SOURCE: “The Narrows: A Black New England Novel,” in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 15, Spring, 1987, pp. 81–93

When Ann Petry published The Narrows in 1953, the novel was reviewed in the leading newspapers and magazines. Since then, however, critics have neglected it, preferring to focus on Petry's achievement in The Street (1946) and in short fiction such as “In Darkness and Confusion.” This neglect of The Narrows is undeserved because the novel reveals the maturing of Petry's literary vision beyond the limited sociological determinism of The Street. The rich and complex rendering of black and white relationships in a small Connecticut city continues to compel readers. Of particular interest is Petry's use of both Anglo-American and Afro-American literary motifs. As Arna Bontemps wrote in his review in The Saturday Review of Literature,

a novel about Negroes by a Negro novelist and concerned, in the last analysis, with racial conflict, The Narrows somehow resists classification as a “Negro Novel,” as contradictory as that may sound. In this respect Ann Petry has achieved something as rare as it is commendable. Her book reads like a New England novel, and an unusually gripping one.¹

Arna Bontemps was right. To overlook the ways in which The Narrows is shaped by Petry's New England heritage is to miss part of its complexity, yet, aside from Bontemps, almost every critic who has analyzed Petry's work has done so solely in relation to other Afro-American fiction. This context has been necessary and valuable for recovering the contours of the Afro-American literary tradition. Nevertheless, it is time to take seriously Sherley Williams' proposal that the most fruitful approach to American literature is a comparative one.² Such an approach reveals that, in The Narrows, Petry is indebted to Nathaniel Hawthorne as well as to Richard Wright, that The Narrows belongs to the tradition of domestic feminism and realism created primarily by New England women writers as well as to the experience Petry had in Harlem in the 1940s.

The New England tradition is most clearly exemplified in Abbie Crunch, the seventy-year-old black matron in The Narrows. While it is important to note that Abbie Crunch is only one of the novel's three major characters from whose perspectives the novel is narrated, Petry's characterization of her is convincing, complex, and realistic.³ Petry shows the emotional and psychic reality of a black mother who has embraced the values of New England culture at the expense of her own racial heritage. Petry's treatment of the theme of the psychic costs of racism, a theme central to much of Afro-American fiction before and since The Narrows, is particularly moving and convincing.

The Narrows is set in Monmouth, Connecticut. The title refers to Monmouth's black ghetto, Dumble Street, variously known as “The Narrows, Eye of the Needle, The Bottom, Little Harlem, Dark Town, Niggertown—because Negroes had replaced those other earlier immigrants, the Irish, the Italians and the Poles.”⁴ To emphasize the universality of her vision, Petry went to Shakespeare for the names of her town and river, using a speech from King Henry V as her inscription:

… I tell you, captain, if you look in the maps of the 'orld, I warrant you sall find, in the comparisons between Macedon and Monmouth, that the situations, look you, is both alike. There is a river in Macedon; and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth: it is called Wye at Monmouth; … but 'tis all one, 'tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both

(Act IV, vii).

In New England as in old Britain and Macedon, the river flows on, indifferent to the dramas of human aspirations and passions played out on its bank. The river is indifferent to human betrayal—Alexander killing his best friend in Macedon, Henry V shunning Falstaff, the black butler betraying the black bartender in Monmouth, Connecticut. And just as all the water in Wye cannot wash the Welsh blood out of Henry V's body,⁵ so all the water of the Wye in Monmouth, Connecticut, cannot wash out black or white blood.

The plot traces the tragic consequences of a love affair between a black man, Link Williams, and a white woman, Camilo Treadway Sheffield. The two meet by chance on a foggy night in The Narrows, unaware at first of each other's race or class. The course of the love affair inevitably reflects America's pervasive racism: The white woman in a jealous rage gains her revenge by crying rape, the black man is callously murdered by her white family, who try to dispose of his body by disguising it as a bundle of old clothes for the Salvation Army. This is a predictable series of events given the sexual and racial politics of America, a series of events as predictable in Petry's Connecticut as in Wright's or Faulkner's South. Petry's rendering of the love affair between Link and Camilo is the weakest part of the novel, unconvincing because melodramatic. As Wright Morris noted in his review in the New York Times, the love story, the dramatic center of the novel, is never quite credible.⁶

