Ann Petry

by Ann Petry

  She caught her breath, appalled by the changes that had taken place deep inside her. During this last week she had lost part of herself, irretrievably lost the part of herself that had been composed of honor and integrity, lost the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. Not lost it. It had been seeping away ever since she read those words: What’s in the bundle, lady? Old clothes for the Salvation Army.

  In the sitting room, she sat down on the Victorian sofa, put on her glasses, and began to read the Chronicle, and finally laid it aside, because no matter what she read, she kept seeing that front page picture of Mrs. Treadway sitting on the side of the road, near the dock, surrounded by policemen, her son-in-law beside her; kept seeing that signed statement of Mrs. Treadway’s: “We were helping the law. Camilo was going to pieces, and we had to do something. We didn’t mean to harm the Negro. We thought if he confessed it would put a stop to those terrible stories about Camilo. Then when the Negro confessed, Bunny seemed to go out of his mind, and he shot him.”

  We didn’t mean to harm the Negro, Abbie thought. The Negro confessed. The Negro.

  To them, all of them, he’s the Negro. And to me—

  She could remember when he was the most important player on the football team at Monmouth High. Though she was proud of his ability, pleased at the acclaim he received, she had never gone to watch him play. She’d always been too busy. Finally he persuaded her to attend one of the games.

  That morning, before he left for school, he took a pencil and a piece of paper, and drew a rough diagram. “See,” he said, “these are the teams, here in the center of the field, eleven men on each side—”

  Men, her mind had echoed the word. Men. Link was only fifteen. True, his shoulders were broad, and he was taller than she, but he was a boy. His bones not really hardened yet. When he finished talking she said, “Is that all there is to it? Just running with a ball?”

  He had seemed disconcerted. “I suppose so. It really isn’t quite that simple. But you’ll see.” Before he left the house he said, “I wear number twenty-one. That’s how you’ll know me.”

  She had smiled, thinking that she would know him anywhere, with or without a number. Yet that afternoon, when the boys ran out on the field she couldn’t tell one from another. The padded pants and the helmets made them look exactly alike. She wouldn’t have known which of them was Link if it hadn’t been for that big printed number on his back.

  When the game started, she was dismayed by its roughness. The players were always piling up in mounds, their arms and legs every which way. She wondered if they didn’t sometimes tug at a leg or try to move an arm and then discover that it was another boy’s arm or leg.

  Toward the end of the half they piled up again—a mass of seemingly headless bodies, the arms and legs askew. When they struggled to their feet, she saw that Number Twenty-One was flat on the ground, not moving. Her first thought was, I knew this was going to happen, I knew it. Number Twenty-One can’t move. Number Twenty-One is Link.

  She said, “I’ll stop the game.” Said it out loud. The woman sitting next to her looked at her, in surprise.

  Link got to his feet, slowly, and stood up, shaking his head back and forth, leaned over and felt one of his knees. A short stout man came waddling from the sidelines, carrying a pail, and a towel, and what looked to be a sponge, and he poked at Link, prodding him here and there, and made him take off his helmet and Link kept waving him away. There was a little group of players around Link, and then they all seemed to wave their arms at once, and a whistle blew and they were running back and forth on the field again, running headlong into each other, piling up in those horrid mounds, arms and legs twisted.

  Number Twenty-One seemed to be all right. He ran and fell down and got up. Her mind was full of thoughts of concussion, of fractured skulls and cracked ribs and broken legs and elbows, and she had found herself rhyming again: Twenty-One is my only son. Son and one. Over and over.

  Then they all seemed to move faster, to fall down oftener, to run into each other with greater violence, and suddenly Number Twenty-One had the ball, and was running down the field, evading those other fastmoving figures. Her heart started hammering in her chest, as though she were running with him, and she was filled with pride, at the sight of that swiftfooted strong young figure moving so fleetly across the green field. She didn’t know enough about the game to know exactly what he was doing, but all around her people were standing up, shouting, calling out his name, chanting his name, “Link! Link! Link!” It was a deep-throated roar that increased her own excitement, made her breath catch in her throat, as though she were the one going swiftly down the length of the playing field, while a great crowd cheered her on.

  Then from somewhere in the back of the stadium, an angry voice rang out, “Get the nigger! Get the nigger!”

  She sat down, suddenly, on the hard concrete seat, sat down without ever having been aware that she had been standing, and the abruptness with which she sat jarred her entire body. She sat there, trembling, thinking, I will never let him play football again. Never.

  When she left the stadium she went to see Frances, told her about Link’s being knocked down, about that loud furious voice, calling, Get the nigger, get the nigger, told her that Link could not play football any more.

  Frances had said, “Nonsense. You’re not to say a word about it. You may have forgotten that he was an orphan adopted by people who were strangers. But he hasn’t forgotten it. And you may have forgotten that you rejected him, completely, totally, when the Major died. But he hasn’t forgotten it. He never will. Football is good for him. Every time he hears a crowd of people roar their approval of him it helps him build up a reserve of belief in himself as a person. As for the word nigger—”

  It was then that Frances had told her, for the first time, that story about her father’s death, and why she was never again the least bit disturbed when she heard someone use the word nigger.

