Reviewed by: At Home Inside: A Daughter’s Tribute to Ann Petry Margaret Earley Whitt (bio) Petry, Elisabeth. At Home Inside: A Daughter’s Tribute to Ann Petry. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009. One day when Liz Petry was walking home from high school, she got a throbbing pain in her lower back and had to sit down on the “ragged edge of an ancient granite marker” until it subsided. Over an hour later when she walked through her front door at home, she found that her father was “settling” her mother on the living room couch, after her fall. Mother and daughter figured that Liz’s pain and her mother’s fall came precisely at the same moment (156–57). Elisabeth Petry was the only child of George and Ann Petry, and the emotional bond between maternal parent and daughter was intensely entwined. This memoir of a daughter’s memory of her mother is an homage of respect and adoration. There is no mean spirit here. At Home Inside is the title Elisabeth Petry took from a letter written to her mother by Nell Drew in 1981: “You radiate peace and love, and I feel you are at home inside” (191). Using her own memory of life growing up in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, and her mother’s thirty-three journals, she recreates a woman larger than the literary author known most widely for her novel, The Street (1946), about Lutie Johnson, a single mother to young Bub, when the novel opens on the streets of Harlem. She also wrote two other novels, Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1953), numerous short stories, and some children’s literature, most notably Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railraod (1955) and Tituba of Salem Village (1964). In this memoir, Ann Petry is depicted as a talented seamstress, sketch artist, pastry chef, ardent collector of old treasures, mostly silverware, and a passionate tea drinker. She is caretaker to aging relatives and friends, a thoughtful letter-writing correspondent to friends far away and a preparer of meals and a visiting nurse to those close at hand. She is also a keeper of secrets. Reticent about her own work, she shunned most interviews, turned down more lecture opportunities than she accepted, and was particularly quiet about her political activities and her personal life. Because she worked out of the spotlight, and disappeared inside herself when she was involved in a writing project, Liz Petry had little awareness growing up that her mother was well known; she thought all mothers behaved this same way. Anna Houston Lane was born in October 1908 at her upstairs home over the family business. Her father was a pharmacist and her mother a chiropodist in Lane’s Pharmacy. She, like her father and her aunt, too, became a pharmacist, graduating from Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Haven in 1931. She met her husband George David Petry at the drugstore when he came to town to visit a friend. She moved to New York, secretly marrying George in March 1936, but publicly marrying him with her parents present in February 1938. Why she kept the marriage a secret for two years is not a part of this memoir, nor is much said about the role of George in Ann Petry’s life. He was drafted in 1943, and his absence provided the only time in Ann’s life that she lived alone; she had the space she needed to begin work on her novels. Their only child, Elisabeth, was born in 1949. For a husband present for over sixty years, little commentary exists on the role he played in his wife’s life. He was an attractive man, tall with the build of a football player. A Louisiana man sent north by his people to attend high school in New York City, he went on scholarship to Columbia University. He managed a restaurant in New York before moving back to the Lane family home at 113 Old Boston Post Road in Saybrook, where [End Page 1104] Ann had lived from the age of 12 until her brief hiatus in the city, and then back again for the rest of her...
Read full abstract
Sep 1, 2013
Jonathan Zurawski + 1
Open Access