Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, and Other Forms of Racial Division

Diseased Properties and Broken Homes in Ann Petry’s The Street

149 Diseased Properties and Broken Homes Diseased Properties and Broken Homes in Ann Petry’s The Street1 ELIZABETH BOYLE MACHLAN Rent Man waitin’ for his forty dollars Ain’t got me but a dime and some bad news. Bartender, give me a bracer, double beer chaser, ‘Cause I got the low-down, mean, rent-man blues. —Blues standard The shades of the prison-house closed round us all: walls, straight and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation. —W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) From the “big house” of the plantation to the “big house” of the prison, African Americans have colloquially associated the domestic architecture of the United States with oppression and abjection. Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street brings to life for its audience the deceptive, malignant structures in which Jim Crow housing policies forced many African Americans to dwell, revealing the profound unhomeliness of these marginalized spaces. Due to Petry’s “relentless presentation of the dreary despair of the inner cities,” critical commentary on The Street has tended to engage first and foremost the question of whether her work is simply a “poor imitation” of the depiction of urban racism in Richard Wright’s Native Son (Christian 11, Henderson 850).2 I propose instead that The Street in fact owes far more to the structural and social preoccupations of the American Gothic than it does to the naturalist tradition, and that Petry positions the apartment house, not the ghetto itself, as the novel’s central source of anxiety. To read her Harlem houses merely as metaphors for a troubled urban environment, I suggest, is to minimize the significance of the distinctly domestic horrors they contain.3 Building on the work of Meg Wesling, who observes that “Petry’s interest is not so much in determinist forces as in the 149 150 Representing Segregation subtleties of social control and the threatening opacity of everyday social relations that racially segregated environments produce”(Wesling 118), my goal is to locate and explore the ways in which Petry’s Gothicized tenement imagines the specter of segregation and white domination, and to illuminate how the “peculiar institution” of Harlem’s real estate market forced black New Yorkers perpetually to re-enact Gothic scenarios of familial dismemberment, real and imagined imprisonment, and sexual intimidation and transgression. For Petry, the Gothic functions as a border genre, one which monitors the many moral, cultural, and literal architectures at work in the (Re)construction of American society. Justin Edwards has described how Gothic conventions allowed both racist and reformist writers to engage a “racial gothic” discourse that “employed striking and metaphoric images to filter and give meaning to the social hierarchies of racial domination and subordination institutionalized through slavery and maintained in the disenfranchising effects and segregation laws of the postbellum period” (Edwards xi). The Supreme Court’s upholding of “separate but equal” premise of racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) had demonstrated white America’s stake in maintaining a sundered nation-subject, as well as the psychology, on a national scale, that resisted integration. Wesling notes that Petry portrays in a very real way “the intricate structural arrangements that facilitate the economic exploitation of black women and men and the sexual exploitation of black women by both white and black men” (Wesling 117); any attempt to defy these hierarchies and cross the thresholds of these segregated structures, Petry suggests, only defines them more deeply. In The Street, Gothic images are often direct articulations, as opposed to representations, of actual urban circumstances, since Harlem’s houses were—and sometimes still are—sites of overt racial and economic conflict. Harlem’s Haunted History In his 1919 essay, Freud describes the uncanny as “what is concealed and kept out of sight,” or, alternately, in spatial terms as “something one does not know one’s way about in” (Freud). Both definitions evoke the constant need for subjects to re-evaluate their boundaries and demarcate their space, even within the home. Yet the slippage between home and not-home at work in the uncanny is not always purely conceptual, or psychological. The history of Harlem’s complex confrontations and negotiations between blacks and whites demonstrate not only architecture’s utility as a tool of social control, but also how segregation turned a lively neighborhood into the “dark double” of a predominantly white New York. At...