Miss Muriel, and Other Stories by Ann Petry
"Miss Muriel, and Other Stories" by Ann Petry is a compelling collection that spans several decades of the author's literary career, focusing on the deep psychological impacts of racism. The stories explore the complexities of identity, race relations, and the intricacies of human emotions within the African American experience. One of the standout tales, "Like a Winding Sheet," delves into the effects of systemic racism on personal relationships, illustrating a man's tragic response to societal oppression. Petry's narrative often incorporates historical events, as seen in "In Darkness and Confusion," which fictionalizes the 1943 Harlem riot and the protagonist's emotional turmoil.
The collection features characters that reflect the lives of black professionals, navigating the challenges of racial prejudice while striving to maintain their dignity and identity. Themes of moral conflict and complicity are highlighted in stories like "The Witness," where a retired professor confronts the harsh realities of his societal position. Through a blend of poignant storytelling and sharp social critique, Petry addresses the burdens of racial expectations and the quest for authentic self-expression. Overall, "Miss Muriel, and Other Stories" serves as a profound exploration of the struggles faced by African Americans, weaving a narrative that resonates with both historical and contemporary issues of race.
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Miss Muriel, and Other Stories by Ann Petry
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1971
Type of work: Short stories
The Work
The pieces in this volume range over several decades of Petry’s career and provide a compact introduction to her imaginative concerns, chief among them racism’s psychological consequences. In the prize-winning story “Like a Winding Sheet,” a husband’s impotence before the racist assaults he sees all around him makes him respond to his wife’s affectionate teasing with the beating he is forbidden to direct at his real oppressors. His actions lay bare the starkness of the struggle between male and female in Petry’s world and the sobering betrayals that occur in it.
“In Darkness and Confusion,” a meditation on the Harlem riot of 1943, fictionalizes a historical event. The story’s protagonist, William Jones, a man who has worked hard to secure a better life for his son, witnesses the killing of a black soldier and erupts into a violence that expresses his grief and rage; Petry assigns Jones responsibility for leading the first mobs.
In “Miss Muriel” and “The New Mirror,” Petry creates a black family much like her own—the Layens are professionals who own the pharmacy in a small New England town. The adolescent girl who narrates these tales speaks of “the training in issues of race” she has received over the years, not only through casual bigotries but also through the painful self-consciousness of respectable people like her parents, whose behavior is a continual refutation of cultural stereotypes. The child learns to use the codes by which the black middle class shields itself from white contempt, and she learns as well the burden of always acting with an eye on the reputation of “the Race”: “all of us people with this dark skin must help hold the black island inviolate.”
Against the most aggressive forms of white hatred, however, there is no defense except a temporary erasure of one’s humanity. “The Witness” presents the case of a retired black college professor who takes a high school teaching position in a northern white community. Called upon to assist the local pastor in counseling delinquent adolescents, he finds himself their prey out in the world as they kidnap him and force him to watch their sexual abuse of a young white woman. Having at one point coerced him to place his hand on the girl, they effectively blackmail him into complicit silence about their crime. His exemplary life and professional stature cannot protect him, and he bitterly describes himself as “another poor scared black bastard who was a witness.”
In “The Necessary Knocking on the Door,” a participant at a conference about Christianity finds herself unable to master her dislike for a white woman dying in the hotel room across the hall from hers—a woman who had earlier in the day refused to be seated next to a “nigger.” In these stories, Petry vividly captures the spiritual anguish of discovering that one’s own grievances can weaken, rather than strengthen, one’s moral courage.
Petry’s handling of white perspectives on racism is more unyielding. For example, the absurdities into which segregationist practices lead multiracial societies are lampooned in “The Bones of Louella Brown,” wherein the most prestigious family in Massachusetts finds its plans to build a chapel for its deceased members compromised when an undertaker’s assistant confuses the bones of an African American maid and the sole noblewoman in the clan.
Other stories in the collection evoke the mysterious private centers of grief hidden in the human heart: “Olaf and His Girl Friend” and “Solo on the Drums” show Petry’s interest in African American music as an exquisite, untranslatable evocation of pain. “Mother Africa” introduces Emanuel Turner, a junk dealer who acquires the huge sculpture of a female nude that a wealthy white woman is discarding. Convinced that the figure is a mythic evocation of Africa itself, he resents the prudish efforts of others to clothe it, just as missionaries had once insulted his ancestors. Thus he is stunned to learn that this dark madonna is not a black woman at all but a white woman—the oxidation of the metal had misled him. By parodying the assumed black male obsession with white women, Petry implies that the real hunger at work in the story is for authentic enunciation of the African American experience, a hunger left unmet as Turner hurriedly rushes to sell the piece for scrap.
Bibliography
Bell, Bernard. “Ann Petry’s Demythologizing of American Culture and Afro-American Character.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.
Clark, Keith. “A Distaff Dream Deferred? Ann Petry and the Art of Subversion.” African-American Review 26 (Fall, 1992): 495-505.
Ervin, Hazel Arnett, and Hilary Holladay, eds. Ann Petry’s Short Fiction: Critical Essays. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004.
Gross, Theodore. “Ann Petry: The Novelist as Social Critic.” In Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel Since 1945, edited by A. Robert Lee. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1980.
Hernton, Calvin. “The Significance of Ann Petry.” In The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers. New York: Doubleday, 1987.
Holladay, Hilary. Ann Petry. New York: Twayne, 1996.
Petry, Ann. “A MELUS Interview: Ann Petry—The New England Connection.” Interview by Mark Wilson. MELUS 15 (Summer, 1988): 71-84.
Washington, Gladys. “A World Made Cunningly: A Closer Look at Ann Petry’s Short Fiction.” College Language Association Journal 30 (September, 1986): 14-29.