The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry

CONCLUSION: FROM THE 1960S TO THE 2000S AND BEYOND: Ann Petry’s Prescient Vision

202 Conclusion from the 1960s to the 2000s and beyond Ann Petry’s Prescient Vision In her standard no-nonsense, borderline curt way, Ann Petry penned this response to a 1970 invitation to speak on racial matters at an institute called “The Young Adult in Conflict”: “I have talked to too many audiences and given too many speeches and taken part in too many seminars , etc. I can’t talk any more about what ‘being black in white America’ means. In a few years I will have done with writing about it, too.”1 Petry’s weariness with addressing the misdiagnosed “Negro Problem” is unqualified here and, true to her word, she published no adult fiction between the years 1971 and 1986. However, her declaration of impending artistic self-muzzling on race—understandable given the oppositional and parochial way in which it is traditionally cast in stark “black-versuswhite ” terms—didn’t dull her piercing insights into our everlasting “race problem,” the reductive appellation applied to material, manifold issues that didn’t magically vanish circa November 2008. In the 1960s and in the mid-1980s, Petry produced some of her most penetrating writing regarding issues as culturally relevant in the twenty-first century as they were topically germane when they were published—specifically the short stories “The New Mirror” (1965),”The Migraine Workers” (1967), “Mother Africa” (1971), and “The Moses Project” (1986). Given the scant (“Migraine ”) to nonexistent (“Moses”) criticism on these works, I will concentrate primarily on them here. These stories are both period-specific and contemporarily relevant, confronting the fault lines underlying a burgeoning white, black, and brown America and the surveillance of the black body. Petry’s foresight in dramatizing such abiding concerns attests to her acute grasp of the cracks in our national foundation that keep Americans of all hues, ethnicities, classes, and sexual orientations distressingly separate in what James Baldwin would prophetically classify as “these yet to be United States” (288). While exemplifying my central claims regarding her re-envisioning of white and black masculinity and 203 conclusion: from the 1960s to the 2000s and beyond her agile appropriation of gothic conventions, these stories reflect an expansion of her creative vision and insure her literary relevance long beyond her death in 1992. Much like Ralph Ellison in the 1960s, Petry was relatively peripheral if not totally silent during the stentorian Black Arts Movement, where a cadre of Afro- and dashiki-bedecked younger artists preached to their adherents to “get whitey” and beseeched “niggers” to “kill” in the rabid, zero-sum rhetoric that often (but not always) privileged militancy over rumination. On the one hand, there was Gwendolyn Brooks, who in essence underwent a self-styled artistic makeover (not to mention her jettisoning her perm for a fro) after attending what for her was an aesthetic-altering event—the Second Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University in 1967; this resulted in a more radicalized Brooks poetic persona. Contrarily, Ellison abjured what he saw as outré Black Arts propagandistic writing which forsook the august, richly American artistic tradition established by Twain, Eliot, and Faulkner, not to mention the African American folk, vernacular, and musical traditions (folklore, spirituals, sermons, the blues, jazz) that bear witness to what Ellison disciple/novelist/blues theorist Albert Murray deems our inherent “omni-Americanism.” While Petry would never vociferously denounce her younger black counterparts while elevating their white literary predecessors to some problematically rarified realm of “pure,” politically unfettered “art,” she would nevertheless mediate these two positions. As the aforementioned correspondence suggests, she remained keenly aware of our inestimable racial discordances, while at the same time resisting Afrocentrically orthodox notions of capital-b Black art. Her later work, like her entire fictive corpus, reflects an art ineluctably informed by her lower-case but irrepressibly black sensibilities—irrespective of the number of “race problem” colloquia or black writers’ conferences she did or did not attend. Published in 1965, a red-letter year that witnessed the Watts uprising and the assassination of African Americans’ “shining black Prince” (actor Ossie Davis’s honorific for Malcolm X), “The New Mirror” might be considered a sort of gadfly text. On the one hand, the “Black Is Beautiful ” mantra was pulsating throughout African America, as “slogans like the radical fiction of ann petry 204 ‘Black Power’ and ‘I’m Black and I’m Proud’ were battle cries of...