Harlem Nocturne

by Farah Jasmine Griffin

  From here, Petry argues for the importance of sociological fiction in a number of ways. First, she grounds the tradition in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament story of Cain and Abel, whereby Cain asks God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Petry also argues against art for art’s sake while insisting upon the importance of craft, especially in the development of full, complex characters. According to Petry, that which distinguishes successful novels from their more didactic cousins is craftsmanship and the author’s development of characterization and theme: “Once the novelist begins to manipulate his characters to serve the interests of his theme they lose whatever vitality they had when their creator first thought about them.” “The Novel as Social Criticism,” like Zora Neale Hurston’s essays of the thirties, was an important early presentation of aesthetic theory by a black woman thinker. Along with Hurston, Petry helped to pave the way for novelist-critics like Toni Morrison.39

  In spite of Petry’s protests, the novel of social criticism did fall out of fashion with the emergence of writers such as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, whose first novels were published in 1952 and 1953, respectively. Baldwin and Ellison wrote formally complex, modernist works that focused on the individual psychology of their characters. Furthermore, in keeping with a rightward, more conservative, anti-Communist shift in American political life in general—and the mainstream civil rights movement in particular—neither writer launched major left-leaning critiques. Publishing companies and white liberal intellectuals found this work more to their liking, and the window of opportunity for the social realists quickly closed.

  The Street is perhaps Petry’s most complete literary example of what she argued for in “The Novel as Social Criticism,” but the aesthetic principles she outlined there are apparent in all of her fiction. In one of her most highly crafted but least appreciated short stories, “In Darkness and Confusion,” published in 1946, she tackled one of the most significant events to happen in New York during the war years—the Harlem Riot of 1943.

  Suppose the day we spent walking through Harlem was Sunday, August 1, 1943. It was hot. That morning we read a story in the Amsterdam News about a black sergeant in Georgia who was executed because he’d gotten into an altercation with a state police officer. Say we have heard a number of stories about the mistreatment of black servicemen in the racist South. We may have attended services at one of the many Harlem churches—maybe the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s Abyssinian Baptist Church—but the pastor didn’t preach because he was out of town. After church, we may have gone to see Stormy Weather with Lena Horne and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson at the RKO Alhambra at 126th and Seventh. Horne was becoming famous for the title song, which had previously been sung by Ethel Waters and Billie Holiday. Horne was the bronze pin-up for the brown boys overseas. In fact, they so loved her that the Marines of the 51st Defense Battalion named a gun after her in 1945. She was later considered for the role of Lutie in the film version of The Street, which was never made. Or, since this was Sunday, our day to relax, maybe we had planned to catch Cootie Williams and his band at the Apollo on 125th Street. Williams’s band played both bebop and rhythm and blues,40 and this made it an embodiment of the transitional nature of black urban life during the war years—a life still grounded in the advances and traditions of the first Great Migration and the New Negro movement but sitting on the verge of something new and consequential.

  By seven, just before dusk, it is still very hot, and we start to hear a new rumor. It is about a soldier who has been shot and killed by a white cop at the Braddock Hotel on West 126th and Eighth Avenue. We knew the Braddock, because it is a favorite haunt of musicians, who sometimes rehearse downstairs. Carmen McRae and Sarah Vaughan are frequently there, and even stars like Dizzy Gillespie.

  But tonight, mobs begin to form. Riots have already taken place in Los Angeles (the Zoot Suit Riots), Detroit (at the Sojourner Truth Houses), and Beaumont, Texas. We will later learn that the soldier, Private Robert Bandy, didn’t die. He had been with his mother when he saw a white policeman, Officer James Collins, trying to arrest a young woman, Marjorie (Margie) Polite. The officer hit the young woman and Bandy intervened on her behalf. Collins shot Bandy in the shoulder. Bandy was taken to Harlem Hospital, where he was treated and released. But the rumor of a white cop shooting and killing a black soldier in uniform is unstoppable. It quickly spreads, igniting a powder keg of resentment over police brutality, maltreatment of black soldiers, residential discrimination, and a myriad other ills suffered by black Harlemites. Before the end of the day, it will take close to 7,000 New York City police officers and military police, along with as many members of the National Guard and a number of volunteers, to quell the riot. Mayor LaGuardia will ride the streets of Harlem throughout the night, speaking to the rioters through a bullhorn. He will close off the streets, order a curfew, and close bars and nightclubs. A number of black ministers will join him.