In part, this weakness stems from the fact that Petry's concern in The Narrows is less with depicting an interracial love affair than with tracing its antecedents and charting the reactions to the affair of a variety of characters, black and white. The events in the present illuminate the major characters' attempts to puzzle out the significance of their past in order to discover the meaning of their lives. Petry, therefore, uses multiple points of view to narrate the events of the novel, making extensive use of interior monologues and flashbacks to convey the mental life of her characters. Although one must agree with Wright Morris' assessment that “the living past overwhelms the lifeless present,”⁷ the power of the past is precisely Petry's point, and the extensive flashbacks reinforce that point.

Petry, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, believes in the chain of “dark necessity” from which people can rarely, if ever, extricate themselves. And the character in the novel most chained to “dark necessity” is seventy-year-old Abbie Crunch. Eighteen years before the novel opens, when her husband was brought home comatose and Abbie was urged to call a doctor, Abbie assumed the Major was drunk, not ill: “People would laugh at her. President of the local WCTU and her husband so drunk he couldn't stand up. … The colored president of the white WCTU. A drunken husband. Well, he's colored” (p. 41). The deadly poison of America's racism leads Abbie to worry only about what whites will think, causing her to neglect her husband's stroke. Pathetically, her only concern is with her living room carpet, her only ministration to put newspapers around the couch where the Major lies snoring, dying. Guilt and suppressed grief over the Major's death haunts Abbie throughout the novel, causing Abbie to abandon her adopted son, Link Williams, to forfeit his love, and to give him over to the enemy, Bill Hod, owner of the Last Chance Saloon, and the personification of evil for Abbie.

Petry's characterization of Abbie is wonderfully compelling in its psychological realism. Indeed, that characterization represents the most telling indictment of racism in The Narrows because it is Abbie Crunch whose psyche has been most severely damaged by being black in a world in which the standards of conduct are white. But Petry is not content, as she was in The Street, to demonstrate the inevitable defeat of a black woman by white America. Rather, by the end of The Narrows, Abbie Crunch transcends the moral bankruptcy of American society and emerges as a spiritual victor.

At first glance, Abbie Crunch seems cast in the mold of the emasculating black mother figure, a stereotype familiar to readers of Wright's work as well as other fiction by black males. In a sensitive analysis of this stereotype, Daryl Dance has concluded that

these writers in their bitter attacks have been dealing in a symbolic way with only one aspect of the character of the Black mother and have been calling for the destruction, not of the Black mother, but rather of that aspect of her character that white racist society has forced her to develop—the repression of the spirit and vitality of her Black men, whether as a result of her blind acceptance of the dictates of white American society or her subservience to them.⁸

But Petry's characterizations are not the stereotypes they seem.⁹ In Abbie, Petry reveals the anguished reality beneath the facade of the emasculating black mother. What the son feels as emasculation, the mother perceives as necessary for survival. Abbie Crunch adheres rigidly to genteel standards of ladylike conduct because she believes only those standards offer her a way to control her destiny in a chaotic, threatening world.

Petry's Abbie evokes the isolated women, the New England widows and spinsters, found in the fiction of such writers as Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Nor is this surprising. Petry became a full-fledged reader, she writes, “when someone gave me Little Women and I discovered Jo March, the tomboy, the misfit, the impatient quick-tempered would-be writer. I felt as though she was a part of me and I was part of her despite the fact that she was white and I was black.” Petry continues, “I wept over Uncle Tom's Cabin and Black Beauty.”¹⁰ In addition to Alcott and Stowe, the only other American writers Petry now remembers having read while growing up are Poe and Hawthorne. In view of the fact that Petry grew up in New England and read New England writers while young, it is not surprising that she would endow Abbie Crunch with a New England consciousness. The white code that Abbie chooses to embrace in order to control her destiny in Monmouth, Connecticut, is that code of conduct deemed “proper” to New England matrons, a code which has, in fact, seemed to confer gentility and respectability on many women, in and out of fiction, black and white.

