Women On the Go: Blues, Conjure, and Other Alternatives to Domesticity in Ann Petry's The Street and The Narrows

KIMBERLY DRAKE Women On the Go: Blues, Conjure, and Other Alternatives to Domesticity in Ann Petry's The Street and The Narrows When a woman get the blues, she goes to her room and hides. When a woman get the blues, she goes to her room and hides. When a man gets the blues, he catches a freight train and rides. Clara Smith, "Freight Train Blues" (1924) Sitting in the house with everything on my mind. Sitting in the house with everything on my mind. Looking at the clock and can't even tell the time. . . . Oh, the blues has got me on the go They've got me on the go. They roll around my house, in and out of my front door. Bessie Smith, "In House Blues" (1931) Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, literary depictions of African-American female sexuality continue to be extremely rare. With the exception of Nella Larsen's Helga Crane and Zora Neale Hurston's Janie Starks, female protagonists ate latgely asexual , the result of authors' attempts to fight the Jezebel stereotype and to prove that black women could and did adhere to middle-class values even if they were, by virtue of their color, excluded from the "cult of true womanhood." These protagonists, specimens of the black bourArizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 1, Spring 1998 Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board of Regenrs ISSN 0004-1610 66Kimberly Drake geoisie who consider themselves a "credit to the tace," construct their identities against the Jezebel image; their behavior and values are well within the bounds of middle-class respectability, but more importantly, their "female desire" is expressed as a "desire to uplift the tace" (Carby, '"It Jus Be's'" 240).' The black heroine's participation in community politics, however, often occurs only after her marriage and enclosure in domestic life; women like Pauline Hopkins' Sappho Clatk or Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy do not engage in public work until aftet their marriage (to politically involved husbands). An asexual middle-class domesticity, then, is the literary "safe space" for black female characters , a place which protects them from sexual objectification so that they can work to transform and protect the reputation of other black women.2 While single, the black heroine is at risk from the sexual dangers of the "outdoors," the culture of white supremacy; once sheltered in the institution of marriage, her reputation secure, she can venture into the political realm knowing that she is protected in her "safe space" of marriage and domesticity.5 Yet not all women writers celebrate domesticity as the solution to the problems faced by black women; Nella Larsen's Quicksand depicts domesticity as another kind of slavery. Forced to choose between het "desire fot sexual fulfillment" and her "longing for social respectability," Latsen's Helga Crane attempts to sanction her sexuality in mairiage (McDowell xvii). This choice results not in safety but in suffocation; domesticity is a death sentence for Helga, in which she is slowly destroyed by consecutive pregnancies and the exhaustions ofchildrearing and housekeeping. Larsen's critique of marriage and domesticity is one of the first in the African-Ametican litetary tradition, adding a racial dimension to similar critiques made by white authors such as Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Oilman, and Edith Wharton . Twenty years later, Ann Petty inflects Larsen's critique further by adding the element of class as a central focus.4 With the publication of TL· Street (1946) and The Narrows (1953), Petty portrays the workingclass black woman's experience of domestic ideology while simultaneously acknowledging the limitations of previous black women writers' rigid moral standards. She does so not by bteaking with the tradition of the asexual heroine, but by including sexualized minor female charactets who act as foils to female protagonists with bourgeois values. Significantly , Petty does not portray her minor characters as fallen or de- Women on the Go67 generate, thereby highlighting the purity and goodness of the protagonists ; rather, the minor characters survive and even flourish during the course of the novel, while the protagonists suffer. Through her narrative support of characters with working-class morals and lifestyles, Petty challenges the white-identified...