@Mary13 That Washington Post article and your post were very thought provoking.
Also thanks to @jerseysouthmomchess for quoting the relevant parts here so I didn’t have to do the hard work.
This encapsulates so well what I was struggling to say in my first post. I think Ann Petry saw this happen far too often.
I grew up in a small cosmopolitan bubble in a major urban area where the majority of the population was homogeneous. We suffered a kind of discrimination when we left our bubble because we were different from people around us. But we had educated, caring parents with paying jobs, a great support system in our neighborhoods, and an insulating layer of friends. It made our problems recede and seem insignificant.
Looking back from a different perspective, I think we were privileged.
The local people living near our particular bubble (poor farmland region with not many jobs other than one big selective employer) were resentful of those who came from outside taking many of the well-paying jobs. The men gathered to rage about the unfairness of the system and got drunk.
The women understood rage and pride weren’t going to keep the family alive and took on jobs that must have been demeaning as well as back-breaking to put food on the table. Their kids suffered from lack of supervision and guidance — we saw many delinquent and troubled kids who perpetuated the cycle. A few got straightened out after turbulent beginnings. A small number of these children were able to get out of the rut — inspiration and aspiration working together well.
I think Lutie’s ambition and pride got in her way. She did many of the right things, finished school, got a steady job and added certifications to improve her career but along the way she lost touch with who she was and where she came from. If she had befriended the people around her instead of looking down upon them and what they did to survive, she may have been able to fight the street’s chokehold on her life. Small steps instead of big jumps.
I didn’t like the fury at all. It was another moment when she ignored the reasons Bub was shining shoes. Instead of having a teaching/learning moment, she just got mad. Her vision of what she thought they needed was so narrow, she couldn’t get past her own walls.
In my version Bub gets placed in an awesome foster home and his life path changes.
So I was catching up on posts and starting to respond as I went along, thus the 2 comments above. I got caught up in everyone’s comments and read to the end. Excellent discussion.
I suspect that if Bub ends up with Mrs. Hedges he will end up working for Junto. If so, he may not live in poverty, but he will still be part of the street and live a dangerous life.
I can’t imagine Lutie finding any happiness in a new city. Killing Boots and abandoning Bub will always haunt her and probably add to her rage. She will probably turn into the exact person she was trying to not become.
The Langston Hughes poem “Elevator Boy” seems to fit here:
*Elevator Boy
I got a job now
Runnin’ an elevator
In the Dennison Hotel in Jersey.
Job ain’t no good though.
No money around.
Jobs are just chances
Like everything else.
Maybe a little luck now,
Maybe not.
Maybe a good job sometimes:
Step out o’ the barrel, boy.
Two new suits an’
A woman to sleep with.
Maybe no luck for a long time.
Only the elevators
Goin’ up and down,
Up an’ down,
Or somebody else’s shoes
To shine,
Or greasy pots in a dirty kitchen.
I been runnin’ this
Elevator too long.
Guess I’ll quit now.*
I need to clarify something: The Jamaica where Lutie’s husband lived is not the island in the Caribbean. It’s a part of Queens, New York. We know that because at one point, when Lutie is going up to her job in CT, they decide to say goodby at home, in Jamaica, so they don’t have to spend a dime for the husband to travel to Grand Central Station, where she got the train to CT.
^ Wow, @VeryHappy, I missed that completely. Thank you. Then why is Jim so completely out of his son’s life? They live only 15 miles apart. He seemed to be a decent enough father (and fond of the foster children). Can I hope that Lutie, knowing she will never return, calls him to go fetch their son?
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
Virtually none, in my opinion. The plotting of the book creates rising tension, and I think humor, even dark humor, would have messed with that dynamic.
