Before China, one of the whores in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, there was China the whore who lived in the Narrows.Before Alice Walker’s sexy blues singer Sugg Avery, there was Mamie Powther, the busty, sensual, blues-singing woman desired by all the men of the Narrows and beyond. “Before the Bottom, before Brewster Place, there was the Narrows (also called the Eye of the Needle, the Bottom, Little Harlem, Dark Town, Niggertown).
Written in a period when deliberate black feminist fiction and black feminist interpretations of fiction were ideas whose time had not yet come, they were revolutionary.” - Nellie Y. “Petry’s novels are unique for their time, and brilliant expositions in the intricacies of their literary, political, philosophical, and social implications. In a fascinating introduction to this new edition, Keith Clark discusses the prescience with which Petry chronicled the ways tabloid journalism, smug elitism, and mob mentality distort and demonize African American men. Thus brought together by chance, Link and Camilla draw each other into furtive encounters that violate the rigid and uncompromising social codes of their own town and times.Īs The Narrows sweeps ahead to its shattering denouement, Petry shines a harsh yet richly truthful light on the deforming harm that race and class wreak on human lives. Unbeknownst to him, “Camilo” (actually Camilla Treadway Sheffield) is a wealthy married woman who has crossed the town’s racial divide to relieve the tedium of her life. Drinking in a bar together after the incident, “Camilo” discovers that her rescuer is African American and he learns that she is white.
The routine of Link’s life is interrupted when he intervenes to save a woman from a late-night attack. Link Williams is a handsome and brilliant Dartmouth graduate who tends bar due to the lack of better opportunities for an African American man in a staid mid-century Connecticut town.
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