SOURCE: “Reading Ann Petry's The Narrows into Black Tradition,” in Recovering Writers/Recovering Texts, edited by Dolan Hubbard, University of Tennessee Press, 1997, pp. 116–127.

In the following essay, a black feminist critic urges a re-evaluation of Petry's The Narrows, a novel the critic thinks has been underrated by male critics since the 1950s.

First the conundrum: Why have critics almost unanimously agreed that Petry's The Narrows (1953) is her best work but largely ignored it and critically engaged The Street (1946)?¹ One answer is that The Narrows neither fits comfortably in a genre identified with a prominent black male writer nor wore well certain labels ascribed to it. Published just seven years after The Street, Petry's novel received the same disregard, misunderstanding, and partial dismissal as other fiction by black women in the 1950s.² That the novel defied the protest formula and decentered the questing black male undoubtedly figured in its...