  After two days of rioting, property damages were estimated at over $5 million, hundreds were arrested, and six people, all black, were dead. The streets were filled with debris from broken windows and looted stores. Communist leader Benjamin Davis proclaimed that Harlem’s residents had “perfectly legitimate grievances” and sufficient reasons for the revolt, including the prevalence of police brutality on the streets of Harlem, even while the nation fought a war against fascism. Rev. Powell issued a statement blaming the riots on the “blind, smoldering and unorganized resentment against Jim Crow treatment of Negro men in the armed forces and the unusual high rents and cost of living forced upon Negroes in Harlem.” A coalition of black leaders from politically moderate organizations, including the National Urban League, met with city officials in the days following the riots. While they agreed that the disturbances had turned into “outbreaks of hoodlumism,” they nonetheless called attention to the social and economic conditions that led to the rioting.41

  Ralph Ellison wrote about the riot in the New York Post in 1943, and then famously fictionalized it in Invisible Man, published in 1952. James Baldwin wrote about it in a 1955 work, Notes of a Native Son. And Langston Hughes penned a poem inspired by it, “The Ballad of Margie Polite,” which appeared in the Amsterdam News just two months after the riot. It was a thirteen-stanza poem. Stanzas 1, 3, 5, and 7 were as follows:

  If Margie Polite

  Had of been white

  She might not’ve cussed

  Out the cop that night.

  . . .

  A soldier took her part.

  He got shot in the back

  By a white cop—

  The soldier were black.

  . . .

  They taken Margie to jail

  And kept her there.

  DISORDERLY CONDUCT

  The charges swear.

  . . .

  She started the riots!

  Harlemites say

  August 1st is

  MARGIE’S DAY.

  About the riot, Petry later recalled, “I can remember walking through 125th Street when the street was filled with the shattered glass from the store windows. It made a crunching sound. I can still hear it.”42

  Petry used these vivid memories to inform her fictional account of the riots and the events that led up to them. William Jones, the protagonist of “In Darkness and Confusion,” shares an apartment with his obese churchgoing wife, Pink, and her teenage niece, Annie May, a southern migrant who is discovering all the temptations of the city. Annie May was inspired by the young women Petry encountered in Harlem who were a bit younger than Lutie Johnson but, like her, also absent from the organizational meetings to which Petry devoted her time. However, young women like Annie May made their presence known on the streets of Harlem. Approaching three of them, Jones describes them with a tone of disdain:

  As far as he could see, they looked exactly alike. All three of them. And like Annie May. Too thin. Too much lipstick. Their dresses were too short and too tight. . . . He knew too, that [Annie May] didn’t earn en
ough money to pay for all the cheap, bright-colored dresses she was forever buying. Her girl friends looked just like her and just like these girls. He’d seen her coming out of the movie houses on 125th Street with two or three of them. They were all chewing gum and they nudged each other and talked too loud and laughed too loud. They stared hard at every man who went past them.

  Might these “too-too girls” be female counterparts of Ellison’s zoot-suit-wearing jitterbugs that his protagonist encounters on the subway platform in Invisible Man? In an unsigned editorial just after the Harlem Riot of 1943, Ellison suggested that black leadership fails if it does not seek to solve the riddle of the zoot. He wrote, “Much in Negro life remains a mystery; perhaps the zoot-suit conceals profound political meaning; perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindy-hop conceals clues to great potential power.” This is a riddle he himself seeks to unravel in Invisible Man, and one that would occupy brilliant thinkers after him.43 The Lindy Hop and the emerging sound of bebop, according to Ellison, embodied the energies and frustrations of these young men—frustrations that led to the chaos and discontent of wartime race riots.

