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Buried alive: gothic homelessness, black women's sexuality, and death in Ann Petry's The Street

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Evie Shockley

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The two gothic conventions that Petry has most emphasized in Lutie's narrative come together in this closing chapter. Lutie realizes that the haunting silence occupies Boots's apartment, too, despite its spacious, elegantly appointed rooms; that Junto can cross this threshold at will, just as easily as he can enter her dismal little dwelling, which he in fact owns. The silence represents the power of wealth, of manhood, of whiteness: the power to achieve the American Dream that Lutie does not have and cannot access without giving up her sexual virtue. (28) That claim to a "properly" asexual identity has become increasingly valuable to Lutie as her performance of domesticity has become decreasingly normative in so many other uncontrollable ways. Her performance of asexuality is all that distinguishes her, according to the ideological rhetoric, from Jones, Mrs. Hedges, and all the others living (dead) in Harlem. And this terrifying silence that is Junto threatens to strip that performance away from her: "All the time she was thinking, Junto has a brick in his hand. Just one brick. The final one needed to complete the wall that had been building up around her for years, and when that one last brick was shoved in place, she would be completely walled in" (423). In other words, Lutie would be permanently buried alive--not just her sexuality, but all of her (which is to say, Bub, too), locked into a different wing of the same ideological prison in which her desires had been buried for so long. To obtain the money she needed to save her son from the street, she would have to sacrifice her already-damaged performance of idealized womanhood and play the stereotypical role of the "black woman"--by definition, in this schema, a role of sexual availability.

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Though Junto agrees to leave, when faced with her enraged refusal to accept his proposal, Boots promises him that upon his return he will find a cooperative Lutie awaiting him. Boots plans to rape her in the interim. His aggression pushes Lutie to make a choice: she can sacrifice her self for her son, or she can sacrifice her son for her self. Yet Lutie does not consciously choose: the narrative deals at length with the way Boots is reduced in her mind to nothing more than an "anonymous" outlet for her rage against all kinds of societal inequities (429-30). But Petry, as author, makes her doppelganger's choice for her, and she chooses to have Lutie continue to fight. Barrett describes Lutie's most definitive, excessive action--murdering Boots to protect herself against rape, cudgeling his head until it is bloody and deformed--as "her most violent effort to resist [the] imagined legitimacy" of the inscription "of the sign--'whore'--... on the bodies of African American women" (122). But for Lutie, self-preservation is self-destruction. Boots dies, and with him dies her dream of domesticity, despite the continuing sanctity of her body. What she has not eradicated, of course, is Junto, the novel's representative of the powerful people who benefit from all of the ideological contradictions that combine to destroy the disempowered like Lutie (and even Boots, who is no innocent and has a good deal of masculine and economic power vis-a-vis Lutie, but who unarguably takes the fall for Junto). Before Lutie can flee for Chicago, she must cross a room that is "alive with silence--deepening pools of an ominous silence" (433). This gothic omen apprises us that Lutie will find no room in Chicago large and loud enough to drown out the rhetoric of domestic ideology, US society's self-contradictory mantra for maintaining a status quo that structures so forcefully the identities of its citizens.

Buried alive: gothic homelessness, black women's sexuality, and death in Ann Petry's The Street

African American Review, Fall, 2006 by Evie Shockley

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