hot summer day” (p. 64).
Despite her somewhat nostalgic view of small-town life, Ann Petry never allows nostalgia to cloud her vision of some of the harsher realities of such an environment. As she herself points out, this “seemingly innocent world contains all the frustrations that are an inseparable part of that [the black] experience.”5 Though essentially tranquil, the day-to-day existence of the townspeople of Wheeling is occasionally shattered by acts of violence. Sometimes these violent acts are a result of seething undercurrents of prejudice, as is the case with Mr. Bemish, whose life is threatened by Dottle Smith and Chink Johnson because they resent the attentions that this white man is paying to Aunt Sophronia, the sister of Mr. Layen. Bemish is forced to leave town in the dead of night while Dottle and Chink stand “watching him like two guards or two sheriffs” (p. 55). When the young narrator, angered and frustrated at seeing her friend, the cobbler, being so badly used, lashes out at her uncle Dottle, he can only reply, “You don't understand.”
Additionally, there is one instance of self-inflicted violence in the little town of Wheeling—the mysterious suicide of Forbes, the butler in “Has Anybody Seen Miss Dora Dean?” Forbes takes care of the summer home of Mrs. Wingate, one of the wealthy summer residents of Wheeling. When his body is found on the railroad track in Shacktown, where all those barefoot foreign women lived with the “red light in the window,” speculation and rumors spread rapidly through town. In the midst of rumor and speculation, however, is an expression of the community's genuine concern and sympathy for the Forbes family. Thus, while this world is not totally devoid of problems, it is one in which problems are more manageable and less devastating, perhaps because of the closeness and support of the community.
The urban world of Ann Petry, the setting of the second group of stories in Miss Muriel, stands in marked contrast to the small-town world of Wheeling, New York. It is a world of junkyards and tenements, of nightclubs and barrooms, of riots and riffraff; it is a world “in darkness and confusion.” In “Mother Africa,” for instance, the reader is introduced to the junkyard world of Emanuel “Man” Turner—a world of “disorder and confusion,” of “worn out tires, inner tubes and parts of cars, broken chairs and rickety tables, heaps of clothing and piles of old bottles.” This junkyard setting of “Mother Africa” is symbolic of the urban scene as Petry perceives it; here is a reflection of its inhabitants, whose lives are, in one way or another, trash heaps of disillusionment, disappointment, and frustration. As Petry observes, these city dwellers are “pulled by many more forces, lost more quickly in a rougher shuffle than their small town counterparts. The dirty streets were meaner and dirtier than a Connecticut town's conscience would dare allow.”6
That the streets are indeed “meaner and dirtier” and that they do reflect the trash heaps of the lives of their inhabitants are two facts that are apparent in the story entitled “In Darkness and Confusion.” William Jones, his wife, Pink, and their niece, Annie Mae, eke out a bare existence on the top floor of a Harlem tenement. The street on which they live, William realizes
wasn't a good street. … Almost half of it on one side consisted of the back of three theaters on 125th Street. … There were few trees on the street. Even those were a source of danger, for at night shadowy, vague shapes emerged from the street's darkness, lurking near the trees, dodging behind them. He had never been accosted by any of these disembodied figures, but the very stealth of their movements revealed a dishonest intent that frightened him.
(p. 260)
The only release that William finds from the trash heap of his life in Harlem—the only light in the darkness of his days—is his anticipation of a letter from his only son, Sam, who is in the Army somewhere in Georgia. But even this small light is extinguished when he learns from his son's Army buddy that Sam has been imprisoned for defending himself against an assault from a military policeman. The anger that has been seething within the father from the time that he learns of his son's imprisonment erupts when he witnesses the killing of a black soldier by a white policeman in Harlem barroom on a Sunday morning. Without even realizing it, he leads the barroom crowd into the streets and urges the people to riot. The scene is chaotic: “As the crowd surges into the streets, they are joined by girls in their summer dresses, boys in tight-legged pants, old women dragging kids along by the hands” (p. 285), a man on crutches, a blind man—virtually the entire community venting its rage against the system that keeps them imprisoned in the junkyard that is Harlem.