  But let’s linger a bit longer with the young women, the “too-too girls.” We might ask, Who are they? What are their hopes, aspirations, dreams, and frustrations? What is their style? What songs do they sing as they work throughout the day to ease heartbreak or express a heart’s longing? What music plays through their heads as they dress for a night out? What rhythms inspire their work? Imagine them: a flirtatious glance here, a familiar gesture there, hands on hips, head tilted. The spirit of black urban life was embodied by not only the zoot suiters, but also by the “too-too girls.” With only a short passage in her story, Petry introduced them to the fictional page. She dared to represent them, and in so doing asked new questions about her time, place, and people.

  For Jones—and in all likelihood, for Petry’s readers—the young women are unfamiliar, unreachable, foreign, and just wrong. The refrain “too” suggests he resents their insistence, their exploding beyond the boundaries, their stepping outside the lines, their taking more from life than it tells them they dare have. They are boldly sexual, which he finds distasteful. He despises their dismissal of proper behavior and respectability. He contrasts them with his upstanding only son, Sam, a scholar athlete who first works as a redcap before joining the military. (Redcap was the nickname given to railroad porters who wore the red hats as part of their uniforms. Most railroad porters were black men. They were also members of the Union of Sleeping Car Porters founded by A. Philip Randolph. These were prestigious, sought-after jobs. Redcaps were greatly admired and respected in black communities throughout the United States.) Sam, the story’s Negro soldier figure, is stationed down south in Georgia.

  In Petry’s story, Jones’s son becomes a stand-in for Private Robert Bandy. After learning that his son has been court-martialed for shooting a racist officer, Jones, fed up with the streets he walks, his job, and Annie May, goes to a Harlem bar in an unnamed hotel on a hot August night in 1943. Petry doesn’t name it, but this fictional hotel is based on the Braddock. Once there, Jones looks out into the lobby of the hotel and sees a black soldier in uniform, who reminds him of Sam, confronting a white police officer. He witnesses the event that provokes the Harlem Riot. Shortly thereafter, he finds himself in the crowd.

  Here Petry’s story becomes the story of the crowd, and Jones merely our touchstone to the larger entity. As the crowd continues to move, Jones turns to spot a young thin girl and realizes it’s Annie May holding a nude mannequin by the waist and hurtling it through the air. Looking at Annie May, “He felt now that for the first time he understood her. She had never had anything but badly paying jobs working for young white women who probably despised her. She was like Sam on that bus in Georgia. She didn’t want just the nigger end of things.” In darkness and confusion, Jones identifies with Annie May and he abolishes the distinction he had been making between them—between the “good” Sam and the “bad” Annie May. Similar fates awaited both of them; neither of them had any future. Both of them are only guilty of trying to assert their dignity, of standing defiantly in the face of old racist practices that confront them on a daily basis. Petry makes the ordinary, anonymous participants of the Harlem riots the central figures of literary fiction. This is her major contribution as an artist: to give voice and complexity to those people who remain nameless in official accounts. She portrays their humanity, their frustrations, their anger and fear. She gives them names. Many people wrote about the riots. Few wrote about the rioters with such compassion and detail.

  Young men and women like Sam and Annie May represented a new generation of African Americans. They were unwilling to tolerate second-class citizenship, unwilling to wait for the slow process of incremental change. Annie May is a fictional representative of the women described by a New York Times article that appeared on August 3, 1943, entitled “500 Are Arraigned in Harlem Looting: 100 Women Among Prisoners Crowding Courts After Night Disorders.” The story’s first line reads: “More than 500 prisoners, among them 100 women, many of them carrying the loot they had at the time of their arrest, were arraigned during the day and evening yesterday. . . . Many of the defendants were youths. Several wore zoot suits.” Records from the Harlem Magistrate’s Office do show that more young women, like Hughes’s Margie Polite, were arrested for “disorderly conduct” on the night of the riot than on any other night preceding or following it—however, I have not been able to locate a record of the 100 women reported arrested by the Times. Perhaps they were arraigned in different magistrates’ offices, but they seem to have quietly disappeared into the Harlem night.44

  Police arrest young women during the riots in Harlem, 1943. Copyright Brown Brothers, Sterling, Pennsylvania.