  And now she thought irritably, That’s fine. For Frances. It doesn’t help me a bit. Link and that girl, girl with pale yellow hair, girl here with him so often that she left the smell of her perfume in my house. Link running down a football field, carrying a ball, eluding all the other strong young figures. Link walking down Dumble Street with her, on Saturday mornings, carrying her market basket, swinging it back and forth, looking up at her. Adoration, devotion in the young face, in the eyes.

  He was in love with that girl. In love with her—

  She got up, put on her hat, her coat. She was going to the police. She was going to tell them that she believed the girl was in danger. They would not believe her over there at the Franklin Avenue Police Station. But if she used her most emphatic manner, some one of those policemen would be sufficiently impressed to suggest that special guards be assigned to that blond girl.

  She was ready to leave, when J. C. Powther sidled into the room. She had not seen him since the day of the funeral, the day he had demolished the Major’s hat.

  He stared at her then put his thumb in his mouth, took it out, said, “You goin’ out, Missus Crunch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kin I go with you?”

  “No. You run along upstairs.”

  “Ain’t nobody home but Powther. He’s just settin’ around holdin’ on his head. Mamie told him it would drive a body crazy if they had to keep lookin’ at him settin’ around holdin’ on his head like that. ’N she went out. ’N then Kelly and Shapiro went out. That’s why they’s nobody home. Kin I go with you?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “You run along now—”

  She heard an echo out of the past, heard Frances’ voice saying, Run along now, Link, run along and play, and saw that small desolate figure leave the room, slowly, reluctantly, and tried to call him back and could not form the words, could only huddle under that shawl with Frances and weep because the Major was dead.

  “All righ
t,” she said, and patted J.C.’s shoulder. “You can come with me.” Though she couldn’t imagine what they would think at the police station when she arrived with this bulletheaded little boy by the hand.

  “Get your hat and coat. But you go to the bathroom first. You go right now,” she said. Because he was wiggling, standing first on one scuffed brown shoe and then on the other, holding his knees together.

  “Where we goin’?” he asked suspiciously. “Ain’t they got no wee-wee chairs dere?”

  “I really don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never been inside a police station before.”

  Other Writings

  The Great Secret

  * * *

  I HAVE, to my continuing surprise, written two novels. They have both been published. This surprises me because I wanted to be a writer of short stories. I wrote short stories for more years than I care to remember. And also for more years than I care to remember the stories did not sell. I have collected enough rejection slips to paper any fair-sized room.

  Finally, I sold a story. When the story was published I received a letter from Houghton Mifflin Company asking if I were working on a novel. I was not. And though the thought of writing a novel, the hours of concentrated work which it would involve, frightened me, I began writing one.

  While I was struggling with this first novel, The Street, I came to believe that there must be some conjuring trick by which a novel is produced—a rabbit-out-of-hat stunt which the published novelist has somehow mastered and which he hugs close to his breast for fear his secret may be snatched away from him.

  It was during this period that one of my friends, perhaps by accident, perhaps as part of a foreordained design, gave me a copy of Anthony Trollope’s autobiography—which is called, simply An Autobiography. It was Trollope who revealed the great secret, in a passage which would, I think, have inspired Dickens’ Fat Boy had someone read it to him:

  I always had a pen in my hand, whether crossing the seas, or fighting with American officials, or tramping about the streets of Beverley. I could do a little, and generally more than a little. I had long since convinced myself that in such work as mine, the great secret consisted in acknowledging myself to be bound to rules of labor similar to those which an artisan or a mechanic is forced to obey. A shoemaker when he has finished one pair of shoes does not sit down and contemplate his work in idle satisfaction. “There is my pair of shoes finished at last! What a pair of shoes it is!” The shoemaker who so indulged himself would be without wages half his time.

  It seemed to me that the first rule of labor which governs an artisan or a mechanic is that he has mastered his trade; and mastered the tools of his trade. And so, while in the process of writing a novel, I tried, and I am still trying, to master the tools of the novelist’s trade. I decided that the tools were, roughly: words; a better-than-average knowledge of people; and a first-class story-telling technique—this phrase to include plot, characterization, style, theme, etc.

  The study of words would, of course, be a lifetime project. I still read a great deal of poetry because it is the most enjoyable way in which to sharpen one’s awareness of words, to quicken one’s sense of rhythm. I found three endlessly fascinating books which deal with words. There are many others but these were particularly useful: Fowler’s Modern English Usage, H. L. Mencken’s The American Language, Ivor Brown’s A Word in Your Ear and Just Another Word.