The scenes of Petry's urban world are depicted as graphically as are the scenes of her small-town world. The writer's ability to infuse her descriptions with such clarity and force results from the fact that she was intimately acquainted with both worlds. Her life in New York—working as a journalist for two newspapers and covering “everything from teas to fires, with births, deaths and picket lines interspersed”7—provided many invaluable experiences. Not only was she able to observe, firsthand, life in Harlem—the streets, the houses, and the living conditions—but she was able to write every day, a fact which, she felt, contributed greatly to her development as a writer.
Miss Petry's newspaper career also brought her into contact with individuals from every stratum of society. As a reporter, she got to know “many of New York's citizens, visited their homes, heard their stories … watched their reactions,”8 and she used them to people her fictional world. It is not by accident, then, that Petry's world is inhabited by a wide variety of people reflecting a multiplicity of tendencies, attitudes, desires, and determinations. They are black, white, and brown; they are rich and poor, young and old.
The nonblack characters in Petry's fictional world, as do their counterparts in the real world, exhibit a wide range of temperaments. There is, for instance, Mr. Bemish, the kindly shoemaker in “Miss Muriel” who befriends the Layens' daughter, bakes delicious molasses cookies for the children, and pays court to Mrs. Layen's sister, Sophronia. There is also the simpering Mrs. Wingate in “Has Anybody Seen Miss Dora Dean?” who is short, fat, and blond, whose “face looks like the face of a china doll,” and who “simply could not live without Forbes,” her black butler. Then there are the ludicrous morticians, Whiffle and Peabody, whose ineptitude is a primary source of humor in “The Bones of Louella Brown.” There is the bigoted Mrs. Taylor in “The Necessary Knocking on the Door,” whose death is directly related to her bigotry. In “The New Mirror,” there is the bright, industrious young Portuguese boy who works in the Layens' drugstore. He develops such an affection for Mr. Layen that he prefers his employer's household to his own. And, finally, there is Pedro Gonzales, the gas station owner in “The Migraine Workers,” whose humanitarian nature is expressed in his compassion for a group of migrant workers huddled together, like animals, in the back of a truck driven by a most unsympathetic black man.
The blacks who inhabit Petry's world are both native and foreign, and they, too, display a wide range of attitudes and behaviors. Perhaps the most despicable black character in any of the works in Miss Muriel is the truck driver alluded to earlier. This man arrives at Pedro's gas station with a truckload of men, women, and children who are “ragged and filthy, their dark skins covered with sores and … [with] burrs and straw in their matted hair.” In response to Gonzales' questions regarding the conditions under which these people are being transported, the driver says, bowing and smiling ingratiatingly,
Well, folks don't usually see 'em, … we run 'em through at night and don't stop nowhere; nobody sees 'em and nobody gets upset by 'em. This time the truck broke down … then I took the wrong turn and that's how I came to your place. Pure accident, boss, pure accident.
(pp. 118-19)
In addition to this unsavory truck driver, many other types of black people inhabit Petry's world. There is Aunt Frank, the rum-soaked cook in “Miss Muriel”; Forbes, the stereotypical butler in “Miss Dora Dean?” who quietly commits suicide on the railroad tracks of Shacktown; Emanuel Turner, the junkman whose pride is restored by the gift of a nude statue that he erroneously names “Mother Africa,” and Johnson, the machine shop laborer in “Like a Winding Sheet,” whose monotonous days in a restrictive environment and unbearable nights in a dead-end job threaten to strangle him, creating an explosive situation that erupts in unbridled violence. Returning home after a night of frustrating experiences on the job, in a coffee shop, and on the subway, Johnson strikes out viciously at his wife, who is trying to tease him out of his somber mood:
[H]e kept striking her. … He had lost all control over his hands. And he grasped for a word, a phrase, something to describe what this was like and he thought it was like being enmeshed in a winding sheet. … And even as the thought framed in his mind, his hands reached for her face again, and yet again.
(p. 210)
In contrast to Johnson, however, is the West Indian dock hand in “Olaf and His Girlfriend,” whose love and fidelity for Belle Rose drive him literally to travel the world over in search of her, determined that they shall be united and confident that time and distance have not diminished their love.