  Although Petry wrote “In Darkness and Confusion” just after the riot, she could not find a publisher for it until 1946. She initially submitted it to The Crisis, a journal that had previously published her fiction. However, the editor, James Ivy, rejected it because of the language, which he encouraged her to keep while she sought other venues for publication.45

  Harlem would not immediately recover from the riot. A number of businesses never reopened. Harlem nightlife especially took a hit: fewer white New Yorkers were now willing to risk a trip to Harlem’s famed nightclubs and ballrooms. Finally and most importantly, many members of the black middle class also began a quiet exodus to the outer boroughs.

  Petry lived in Harlem for only a few years after the riots. Sometime after George’s return from the army, the couple relocated to Bronx Park East. Many middle-class African Americans began to leave, relocating, like the Petrys, to the Bronx, or to Queens. Petry would continue to write, and she still set many of her stories in Harlem, but her next two novels would be set in New England.

  Early critics considered Petry part of the Richard Wright school of naturalist black fiction—a designation she deeply resented. Wright was the towering black literary figure of the time, and the success of his work certainly created the audience and market that would read Petry’s work. He never served as her mentor, and he never seems to have read her work for publishing houses, as he did Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry. Petry later noted that while she read and admired Wright, Baldwin, and especially Ellison, she had never met any of them. She was part of a group of writers whose reach went beyond that of Wright. Petry, like Chicago’s Gwendolyn Brooks, found inspiration in the lives of ordinary working-class black people, especially migrants and women. To modernist, urban landscapes, these writers added black women as walkers of the city.46

  Petry’s introduction of figures like Lutie and the “too-too girls” helped to give voice to black women who remained invisible to much of American society. As such, her fictional characters might join the sound of the young Dinah Washington in giving us a more textured understanding of the time. The epitome of the too-too girl, singer Dinah Washington—Miss D—was a child of the Great Migration and the Great Depression. D
eeply steeped in gospel, she was first dubbed a blues singer and then a rhythm and blues pioneer. She was both and more. She was a capable interpreter of the blues, country and western, pop tunes, and jazz standards. She joined the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and eventually made Harlem her home. Like Petry with her “too-too girls,” Washington exploded beyond genre and category. Hers was a sexually confident, insistent, and bold voice. In her music and her style, Washington captured the energy, the spirit, and the setting that animate Petry’s fiction.

  Even though she left Harlem soon after the war ended, Petry’s most prolific decade was clearly the result of her deep involvement in and engagement with the neighborhood. Her literary celebrity soared with the publication of The Street. When her essay “The Novel as Social Criticism” appeared in the Writer’s Book, she was published alongside the likes of W. H. Auden, Pearl S. Buck, and Lionel Trilling. Translations of The Street appeared in a number of languages including Spanish. The interest of foreign readers is evidence of Petry’s widespread literary significance during this time. Petry recalled, “I became famous, a celebrity, almost overnight.” However, she grew to disdain the fame she’d acquired. “After the publication of The Street,” she said, “I began to feel as though I were public property. I was beleaguered by all the hoopla, the interviews, the invitations to speak.” She left New York, and, to a certain degree, the center of her literary life, when she and George returned to Old Saybrook in 1948. There they purchased an old sea captain’s house, built in 1790. Petry gave birth to her only child, a beautiful baby girl named Elisabeth, the following year. Petry would live, write, and raise her daughter in Old Saybrook until her death in 1997.47