The Narrows by Ann Petry

First published: 1953

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1930’s to the early 1950’s

Locale: Monmouth, Connecticut

Principal Characters:

• Lincoln (Link) Williams, a Dartmouth graduate and bartender at the Last Chance Saloon, the adopted son of Abbie Crunch
• Abigail (Abbie) Crunch, a seventy-year-old widow who prides herself on her New England Puritanism, immaculate appearance, and racial piety
• Camilla Treadway Sheffield, the internationally known heiress to the Treadway Munitions Company, who becomes Link’s lover
• Bill Hod, the owner of the Last Chance Saloon, who becomes a father figure to Link
• Frances Jackson, a successful black undertaker and Abbie’s best friend

The Novel

The Narrows takes place in Monmouth, Connecticut, and tells the story of an interracial love affair between Lincoln (Link) Williams, a twenty-six-year-old black man, and Camilla Treadway Sheffield, the beautiful wife of Captain Bunny Sheffield, heiress to the Treadway Munitions Company, and daughter of Monmouth’s most prominent white family. The complexity of the novel, however, makes it more than a novel of romance. Through an omniscient third-person narrator, flashbacks, introspective monologues, and memories, Petry discusses the impact of racism on the lives of her characters. Link Williams, the adopted son of Abbie Crunch and Theodore Crunch—known as the Major—was happy with his life until one Saturday afternoon when he was eight years old. The Major, looking seriously ill, had been sent home by Bill Hod. The Major, however, smelled of whiskey, and because Abbie had a strong aversion to drinking, she did not listen to Bill’s warning to get the Major a doctor soon. The Major had a stroke and died two days later. Abbie, overwhelmed with guilt, blames herself for her husband’s death. In her deep grief, she forgets Link’s existence. Link tries to get Abbie’s attention during and after the Major’s death, but he fails. Frances, who is there to comfort Abbie, keeps telling Link to run along and play for fear he will disturb his mother. Link is too young to survive this double tragedy: It seems that he has lost both father and mother at once. He feels alone, abandoned, and betrayed. He has to find something or someone to make up for this great loss. Link leaves the silent, dark, and grief-filled house. His sees Bill standing in front of his saloon across the street, and he gets food, shelter, and a job at the Last Chance Saloon. He stays there for three months; it takes Abbie that long to notice his absence. When she and Frances finally go to the Last Chance to claim Link, he refuses to go home with them. It is only after Frances and Bill work out an arrangement to allow Link to go on working at the saloon that Link agrees to go home with Abbie, but things will never be the same again. Now Link has two rival authority figures in his life: Abbie and Bill. Link grows up amid conflicting views of black people. Abbie, African American herself, is always finding fault with other blacks; the Major, on the other hand, enjoys telling stories about his family, the “swamp niggers.” At the Last Chance, Bill and Weak Knees, the cook, try hard to instill racial pride in Link; Link’s high-school history teacher, a white person, encourages him to read more about slavery in America so that he will not be ashamed of being black. Link goes on to Dartmouth College to major in history, and he is graduated with a Phi Beta Kappa key four years later. Link is in the process of researching a book on the history of slavery in the United States when he meets Camilla, who is white, on a foggy night at the dock in the Narrows. Despite the taboo against interracial relationships, the two fall in love. The society in which they live dooms their romance. Link is accused of rape by Camilla when he tries to talk her out of their poisoned relationship. In a desperate act to save their reputations, Mrs. Treadway and Captain Sheffield, Camilla’s mother and husband, kidnap Link and murder him. Mrs. Treadway is stopped by the police when she tries to dump Link’s body in the river.

The Characters

The character of Link Williams is presented through his relationships with other characters in the novel. Link has suffered many scares that are detrimental to his psychological development. At the age of eight, Link is rejected by Abbie—his adoptive mother and the center of his boyhood—who, in her grief and guilt over the recent death of her husband, has completely forgotten Link’s existence. In elementary school, Link is embarrassed by his teacher, who assigns him the role of Sambo in a class presentation. When Link is sixteen, Bill Hod—who has been a surrogate father to Link—betrays his trust and love by almost killing Link the first time Link disobeys him. When he is twenty-six, Link is betrayed by Camilla when he decides to end their relationship. Ambivalence marks all three relationships: Link’s feelings toward Abbie, Bill, and Camilla mix love and hate, happiness and suffering, gratification and disappointment. Abbie evokes the sympathy as well as the intolerance of the reader. Her disdain for black people, her embrace of white ideologies, and her adoption of aristocratic values greatly endanger Link’s psychological well-being, indirectly cause the Major’s death, and prevent her from enjoying life and loving Link. The author uses Abbie as an example to show that the internalization of the oppressor’s values will bring only confusion and self-destruction. Still, Abbie proves that she is able to change. At the end of the novel, she transcends her racial bias and the painful loss over the death of Link to protect Camilla. Camilla is a beautiful and wealthy young woman, loving at times but murderous when her authority is challenged. She is a spoiled child who must have her own way. She is so rich that she acts as if she owned the world, and Link is in many respects simply another one of her possessions. When Link ceases to be a kept man, Camilla is outraged; she simply has to destroy him. Though she and Link have shared a love that seems to have crossed the color line, Camilla is in no position to abandon her privileged status. Her eventual betrayal of Link shows her to be a product and victim of a racist society. Bill Hod is a complex character who cannot be defined simply as either “good guy” or “bad guy.” He has his dark side: He operates whorehouses, engages in smuggling illegal Chinese immigrants, has an affair with a married woman, and threatens to cripple Link if he ever disobeys him. On the other hand, he knows how to survive a racist world with body and soul intact. Above all, he has a strong sense of racial pride. He has no patience with Abbie’s sense of racial inferiority and takes responsibility for teaching Link about black people: their history, their beauty, and their cultural heritage. Frances Jackson is a woman with a man’s build and mind. She is thin and tall, and she works in a profession that was traditionally a man’s: undertaking. Being a successful entrepreneur, Frances is able to escape the daily humiliations of the poor and working-class blacks. She has been instrumental in nursing Abbie back to a normal life after the Major’s death. Like Abbie, though, Frances has played her own role in miseducating Link about African Americans. She has been hardened by the racial discriminations she encountered when growing up. She is no longer bothered by the word “nigger.” This indifferent attitude is not what Link needs in a racially hostile society.