Abbie Crunch is a descendant of the female characters found in the fiction written by New England women. For example, Abbie, like the two sisters in Mary Wilkins Freeman's “A Gala Dress,” who are forced to alternate wearing their one proper Sunday dress, will not leave her house improperly attired. Her sense of self-worth necessitates a ritual Saturday morning shopping costume:

She'd had this basket almost forty years. … It was a much a part of her Saturday morning shopping costume as the polished oxfords on her feet, and the lisle stockings on her legs. The shoes had been resoled many times, but the uppers were as good as new. She glanced at her hands—the beige colored gloves were immaculate; true, they'd been darned, but she doubted that anyone would know it

(p. 14).

This passage reveals Petry's mastery of the tradition of domestic realism as she focuses attention on the commonplace, seemingly trivial detail, which reveals so much about the inner values of her character.¹¹

Abbie's mind is also informed by domestic imagery:

In this early morning light, the brick of the house was not red but rose colored—the soft pinkish red found on old Persian carpets. The wrought iron railing on each side of the front steps was so intricately and delicately worked that it resembled filet crochet, incredible that a heavy metal like iron could be twisted and turned and bent until it looked like lace

(p. 13).

Not only does Abbie think in terms of images of the home, she also chooses work that can be done there. A schoolteacher before her marriage, Abbie does not return to the classroom after being widowed but supports herself by work associated with the respectable New England matron: she sews, embroiders, makes jellies. However, Petry, unlike Stowe, does not fashion Abbie as a life-giving, maternal figure whose home offers the spiritual and moral values missing in American society outside the family. Rather, Abbie's home has become a prison from which she dares not escape; although it is a place of refuge from the terrors Abbie imagines to exist in the larger world, it is also a place that is sterile and deadly.

That Petry is consciously delineating Abbie's character within the confines of the New England tradition becomes even more evident when Abbie is contrasted with other female characters in The Narrows who also belong to this tradition. The spinster Frances K. Jackson, Abbie's close friend, not only works as an undertaker but once aspired to become a doctor. F. K., as she is known, describes herself as “too bright … and unable and unwilling to conceal the fact that I had brains” (p. 281). After finishing Wellesley, “where I was a kind of Eighth Wonder of the world because I was colored” (p. 281), F. K. is forced by the circumstances of her race, gender, and class to give up her aspirations in order to help her father in his undertaking business.

Frances resembles the spinster figures in later New England realistic writing, in particular, Olive Chancellor in Henry James' The Bostonians. As in James' portrayal of Olive, Petry suggests that Frances' friendship for Abbie is motivated both by a lesbian attraction and a wish to dominate her. In other words, the brainy, angular, bony, too tall woman is not quite a woman at all, at least if “woman” is defined as heterosexual and submissive.

Petry's characterization of Camilo Treadway Sheffield, the wealthy white lover of Link, is also informed by Petry's New England heritage. Petry's analysis of Camilo stresses that Camilo's unhappiness stems in part from the fact that her family did not permit her to do productive work as an English teacher. Instead, Camilo works as a fashion photographer, a parasite, who nevertheless fits into an economy based on consumption rather than production, a white woman whose culture has forgotten the New England moral emphasis on useful work. In Petry's formulation, women such as Frances and Camilo are prevented by their race, class, and gender from following the secular vocation to which they aspire. In the novels of the pioneer New England women writers such as Alcott and Stowe, who inaugurated the tradition of domestic feminism and realism, the parlors and kitchens symbolize the warmth and security offered only by the home in American society. In contrast, Abbie Crunch's parlor lacks warmth and joy, and her husband is chided for soaking his feet in a tub in the kitchen: “‘Dory, I told you not to do that here in the kitchen. It's the kind of thing sharecroppers do’” (p. 145). Abbie Crunch has embraced a rigid New England code of genteel behavior in order to deny her blackness and in so doing has sacrificed love.

In The Narrows, Petry presents a “counterposed value”¹² to the rigid repression symbolized by Abbie's joyless house. The response to Abbie's sterile kitchen where neatness reigns is the kitchen belonging to Bill Hod, gangster and saloon owner, and his chef, Weak Knees. Here is the vitality, warmth, and joy of black culture; it is a kitchen in which smells represent the Sunday morning cooking smells of The Narrows as a whole, the heart of the black community:

Then they were in the kitchen, a kitchen almost as big as the bar-room, and filled with such delicious smells of food that he [Link] was afraid for a moment he would cry, smells like on Franklin Avenue over near the bakery on Saturday morning when they were baking bread, … smells like on Sunday on Dumble Street, and he coming home from church with Abbie, … and his stomach sucking in on itself, and Dumble Street filled with the smell of fried chicken and baked yams, and kale cooked with ham fat

(p. 140).

