5 3 R N O T H I N G N E W U N D E R T H E S U N A N N P E T R Y ’ S T H E S T R E E T A N D T H E N A R R O W S E M I L Y B E R N A R D The Richest Damn Country in the World Ann Petry never liked the way she looked. She hated having her picture taken, and she despised the attention that went along with celebrity. Yet the limelight found her immediately upon the 1946 publication of her novel The Street, the first novel written by an African American woman to sell over a million copies. She felt cornered by her success. Petry knew that the media glare was occasioned as much by her race and gender as by her talent. Suddenly she was a public curio, on display for the world to inspect . After the reporter Ed Sullivan mentioned the book in a 1945 newspaper column her phone rang nonstop. Instead of flattered she felt menaced. ‘‘I didn’t feel like being pursued, and questioned, and all the rest of it – flashbulbs, cameras, oooh!’’ she confided in her journal. She was similarly miserable fifty years later during the publicity campaign for the 1992 edition of The Street. ‘‘I feel as though I were a helpless creature impaled on a dissecting table – for public viewing,’’ she despaired. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that in the fictional world of The Street, as well as in her 1953 novel The Narrows, someone is always watching, and the looking is never innocent. 5 4 B E R N A R D Y No doubt Petry would writhe with discomfort today in the wake of the release of the Library of America volume of her work that includes The Street, The Narrows, and several selections of Petry’s nonfiction, as well as a chronology of her life by volume editor Farah Jasmine Gri≈n so thorough and well considered that it o√ers something closer to a biography of Petry than a simple listing of her life events. But Petry’s work, if not Petry’s person, merits a renaissance. The Street and The Narrows are big books, long in length, hefty in plot, and gigantic in scope. They narrate lives lived in specific times and places, and they dive deep into big issues, including the nature of freedom, community, family, and love. The stories they tell, like the questions they raise, are eternally poignant and eerily current. They dramatize what it means to be black, female, and American, and, above all, human. There is no novel more satisfying to teach in the age of #Me Too than The Street. My students and I root for the novel’s main character, Lutie Johnson, as she moves through the world, battling carnivorous gazes of men and women, determined to make a living and maintain a household for herself and her son. But because she is poor, black, and female – and beautiful, to boot – Lutie is constantly in peril. From the very first page, she is fighting nature itself. The wind virtually undresses her and hurls dirt and garbage in front of her eyes as she hunts for an apartment on 116th Street in Harlem. (Petry worked as a journalist in Harlem when she was a young woman, and during those years, she came across a newspaper article that inspired the story at the heart of The Street.) Lutie can barely see the signs advertising apartments to let, something that truly adds insult to injury, since the apartments themselves are shabby, overpriced, dark, and crowded. But only one thing matters to Lutie: keeping her son safe and sheltered from the life they have left behind. As she pursues this goal, she tries to ignore the eyes that follow her and travel up and down her body. On the day of her fateful search for housing, Lutie is still recovering from life on another street, the grand main street in Lyme, Connecticut. A few years earlier, she had left her job...