[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 60 (Friday, May 9, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4277-S4278]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         IN MEMORY OF ANN PETRY

  Mr. DODD. Ironically, in the same town of Old Saybrook, CT, we have a 
sadder piece of news about a wonderful constituent of my State. Ann 
Petry, an African-American writer whose life is described in an article 
by David Streitfeld last Saturday in the Washington Post, has died. She 
was well into her nineties at the time of her death and was truly a 
remarkable person.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have that article printed 
in the Record.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the Washington Post, May 3, 1997]

          Ann Petry's Storied Life--Author Left Indelible Mark

                         (By David Streitfeld)

       Ann Petry lived in Connecticut in a 200-year-old sea 
     captain's house that smelled of old wood and homemade bread. 
     Her husband, the taciturn but adoring George, was her 
     constant companion; their one child, Liz, had ended a 
     promising law career because she wanted to live near her 
     parents, because she liked them.
       It seemed a pretty idyllic way to finish a life. Petry, who 
     died Monday in a convalescent home at the age of 88, was well 
     known enough to need an unlisted phone number but not so 
     famous that people were constantly on her doorstep. She knew 
     her books would be remembered, and that--along with her 
     family and friends and the warm spring mornings out in her 
     garden--provided pleasure. I think she died without regrets, 
     which has to be unusual.
       Petry's family was firmly rooted in Old Saybrook; her 
     father had opened a pharmacy there in 1902, and Ann was 
     trained to follow him. As much as possible for a black woman 
     in the first half of this century, she escaped the effects of 
     racism.
       It was a life in sharp contrast to that of her most famous 
     heroine, Lutie Johnson in ``The Street.'' Lutie is a single 
     mother in Harlem in the 1940s who has the misfortune to be 
     good-looking. White or black, the men

[[Page S4278]]

     want only one thing. Lutie tries to protect her 8-year-old 
     son and her virtue, an impossible task:
       ``Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They 
     were the North's lynch mobs, she thought bitterly; the method 
     the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place. And she 
     began thinking of Pop unable to get a job; of Jim slowly 
     disintegrating because he, too, couldn't get a job, and of 
     the subsequent wreck of their marriage; of Bub left to his 
     own devices after school. From the time she was born, she had 
     been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was 
     very nearly walled in and the wall had been built up brick by 
     brick by eager white hands.''
       ``The Street'' was based on the nine years Petry spent in 
     Harlem, working primarily as a journalist. ``I can only guess 
     at what she went through when she moved to New York and saw 
     all those disenfranchised people, totally lacking power in a 
     way that she and our family never did,'' her daughter once 
     told me. ``Her way of dealing with the problem was to write 
     this book.''
       ``The Street'' was well reviewed when it appeared in 1946, 
     enough to become a bestseller, and it went on to become a 
     classic. It will always have a place in literary history 
     because it was the first book by a black woman to sell more 
     than 1 million copies, but the real reason it will survive is 
     because it's good, a triumph of realism.
       Sadly, the book is also a measure of how far we have 
     fallen.
       In 1992, when the original publisher, Houghton Mifflin, 
     bought back the rights and reissued ``The Street,'' it got a 
     front-page review in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. 
     Petry's Harlem, Michael Dorris wrote, ``hard as it was, now 
     seems in some respects almost nostalgically benign. The 
     streets of New York, as she describes them in the mid-1940's 
     were indisputably mean to the downtrodden, but in those days 
     it was still possible for a Lutie Johnson to walk 12 blocks 
     safely, at midnight, or to ride the last subway alone. It was 
     a place where the worst thing a child might bring to public 
     school was a penknife, a place where neighbors tried to watch 
     out for one another, where violent death was a rare and awful 
     occurrence.''
       After ``The Street,'' Petry wrote in quick succession two 
     other novels for adults, ``Country Place,'' a story about a 
     Connecticut town that featured no black characters, and ``The 
     Narrows'' about a doomed interracial love affair. During the 
     '50s, she wrote several fiction and nonfiction books for 
     young people. While ``The Narrows,'' particularly, has its 
     supporters, her fame primarily rests on ``The Street.''
       One of the problems with interviewers is that they ask 
     pesky questions like ``When are you going to publish a new 
     book?'' Five years ago, Petry answered that she was working 
     on things, but I didn't really believe it and I don't think 
     she expected me to believe it. She had said what she had to 
     say, and saw no need to obscure it with inferior work. It's a 
     lesson many other novelists could learn.
       Petry had little tolerance for fools or academics, two 
     categories she regarded as essentially synonymous. From a 
     1989 interview with a scholar who wrote ``the first post-
     structuralist study to reveal a hidden text'' in Petry's 
     novels:
       Q. Richard Wright mentions in ``How Bigger Was Born'' that 
     he experienced ``mental censorship'' when writing ``Native 
     Son,'' that he worries about what blacks and whites would say 
     about Bigger and whether Bigger would perpetuate stereotypes. 
     How much mental censorship did you experience when you were 
     writing ``The Street''?
       A. None.
       Q. Were there ever concerns on your part or on the part of 
     your editor about ``The Street'' being overshadowed by or 
     having to measure up to ``Native Son''?
       A. No.
       When I interviewed Petry in 1992, she said that I should 
     stop by the next time I was in the area. This is the sort of 
     thing interview subjects often say; what they really mean is 
     that they hope you're not going to write something nasty. 
     They don't actually expect or want you to come visit.
       Petry, though, did. So a few times when I was in that 
     corner of Connecticut I called her up and dropped in for a 
     couple of minutes. I last saw her about two years ago. She 
     was a little more stooped but seemed as if she would live 
     forever. George, who survives her, puttered around and didn't 
     say much as usual. I walked down the block to the old family 
     drugstore, where I looked out the window that Petry's father 
     would look out Sunday mornings to catch a glimpse of his wife 
     coming back from church.
       ``Come here,'' he would tell Ann. ``Look at your mother. 
     Isn't she beautiful?''
       Tuesday, I noticed a teenage girl on the Metro reading a 
     beat-up paperback of Petry's biography of Harriet Tubman. 
     Although I didn't know it, Petry had died the day before. 
     Like any good writer, her work survives.

  Mr. DODD. Ann Petry's father was a pharmacist who opened up a 
pharmacy in 1902 in Old Saybrook, CT. Although she learned the pharmacy 
trade from her father, her contribution, of course, was in literature.
  Her famous novel, ``The Street,'' written in the 1940's, was a 
remarkable piece of journalism that is still read today by younger 
generations. She followed that novel with two others that received wide 
recognition, ``The Narrows,'' and ``A Country Place,'' about a 
Connecticut town that many thought could be Old Saybrook. She wrote a 
number of short stories and articles. Ann Petry was truly a very 
remarkable person.
  She did not have much use for fools and academicians, she once said, 
and she said she was usually speaking about one and the same person 
when talking of fools and academicians. I do not know that I agree, but 
she was a person of curt opinion, straightforward talk, and was well 
admired and loved in the town of Old Saybrook. Her contributions to 
literature have brightened the lives of many, many people.
  We express our sorrow for the loss of Ann Petry.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, my colleague from Ohio has indicated I 
should proceed to seek 10 minutes of time, at which point he intends to 
resume his discussion. I appreciate his courtesy.
  I ask unanimous consent to proceed for 10 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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