This passage represents Petry at her best. The sensuous imagery, the evocative and realistic details, the use of the commonplace, all express the strength and love to be found in the black ghetto, although not by such as Abbie Crunch. Once again, Petry has used the New England tradition of domestic realism, here to evoke one Afro-American reality.

One of Petry's techniques in The Narrows, then, is to provide an Afro-American response to Abbie's New England way. For example, Abbie's need to control her fate in white America leads her, as it led many female characters in New England fiction, such as the protagonist in Freeman's “A New England Nun,” to shrink from sexuality. The character of Mamie Powther enables Petry to posit a contrast to Abbie's inhibitions about sexuality. To Abbie, Mamie symbolizes the eruptive chaos of indiscriminate sexuality. Abbie recoils from Mamie's type, “young, but too much fat around the waist, a soft, fleshy, quite prominent bosom, too much lipstick, a pink beflowered hat, set on top of straightened hair” (p. 25). Mamie, though married, is not known as Mrs. Powther because, according to Abbie, she is “not a man's wife, permanently attached, but an unattached unwifely female” (p. 35); Mamie does not “belong in that [Abbie's] neat backyard with its carefully tended lawn and its white fences” (p. 35). Worst of all, Mamie sings the blues, defined by Abbie as “the bleating that issued from all the gramophones and radios these days, all of it sounding alike, too loud, too harsh, no sweetness, no tune, simply a reiterated bleating about rent money and men who had gone off with other women, and numbers that didn't come out” (pp. 32-33). Abbie concludes with contempt that “Mamie Powther was Dumble Street” (p. 30).

For Petry, however, Mamie is an earth mother; what Abbie condemns as vulgar behavior, Petry presents as the embodiment of the spirit of the black ghetto. Mamie is the life-force figure found in the Afro-American blues tradition; according to Sherley Williams, “the ability to keep on pushing, to keep on keeping on, to go on about one's business, is the life-force, the assertion of self amidst collective and individual destruction that comes directly out of the blues tradition.”¹³ Abbie's outrage at what she conceives of as Mamie's vulgar behavior is a measure of her fear that the life-force will erupt and destroy her carefully controlled world, will lead to the emergence of the black heritage that she has so rigidly suppressed:

Wind whipped the clothes back and forth, lifting the hem of Mamie Powther's shore cotton dress as though it peered underneath and liked what it saw and so returned again and again for another look. What a vulgar idea. I never think things like that. … I don't dance. I never could, Abbie thought. I haven't any sense of rhythm and yet she hangs clothes and I think about dancing

(pp. 33-34).

But Abbie does have a sense of rhythm, not permitted to emerge in music and dance, because that would be being black, emerging rather as a compulsion to make up jingles; Abbie has a witty mind and a rhyming gift. Abbie is pleased that she lives on Dumble Street, pleased because it offers so many opportunities to rhyme: “The people who lived near the waterfront fumbled and they mumbled and they stumbled and they tumbled, ah, yes, make up a word—dumbled” (p. 31).

By endowing Abbie with a need to construct rhyming jingles, Petry is making a complex statement about her black matron. The jingles are more than an expression of Abbie's verbal intelligence. Abbie's gift has its roots in the rhythmic and linguistic inventiveness of black oral expression (Langston Hughes' poems are an example), yet for Abbie this oral heritage must also serve as a way to control her environment. Whereas Mamie Powther embraces her heritage and sings the blues, Abbiè expresses her heritage though the structure of white nursery rhymes. For example, about Mamie Powther's cuckolded husband, Abbie thinks:

Mister Powther Sat on a sowther
Eating his curds and whey.
Along came a Mamie
And said, You must pay me.
And so he did pay, did pay

(p. 30).

Abbie's rhymes, like Emily Dickinson's poems, tell the truth, but tell it slant.