Critical Context

The Narrows, Ann Petry’s third work of long fiction, is also her most complex one. Published seven years after her first book, The Street (1946), The Narrows has largely been neglected by critics and overshadowed by the success of her first novel. Both books are about racial themes and the impact of racism on the lives of her black people. Her second novel, Country Place (1947), on the other hand, deals with the devastating effects of World War II on the social and moral structures of a small New England town.

Petry is often set apart from black writers who are from the Deep South or from the black communities in the North. To some, her growing up in a small, predominantly white Northern town seems to have disqualified her to write about the experiences of black people. The Narrows, however, is very much a novel about black people’s experience in America; it is about the development of Link Williams, a black youth, and his relationships with his family and the black community. The book is also concerned with the past: Link, a history major whose ambition is to write a book on American slavery, knows that the cause of his imminent execution by the Treadways reaches back to the first shipment of enslaved Africans that landed in Jamestown in 1619. In this respect, Petry has joined Zora Neale Hurston as a model for a later generation of black women writers—Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor, to name just a few—in understanding the historical context of slavery in America and its legacy to the American people as a whole. Besides writing novels, Ann Petry wrote several historical books for young readers, including The Drugstore Cat (1949), Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad (1955), Tituba of Salem Village (1964), and Legends of the Saints (1970). Her collection of short stories entitled Miss Muriel and Other Stories (1971) demonstrates her remarkable versatility.

Bibliography

Bell, Bernard W. “Ann Petry’s Demythologizing of American Culture and Afro-American Character.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and the Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Discusses the ways in which Petry’s portrayal of characters in her fiction, especially The Narrows, “debunks” certain myths in American society. Innocence and virtue are not always indigenous to the small-town environment.

Bontemps, Arna. “The Line.” Saturday Review 36 (August 22, 1953): 11. Bontemps concedes that Petry’s The Narrows is “a novel about Negroes by a Negro novelist and concerned . . . with racial conflict.” This initial critical comment on the novel has served as a point of departure for later interpretations of this complex work.

Ervin, Hazel A. Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993. A comprehensive compilation of reviews, analytical articles, and interviews with Petry. A brief introductory essay is followed by Ervin’s annotations of the chronological list of primary and secondary sources. A valuable reference for studying Petry’s work.

Gates, Henry Louis, ed. Ann Petry: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad Press, 1998. This collection of essays by respected scholars of African American literature presents an illuminating overall critical view of Petry’s life and work. Offers an in-depth analysis of The Narrows.

Hernton, Calvin C. The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers. New York: Anchor Press, 1987. Hernton devotes a chapter to Petry, whom he praises as an important pioneer.

Holladay, Hilary. Ann Petry. New York: Twayne, 1996. This first book-length critical study of Petry’s work examines The Narrows, as well as her other two novels and short-story collection. Holladay’s careful critical analysis of Petry’s works demonstrates the modernist aesthetic Petry’s narratives share with the fiction of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.

McDowell, Margaret. “The Narrows: A Fuller View of Ann Petry.” Black American Literature Forum 14 (1980): 135-141. Discusses The Narrows as one of Petry’s most accomplished novels, focusing upon the skill with which the author interweaves character, theme, and symbol in the narrative.

McKay, Nellie Y. “Ann Petry’s The Street and The Narrows: A Study of the Influence of Class, Race, and Gender on Afro-American Women’s Lives.” In Women and War: The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930’s to the 1950’s, edited by Maria Diedrich and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung. New York: Berg, 1990. From a feminist perspective, this essay takes a critical look at how class, gender, and race affect the lives of black people in general and black women in particular.

Washington, Mary Helen, ed. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987. Examines Petry’s development of female characters in her novels, with special attention to the character of Mamie Powther in The Narrows.

Weir, Sybil. “The Narrows: A Black New England Novel.” Studies in American Fiction 15, no. 1 (Spring, 1987): 81-93. Examines The Narrows in light of the New England traditions that influence character development, focusing especially on the character of Abbie Crunch. Petry’s novel reflects what Nathaniel Hawthorne saw as the chain of “dark necessity” from which people can rarely, if ever, extricate themselves.

Wilson, Mark. “A MELUS Interview: Ann Petry—The New England Connection.” MELUS 15 (Summer, 1988): 71-84. Recalling the racial discrimination that she and her family encountered in their hometown, Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Petry remarks that she has difficulty calling herself a New Englander. Her comments on her life and work in general and The Narrows in particular are illuminating.