Petry's world also includes children. They are small black children such as Sue Johnson in “Doby's Gone,” skipping to school holding tightly to the hands of her imaginary playmate, Doby—loving school and teacher, seeking acceptance by her white classmates, and smarting from their cruel rejection. In contrast, there are the teen-age white delinquents in “The Witness,” testing the fortitude of Charles Woodruff and ultimately forcing him to leave this town that he had hoped to make his home. These youngsters, with their heavy black jackets, he thinks,
could pass for the seven dark bastard sons of some old and evil twelfth century king. Of course they weren't all dark. … All of them were white. But there was about them an aura of something so evil, so dark, so suggestive of the far reaches of the night, of the black horror of nightmares, that he shivered deep inside himself when he saw them.
(p. 218)
Looking at them, Woodruff has a foreboding of the inherent evil that will result in an act so violent and humiliating that he finds himself unable to remain in this town, fleeing it under the cover of darkness.
Not only do Ann Petry's characters exhibit a variety of personalities: they also represent a variety of occupations—domestics, industrial workers, craftsmen, professionals, entertainers. The teacher, for example, appears frequently in the stories in this collection. In the title story, “Miss Muriel,” Uncle Johno's friend, Dottle Smith, teaches English at a school for black people in Georgia; and he gives lectures and readings during the summer to supplement his income” (p. 30). Charles Woodruff, in “The Witness,” is an English teacher who has retired from the university of Virginia and is presently teaching in the small town of Wheeling, New York. “The Necessary Knocking on the Door” depicts an incident in the life of Alice Knight, a Washington, D.C., teacher attending a conference in the Berkshires—a conference that promises escape from “years of suffocating heat that started in June and did not end until October; years of trying to teach grammar to indifferent high school students; years of taking repeated insults that were an integral part of life in the capital” (p. 245). In the final story in the collection, “Doby's Gone,” a first-grade teacher, Miss Whittier, endears herself to the young black child, Sue Johnson, on Sue's first day at school. Miss Petry's teachers exhibit sensitivity and dedication; yet, they are very human, subject to human frailties, disappointments, and frustrations.
Entertainers also figure prominently in Ann Petry's world—singers, dancers, musicians—their portraits sometimes fully drawn and at other times merely sketched. Among the sketches are the “Chorus of Sixteen Brown Girls,” which appears in “The Creole Show” referred to in “Miss Dora Dean,” and Belle Rose, the night club singer in “Olaf and His Girlfriend.” The full portraits include the itinerant piano player in “Miss Muriel”—the carefree ladies' man, Chink Johnson, who performs at the Wheeling Inn in the summer, playing the “talkin' blues” with “a cigarette dangling from his lower lip … a blue-gray, hazy kind of cloud around his face … playing some kind of fast, discordant sounding music … slapping the floor with his long feet and … slapping the keys with his long fingers” (p. 28). They also include Kid Jones, in “Solo on the Drums,” whose drums are an outlet for his pent-up emotions as they echo the myriad disillusionments of his life:
The woman in Chicago who hated him. The girl with the round soft body who had been his wife and who had walked out on him this morning in the rain. The old woman who was his mother, the same one who lived in Chicago and who hated him because he looked like his father, his father who had seduced her and left her, years ago.
(p. 240)
Miss Petry's world is indeed a world made cunningly. It is urban and rural; it is cramped and wide; it contains people of various colors with an infinite range of dispositions. The credibility of Petry's world, however, rests not only upon these elements but also upon the skill with which the writer weaves into her stories the realities of the black experience—those traditions, both African and American, that have shaped the lives of black people. Two most important aspects of that tradition, music and dance, have exerted a tremendous influence upon the lives of black people—from the tribal music and dances of Africa to the slave songs and minstrel shows to the blues and jazz rhythms of contemporary America.
In “Olaf and His Girlfriend,” for example, Petry focuses upon tribal dance in her description of the “Dance of the Obeah Women,” performed by Belle Rose to the insistent beat of the drums. The dance is ritualistic, trance-invoking; it speaks of voodoo and witchcraft:
It was an incantation to some far-off gods. It didn't belong in New York. It didn't belong in any night club under the sun. … It was a devil dance—a dance that's used to exorcise a spirit.
