Books: Color in Connecticut

THE NARROWS (428 pp.)—Ann Pefry —Houghton Mifflin ($3.95).

The cops caught up with the speeding, old-fashioned Rolls-Royce and brought the woman driver to a stop. What, one of the officers asked, was that bundle on the floor? The answer: “Old clothes for the Salvation Army.” But the bundle actually contained the body of Lincoln Williams, handsome Negro bartender of the Last Chance Saloon, punctured by two .45 slugs fired at close range. The lady in the car—and she obviously was a lady—was Mrs. Treadway, the richest woman in town. Captain Sheffield, respectable broker and her son-in-law, sat beside her.

So ends the life story of Link Williams, hero of The Narrows, by Ann Petry. It is a story of black and white, love and violence. One of the remarkable things about it is its setting: not the conventional smoldering South, nor the familiar, raw Northern city slum (which Author Petry well described in The Street, 1946), but the wind-blown Connecticut town of Monmouth, where dark, violent deeds are hard to imagine and slums are small enough to be swept under the carpet. Born and raised in Old Saybrook, Conn., Negro Author Ann Petry has the background to make her story fresh and credible. Apart from a deplorable tendency toward short flights of bogus impressionist prose, she also has the easy writing ability to tell a warm, readable story.

Link’s story is simple enough. He was an orphan from The Narrows, the Negro slum of Monmouth, down by the river. He had been brought up by Aunt Abbie Crunch, a former schoolteacher and a lady of almost painful rectitude. But Bill Hod had been an even greater influence than Abbie. Hod was the Negro owner of the Last Chance, a coldblooded, iron-fisted racketeer who paid Link’s way. through college and wised him up to life. The trouble began when Camilo, Mrs. Treadway’s daughter, met Link down at the docks one foggy night. He was handsome and intelligent. Camilo was bored and unhappily married to dull Captain Sheffield.

What started out as a forbidden idyll headed quickly toward disaster. Link had his pride, did not want to be simply a kept lover. When he tried to break with Camilo, she called him a nigger and cried rape. While the whole town was talking and racial tension was at its worst, Link was abducted to the Treadway home. There Camilo’s husband shot him dead.

If that were all, The Narrows would be merely the retelling of a sordid tabloid standby. But Author Petry, serious as she is about her seriously told plot, almost lets it take second place to other and better things: Negro life in broken-down Bumble Street, Aunt Abbie’s sturdy effort to clothe her existence in dignity. Best of all is the rich parallel story of little Malcolm Powther, the dignified Treadway butler, and his blowsy, handsome, blues-singing, two-timing wife. Link and Camilo have a fictional survival period of one publishing season at best. Had Author Petry stuck strictly to Malcolm and Mamie Powther, The Narrows would be remembered far longer.