I grew up in a large middle-class Irish Catholic family outside Chicago. Dad worked outside the home, and Mom inside. Not a lot of money for luxuries, but plenty of food on the table, family vacations, and a promise (fulfilled) of sending all of us to college. Our neighbors were the same – big families bound together by attendance at the same parish as much as by geography. It was a supportive and loving community. I am privileged. I recognize that and it makes it hard to approach some of the material in The Street. Every time I judged Lutie (which was lots of times), I had to stop, give myself a virtual shake, and remind myself that I have no genuine understanding of what she endured (and what many others today continue to endure).
I may want the world to change, may actively do my best to work toward that change, but there’s no getting away from the fact that an element of systemic racism stems from people like me who spent most of a lifetime not seeing what should have been seen.
I’m wondering if Lutie was so future oriented about “getting out” that she missed the present (forest/trees issue). She took the job in Connecticut that ended up damaging her relationship with her husband, she left Bub on his own so that she could work, she pursued the nightclub job instead of being at home with him at night. All these were in her mind the road to improvement and a better life but in pursuing them, she missed the moments in the present.
That’s the kind of American Dream that Lutie was aiming for, but Benjamin Franklin was a white man, and the dream plays out different for a black woman. Franklin is a funny role model for Lutie to have chosen, since he was (initially) a slaveholder and a believer in the importance of expanding the white race. He was self-aware enough to say, "perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such kind of partiality is natural to Mankind.”
(For what it’s worth, I disagree – I think it’s learned, not natural.)
[quote]
Lutie also often found herself dreaming of the American dream: having money, a decent job, and living in pursuit of happiness, and she compared herself to Benjamin Franklin, “feeling the hard roundness of the rolls through the paper bag, she thought immediately of Ben Franklin and his loaf of bread…and grinned thinking…if Ben Franklin could live on a little bit of money and could prosper, then so could she” (Petry 63).
According to Vernon Lattin, in a section of the Literary History of the United States, he asserts that Benjamin Franklin was the **“living demonstration of the fact that in a republican society, where class distinctions do not prevent recognition of talent and genius, a poor boy may seize opportunities and rise to positions reserved for the privileged” (69). **
Lutie Johnson, although she is black, a female, poor, and aware of the fact that she is living during a time where there is, “racism, sexism, and economic slavery, she doesn’t understand the ironic reality of the American dream as it applies to her” (Lattin 70).
Lutie assumed that she could have a happy life just like Benjamin Franklin, but again she was so determined to have the American dream, she failed to realize that the American dream did not apply to her because of the racially oppressed society.
@VeryHappy Again, late to the “party,” but I was going to say the same thing about Jamaica being on Long Island. For anyone who isn’t familiar with the NY metro area, Petry referring to “the house in Jamaica” could be confusing. I’m familiar with it because I lived/worked on Long Island, just over the border with Queens, during my first job after college. I often rode the LIRR into NYC, and had to change trains in Jamaica.
Totally agree with @Mary13 about the lack of humor in the book. I had to “just walk away” many times while reading the book. I was rooting for Lutie, but somehow knew there wouldn’t be a happy ending.
@ignatius Thanks for the Langston Hughes poems. Very fitting.
@VeryHappy, thanks for the WP article. For anyone who might get a pay wall, here are a few salient points:
The article traces the racial injustices against George Floyd’s family through hundreds of years, from his great-great grandfather’s land being seized by white farmers, to his sharecropper grandparents being cheated out of their pay, to his mother moving into a public housing complex (“a sandtrap of entrenched poverty”), to the constant discrimination faced by Floyd and his siblings. “Recalling the racial profiling he and his siblings experienced regularly in their Third Ward neighborhood, George Floyd’s younger brother put it more succinctly: ‘Your skin,’ Rodney Floyd said, ‘is your sin.’”
Lutie Johnson had an additional strike against her: being a female – which adds to the list of social and economic challenges.
Thanks for posting that, @Mary13. I forgot about the possibility of a paywall. (Although, if anyone’s interested, you can subscribe to WaPo’s digital edition for ~$4 a month, through Amazon.)