(p. 194)
Again, in “Miss Muriel” and in “Solo on the Drums,” Petry uses the piano player, Chink Johnson, and the drummer, Kid Jones, to focus upon the black musical art forms—blues and jazz. In both of these stories she deals not only with the lives of professional musicians but also with the effects of this music upon both the performers and their audiences.
Music has played a significant role in the lives of everyday, ordinary people as well as in the lives of professional musicians, a fact that is clearly evident in the world that Ann Petry creates in her fiction. This fact is exemplified in the very staid and proper butler, Forbes, in “Has Anybody Seen Miss Dora Dean?” The title of this work is the title of a song from an 1890s minstrel show entitled “The Creole Show”; and Forbes whistles it continuously as he goes about his daily chores. It is a tune that seems to transport him from the mundane world of day-to-day existence to a glittering, exciting, thoroughly enchanting world of “cakewalks, beautiful brown girls, and ragtime.” Another instance of the importance of music in the lives of ordinary black people is seen in William Jones, who appears in “In Darkness and Confusion.” Jones is a man who finds that some of the gloom of his life in Harlem is dispelled as he sits in a barroom on a Sunday morning listening to the wail of a jukebox.
Finally, woven into the fabric of most of the stories in the volume—sometimes strident, sometimes subdued but always present, defining character and influencing situation—is the religious or moral element that is the bedrock of the black experience. It is manifested in the presence of the church and the clergy, but it is also apparent in certain moral attitudes exhibited by the people of Petry's world. The religious black folk of Bridgeport, for instance, are “scandalized” by the young Mrs. Forbes “pounding out whore-house music on the piano” (p. 103); and the neighbors of Emanuel Turner, even the neighborhood drunk, Ginny the Baptist, are so disturbed by the naked statue of “Mother Africa” that graces his junkyard that Turner becomes a virtual parish—the target of their ridicule and vituperation. Further, the mere presence of the church, both in the small towns and in the cities, seems to provide for the characters of Petry's world a sense of well-being and comfort, a ray of hope in an otherwise hopeless existence. And so it is that Pink Jones in “In Darkness and Confusion,” despite the drabness and desolation of her life on the top floor of a Harlem tenement, finds herself on Sunday morning dressed and ready for church. It is in the church that she seems to find the strength to endure and to make some sense out of the chaos of her life.
The view that the reader gets of Petry's world, then, is a world that is in perfect balance. It includes the cities, the small towns, and some places in between (“The Migraine Workers”). Its inhabitants are of all colors, shapes, and sizes; they are native and foreign, prejudiced, liberal, compassionate, cruel, indifferent. Her themes are universal; yet she is able to capture the very essence of the black experience in its many and varied complexities. Recognizing prejudice, brutality, and pain as indigenous to the black experience in America, Petry carefully chronicles these horrors; yet she never loses sight of the fact that being black does not mean, nor has it ever meant, the inability to enjoy the simple pleasures of life—such pleasures as can be experienced in a loving, nurturing family.
From having examined Miss Muriel and Other Stories, I believe it is evident that Ann Petry is a writer of considerable skill and talent and that her works are certainly deserving of more critical attention than they have heretofore received. She spent many years learning her craft, and she learned it well—a fact to which her works attest. Petry's sensitivity to the world around her, her careful attention to detail, and her distinctive prose style place her among the really fine writers of this century. It has appropriately been said of Ann Petry that
[d]rawing upon her knowledge of country and city, early history and the present day, she writes with an accuracy sharpened by her scientific training and made vivid and dramatic by the ability of a skillful journalist who looks beneath the surface of events … to discover where and how those events touch the human heart.9
Notes
-
Rita B. Dandridge, “Male Critics/Black Women's Novels,” CLA Journal 23 (September 1979), 11.
-
Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958), p. 180.
-
David Littlejohn, Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writings by American Negroes (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 155.
-
Ann Petry, Miss Muriel and Other Stories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), pp. 14-15. Subsequent page references will be to this volume and will be included parenthetically in the text of this paper.
-
Comment in a personal letter from Ann petry (March 3, 1983).
-
Majorie Green, “Ann Petry Planned to Write,” Opportunity, 24 (1976), 79.
-
Green, p. 79.
-
Ibid.
-
Richardson, p. 157.
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