On the surface, Abbie Crunch is indeed “upright as a darning needle” (the phrase Stowe uses to describe Miss Ophelia in Uncle Tom's Cabin), independent though poor, dismayed by vulgarity, emotionally repressed. Abbie is almost an elderly version of Stowe's Topsy, who incorporated the white contempt for blacks into her own self-concept. Underneath Abbie's pride and rigid stance pulse guilt, shame, and self-hatred. The pathological aspects of this syndrome, as well as its roots in the racism of American society, have been delineated in books such as Black Rage by William Grier and Price Cobbs. But Petry does not simply condemn Abbie; rather, she presents her “case” with compassion and understanding. It is not the pathological in Abbie that interests Petry but her representativeness. In her conception of Abbie, Petry is following the lead of another Afro-American, W. E. B. DuBois, who, like Petry, grew up in the only black family in a small New England town. It was DuBois who first articulated the dilemma facing Afro-Americans searching to establish an identity “in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”¹⁴

Abbie's consciousness comes only from “the revelation” of New England culture. Petry, however, remains always aware of the other half of DuBois' double consciousness, the strength and vitality of black culture. Petry explicitly links Abbie's destructive human failings—symbolized by her “cold house,” her “house of weeping,” her “house of darkness”—to her rejection of black culture. Abbie's contempt for Mamie Powther signifies her rejection of the sensual heritage of African dance, religion, song, and music, a heritage that celebrates the union of body and mind. Another example of Abbie's rejection of the strength to be found in black folk culture is her horror of her husband's relatives, “swamp niggers,” from South Carolina, who are legendary conjurors, witches, gypsies. Abbie dismisses these folk as an “ungodly crew” whose tales are never “about goodness and mercy, always death and cruelty” (p. 50), whose tales, in other words, do not reflect New England Christian tenets but vestiges of African folklore merged with the horror of slavery and post-reconstruction black lives.

Abbie, of course, shrinks from The Narrows, the black ghetto vividly evoked by Petry. Unlike her treatment of Harlem in The Street, Petry presents The Narrows as a milieu of vitality, a source of strength, fellowship, and spiritual warmth as well as a potentially violent and criminal place. In The Narrows are saloons with ironic names such as “The Moonbeam” and “The Last Chance”; Dickensian grotesques such as Cat Jimmie, who has raw, red stumps for arms and legs and whom one can see “lie flat on his homemade cart and moan like an animal” (p. 77) when looking up a woman's skirt; Cesar the Writing Man, who prophesies and writes small sermons on the sidewalk, looking neat and clean yet always wearing the same clothes; large signs promising to reveal the “Strange Secrets of the Unseen Forces of Life, Time and Nature, Divine Blessings—Healings of Mind and Body” (p. 11); clangs of trolleys, whines of sirens, redorange neon signs, drunks, prostitutes, obscene jokes about redwinged blackbirds; the river front blanketed with fog or in bright sunlight, the river the “blue of bachelor buttons, of delphiniums” (p. 10). Petry's ghetto inhabitants display bitterness and despair but also manage to endure, to hope, and to love. In short, Petry's capsule descriptions of The Narrows emphasizes the existence of a vital black folk culture behind the mask reserved for white America.

But Abbie Crunch sees only through the eyes of white America. As her foster son, Link, remembers:

She said colored people (sometimes she just said The Race) had to be cleaner, smarter, thriftier, more ambitious than white people, so that white people would like colored people. … You had to be polite; you had to be punctual; you couldn't wear bright-colored clothes, or loud-colored socks; and even certain food was forbidden. Abbie said that she loved watermelons, but she would just as soon cut off her right arm as to go in a store and buy one, because colored people loved watermelons

(pp. 168-69).

Thus Petry's version of an experience central to the memories of so many blacks, fictional and actual.