  I had been an avid reader of novels for a good many years. But I stopped reading for pleasure and began to study them. If a passage in Dickens made me laugh, I went back to it again and again until I knew why I had laughed; whether it was the character, the situation, the dialogue which seemed so funny. I dissected plots, analyzed style and emotional effects. I did this because I was convinced that no matter what else a novel might do, it must tell a story, preferably a believable one, if it was to hold the reader’s attention.

  I dissected plays, too. For the playwright is confronted by a task far more difficult than that of the novelist. He must tell his story solely in terms of what his characters say and what they do; and he performs this miracle inside the very rigid framework of a stage.

  Though I was, at the time, writing a novel and learning a good deal in the process, I began to doubt the value of the advice which is so often given to beginners: write about what you know. I think this should be qualified so that it goes something like this: first find out what you know, find out what it means, and then set your imagination to work on it, transforming it, dramatizing it.

  If you look at this piece of advice (write about what you know) in terms of the mechanic who has mastered his trade, the mechanic who supposedly works always within the limited area of his mechanical knowledge, you will see that it is a half-truth. A mechanic often finds himself confronted by a problem which he can solve only if he uses his imagination—for the answer lies outside his experience, outside his range of observation.

  This same thing happens to writers. Certainly the historical novelist does not write about what he knows—if “know” means first-hand observation or experience. He writes about places he has not seen, about an era in which he did not live; and yet he manages, if he is expert enough, to recreate a believable 17th century France or Spain, or England.

  Then, too, many a man has turned out a first-class novel dealing with the great emotional peaks in a woman’s life—her loves, her hates, and her final tragic destiny. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are excellent examples. Can it honestly be said that Tolstoy and Flaubert, who were men, were writing about what they knew when they put on paper the workings of a woman’s mind?

  It is true, of course, that one can do a better job of getting the feel of a place, a small town or a big city, into a novel if one has actually lived there—the sound of the subway starting and stopping, the cattle-like stampede of people at Times Square, at Penn Station, the look of a country road in the snow, the precise pattern of trees against a winter sky. These things, yes. But there would be more novelists in the world if the first law of writing were simply to write about that which one knows.

  And so I came to the conclusion that I could spend the rest of my life writing about what I knew and yet when the book was finished no one would want to read it. I had first to learn how to tell a long story; I had to deepen my understanding of people and their motives; and finally I had to cultivate my imagination, set it to work on what I “knew.” Because I would frequently have to write about many things that I had neither experienced nor observed, it was up to me to start acquiring a better-than-average knowledge of psychology, of anthropology, of sociology.

  Despite all my reading and study I still did not know how to begin writing a novel. It seemed far more complicated than beginning a short story. And all I had to start with was an idea, an idea that came from a newspaper clipping. I think I still have the clipping somewhere. It was a brief item about a janitor in a Harlem tenement who had been arrested for teaching an eight-year-old boy to steal.

  Finally I decided to use the same procedure that I used in writing a short story; and that was to put down on paper everything that occurred to me about the plot, the theme, the setting, the characters. I did this in longhand. In the process the little boy became Bub of The Street and the janitor became Jones. This did not happen all at once—their birth was a slow, uncertain process.

  I pieced together a story about them, set it down in rough chronological order, still in longhand. The next step was to type it, adding more information as I went along, expanding scenes, strengthening the plot.

  Once I had it typed, the whole story, or at least as much of it as I knew at the time, I divided it into chapters; and then typed these chapters on yellow sheets. This meant I now had the skeleton of a book to work with. I twisted the chapters around, changed their order, shortened some, lengthened others, always with the idea of trying to carry the reader on from one page to the next. I rewrote these chapters again and
again, working on the dialogue, the characters, tightening the plot, trying to strengthen the story line.

  Some of the chapters were rewritten as many as seven times—only one of them was left unchanged. By that time I had a book which had been written as well as I knew how to write it, tested and fought with every step of the way. Then I rewrote it again. This time I tried to add the something more—which was really a matter of fitting the style of the writing to the material. In The Street I wanted to achieve a swift-moving, almost passionate style in order to heighten the story of Lutie Johnson and her small son, Bub.

  In Country Place I tried to underwrite, if there is such a word for writing, a word which corresponds to underplaying in the theatre. Despite the obvious violence of the storm, and the violent action of some of the characters, I tried to get into the style something of the surface quiet of a small country town—a slowness of tempo which I hoped the reader would absorb almost unconsciously.

  But to get back to Trollope and his great secret. He said that he found he could always “do a little.” That is, of course, the secret of accomplishing any task. But I found it extremely difficult to keep on working on that first book, hour after hour, day after day. I was always finding something else to do. I can still find any number of perfectly valid reasons for not writing, today, or tomorrow, or the next day.

  And so I began using a clock as taskmaster. I decided that if I were working for someone else there would be no question about the number of hours I put in; no question about when I showed up for work. I placed a clock where I could see it. The hands of the clock shamed me into working, steadily, with few pauses for daydreaming; though I must confess that I still, on occasion, cheat like a schoolboy.