Abbie's hatred of poor blacks, rural and urban, is concentrated in her hatred for Bill Hod, pimp, procurer, gangster, owner of The Last Chance saloon. Hod, more symbol than character in The Narrows, is a descendant of the legendary black bad men, presented in Afro-American folklore with what Lawrence Levine has called “unadorned realism” because “they never really tried to change anything. They were pure force, pure vengeance; explosions of fury and futility. They were not given any socially redeeming characteristics simply because in them there was no hope of social redemption.”¹⁵ Bill Hod, however, does have one socially redeeming characteristic, his love for Link, who becomes as much his foster son as Abbie's. In the structure of The Narrows, Hod's code balances, responds to, Abbie's. As Link remembers just before his murder, Hod and Weak Knees “had balanced that other world, the world of starched curtains and the price of butter, the world of crocheted doilies and what will people think, the world of white bedspreads and pillow shams and behavior governed by what The Race did or did not do” (p. 482).

Abbie's New England way is inadequate to the reality of black experience. It is the father figure, Bill Hod, who gives Link that pride in race necessary to Link's psychic survival, who teaches Link that “Black was best-looking,” that “the best caviar was black. The rarest jewels were black; black opals, black pearls” (p. 176). Ironically, it is only because he has learned from Hod not to be ashamed of the color of his skin that Link can retain his admiration for Abbie despite the hurt and confusion she causes him. And Link is right. Abbie is a heroine, despite her contempt for her own race and culture. She has earned admiration because she has learned to survive in the only way she knows how; she is “upright as a darning needle” and that rectitude compels admiration even in the context of her flaws.

For seventy years Abbie has been asking herself “what will people think?” For seventy years, Abbie has accepted unquestioningly the New England code of conduct. Petry, on the other hand, examines the culture of Monmouth's whites by applying the moral standards of an earlier New England, and by this measure Petry determines the New England of the 1950s to be morally bankrupt. Petry uses Camilo Sheffield, Link's mistress, to expose the corruption at the heart of the New England girl, the heroine who, in earlier New England novels, had symbolized the moral values of the New England way.¹⁶ In The Narrows the underlying reality of the New England girl is uncovered: “The princess of the fairy tales, all gold, was not gold at all, was flesh, human flesh, all too human, all too weak, capable of jealousy, of vengeance, capable of being ruined, like any other woman” (p. 412). In Camilo Treadway Sheffield's case, the gold is even further debased by the fact that her fortune depends on the manufacture of munitions. She is, in fact, “the Duchess of Moneyland, young Mrs. Moneybags, of the gun empire” (p. 432). Link's love, the golden heroine, who in nineteenth century New England literature represented the redemptive promise of America, now represents another reality of American culture: materialism, moral corruption, violence.

In The Narrows, as in Petry's other novels, the hollowness of the white society is a persistent theme. Petry's indictment resembles the New England jeremiads that called on the younger generation to live up to the moral vision and stern rectitude of their forebears, that invoked as a standard the moral heritage of the past against which the moral emptiness of the present is revealed. Ultimately, however, what most links Petry's novel to the New England literary and cultural tradition is her belief in what Hawthorne called the chain of “dark necessity,” Petry's insistence that the past, collective as well as individual, determines the present.

In a modern day version of Calvinism, Petry argues that there is one original sin that must continue to burden America, the sin of slavery with its attendant racism. Petry's thesis in The Narrows is like that articulated by LeRoi Jones in Blues People, “The poor Negro,” Jones writes,

always remembered himself as an ex-slave and used this as the basis of any dealing with the mainstream of American society. The middle class black man bases his whole existence on the hopeless hypothesis that no one is supposed to remember that for almost three centuries there was slavery in America, that the white man was the master and the black man the slave. This knowledge, however, is at the root of the legitimate black culture of this country. It is this knowledge, with its attendant muses of self-division, self-hatred, stoicism, and finally quixotic optimism, that informs the most meaningful of Afro-American music.¹⁷

This knowledge with its attendant muses also informs The Narrows. In the character of Link Williams, Abbie's adopted son, Petry provides a response to Abbie's denial of her race's history. Whereas Abbie “always avoided the mention of slavery” (p. 171), Link aspires to write the definitive history of slavery in America and to master the authentic texts and documents belonging to the Afro-American heritage.¹⁸ Link knows that the explanation for his impending murder “reaches back to the Dutch man of warre that landed in Jamestown in 1619” (p. 475).¹⁹

Petry insists that both white and black Americans must acknowledge their collective history and its consequences if they are to avoid moral and spiritual confusion. But it is only Abbie Crunch among the many white and black characters in The Narrows who transcends moral and spiritual confusion. Abbie overcomes her fear of whites and her selfhatred and recognizes that it is not only she who is responsible for Link's death, that “it was all of us, in one way or another, we all had a hand in it, we all reacted violently to those two people, to Link and that girl, because he was colored and she was white” (p. 498). Abbie transcends her own racism to save Camilo, the white woman, from certain death at the hands of Bill Hod, the black man.

The Narrows demonstrates that in the United States racial and sexual politics are inextricably intertwined: both whites and blacks react with murderous rage to the love affair between a black man and a white woman. It is only the black mother, the repressed and respectable New England matron, who transcends that murderous rage to reach charity and forgiveness. Among Ann Petry's many achievements in the novel, one of her finest is her realistic and complex characterization of Abbie Crunch. And, in The Narrows as a whole, Ann Petry has accomplished what she told an interviewer in 1943 was her goal, to show Afro-Americans “as people with the same capacity for love and hate, for tears and laughter, and the same instinct for survival possessed by all men.”²⁰

Notes

1. Review of The Narrows, SatR, 36 (August 22, 1953), 11.

2. Cited in Robert Hemenway's “Are You a Flying Lark or a Setting Dove?” in Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, ed. Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto (New York: MLA, 1978), p. 129.

3. For a useful general introduction to The Narrows, see Margaret B. McDowell, “The Narrows: A Fuller View of Ann Petry,” BALF, 14 (1980), 135-41.

4. Ann Petry, The Narrows (New York: Pyramid, 1971), p. 11. All further references to the novel will be cited in the text.

5. William Shakespeare, King Henry V, IV, vii, 105-06.

6. Wright Morris, New York Times Book Review (August 16, 1953), p. 4. Petry, in a letter to this writer (September 13, 1984) responds as follows to the criticism that the love story is never quite credible: “Not true. Racism, especially as it manifests itself in reactions to miscegenation, is ‘so deeply imbedded in American society, in its laws, in its social structures’ (Baldwin) that it is impossible for most readers, reviewers, critics to look at Link Williams squarely, forthrightly, head on, and recognize him for the 3-dimensional, fully-realized, compelling figure that he is and to recognize the reality and the validity of his love affair with Camilo.”

7. Morris, p. 4.

8. “Black Eve or Madonna: A Study of the Antithetical Views of the Mother in Black American Literature,” in Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, ed. Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Garden City: Anchor, 1979), pp. 126-27.

9. Barbara Christian in Black Women Novelists (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980) makes this point about The Street.

10. Statements in a letter and in an enclosure, both sent to this writer on February 9, 1984.

11. About The Street, Barbara Christian writes that “Petry employed the tone of the commonplace. She is particularly effective in selecting the many details and seemingly trivial struggles that poor women can seldom avoid” (p. 64).

12. Berndt Ostendorf, in Black Literature in White America (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982), borrows this term from Melville Herskovits to describe the give and take between the black culture and the dominant culture in America. See particularly “Double Consciousness: The Marginal Perspective in Language, Oral Culture, Folklore, Religion,” p. 19.

13. Sherley Anne Williams, “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry,” in Fisher and Stepto, p. 85.

14. The Souls of Black Folk (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1961), p. 16.

15. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford, 1977), pp. 419, 420.

16. In The New England Girl: Cultural Ideals in Hawthorne, Stowe, Howells, and James (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976), Paul John Eakin provides an extensive analysis of the cultural significance of the New England heroine.

17. Quoted in Ostendorf, p. 56, note 19.

18. Link's quest for freedom and literacy places him within the tradition of the articulate Afro-American hero, delineated by Robert Stepto in From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1979).

19. When Petry was asked by an interviewer in 1973 about the cause of the evil in The Narrows, she answered that although there was not just one cause, “racism comes closer to being the cause.” See John O'Brien, ed., Interviews with Black Writers (New York: Liveright, 1973), p. 162.

20. James W. Ivy, “Ann Petry Talks about First Novel” in Sturdy Black Bridges, p. 200.

A different version of this paper was first given at a M.E.L.U.S. sponsored panel during the National Women's Studies Association annual meeting, Storrs, Connecticut, June, 1981. I would like to thank Ann Petry, Fauneil Rinn, and John Galm for their assistance.