 All right, we'll get started now. Thank you all for coming out. I was just telling Christine and Jennifer that I'm reminded the last time we had this in person, the last time we had the first talk in person, we left and didn't come back for a year. So at the end of the day, so it's nice to be back here in person and not virtual. For those of you who I don't know, my name is Adam Braver. I'm the interim dean of the library. I also, my usual role in the library is the library program director, of which I work quite a bit on this BERS program. So I do feel very connected and committed to it. And I also want to acknowledge, because I see right next sitting side-by-side are Jim Taggach and Christine Fagan, who worked for many, many years on the BERS program before I was involved and overlapping when I got involved. So this is the 24th anniversary of the BERS Memorial program. And this year we celebrate The Street by Ann Petrie, a book whose relevance still holds so true and so fierce and so important that one could imagine it having been published in the past year, reaffirming the famous expression of the ancient Greek philosopher Thales Miletus that quote, time is the wisest of all things that are, for it brings everything to light. So first I want to thank, he's not here, but I want to thank Bob Blaise, who was the class of 1970 at Roger Williams University, who endowed this program in honor of his mentor, John Howard Bers, who as a young man, Bob met by chance one afternoon. And as those of us in higher education know, that meaning led to Bob's life and world really being opened up from being exposed to the knowledge and insights shared by Professor Bers. I also want to thank who is here, Bob Blaise's daughter, Jennifer, who has been a tremendous partner with us over the past several years, standing in for her father on administering this program from their side. I want to thank the Bers committee with representation from many disciplines that here at RWU, as well as our community partner, Rogers Free Library, who is part of that committee. And I want to point out Susan Tayson, who represents, who is also teaching here, but represents Rogers Free Library, who brought the street to our attention and passionately advocated for us to celebrate it. And from our side, I'd like to thank my agent, my director, my producer, from our side, archivist Heidi Benedict has been essential to creating the exhibitions. And afterwards, if you haven't seen it, you should look at the exhibition out there and spend some time with it. Heidi will, I'm sure, be around to answer questions. Another key player and often behind the scenes is Liz Battaglia, who without fanfare or a call for attention contributes to the exhibition in ways that simply bring it to life. And while we're at it, Thelma Disallo, Chris Traskowski, Cindy Jones, all lend support in essential ways that only serve to raise the level of the BERS program. And finally, I want to introduce our two BERS fellows, student fellows, Cassandra Bousquet and Shelby Ganey, sitting right here in front. I had the pleasure of accompanying them on research visits to the Beinecke Library at Yale, where we poured through the original manuscripts of the street and later to the old Sabrec Historical Society, where we were treated to a behind the scenes exhibition on Anne Petrie and her family and their legacy and heritage in that town. At each stop of the way, Cassandra and Shelby participated in decision-making about how this exhibition would be shaped, the types of artifacts we could showcase and the type of keynote talk we would have, which leads me to our speaker. Dr. Jesse Nasta specializes in the history of slavery, emancipation, and their aftermaths with a particular emphasis on New England. He has been a professor in Wesleyan University's African-American Studies Department since 2017 and is the executive director of the Middlesex County Historical Society in Middletown, Connecticut. He's speaking today as a personal friend and a research collaborator of Anne Petrie's daughter, Elizabeth Petrie, who sadly and unexpectedly passed away last year. So please welcome him as he talks about Anne Petrie, her work and her amazing family. Thank you. I have my own long list of thanks to start with. So first, thank you so much to Director Adam Braver for inviting me. I was thrilled to get this invitation and to be here today. Thank and acknowledge your wonderful University Archivist, Heidi Benedict for this incredible exhibit and to the student fellows. I'm thrilled to see the exhibit in person for the first time and thank to Cindy Jones for your patience with all the logistics of setting today up. So thank you again. I'm thrilled to be here. As you were told, I'm speaking as a historian, but really I came to Anne Petrie's life and family through my personal friendship with Anne Petrie's only daughter, Liz Petrie Riley, who as you heard unexpectedly and very sadly passed away last year. So during my talk today, I'll be reading some prepared statements, but I will interrupt myself a lot with stories about Liz, stories about the family because this history is just so personal to me, so personal to Liz that it's not just an academic subject. It's a friendship. And I kind of feel like an honorary part of the family having grown up close to Liz and hearing stories about her family. So to start with, we'll keep coming back to this image, but this is kind of the image that Liz Petrie used most in her writing about the family. On the young woman, the child really on the right, that's Anne Petrie's mother. So the novelist Anne Petrie's mother, Bertha James Lane, this photo was taken in Hartford, Connecticut in the late 1880s. So really you can see that this family right here, it's Hartford 1880s only two decades after the Civil War. These children were the children of formerly enslaved parents. So just visually you could see that within two decades, Anne Petrie's grandparents had escaped from slavery in Virginia to Alabama, made their way to Connecticut, were not only free but middle class, gave their daughters and sons piano lessons and allocution lessons and music lessons and nothing that was denied them that they could humanly give them, right? And that really set the stage for the next generations. That's the child to that Anne Petrie's mother had and then you can kind of see where Anne Petrie came from a generation later knowing that. We usually say middle class, but that's such shorthand for the fullness of their education and dignity. So I'll keep coming back to this image. A quick outline, so just I'll start with an overview of this family, who they were. Connecticut, talk about Hartford, Connecticut and Old Saber, which are the communities that they came from, the communities that shape this family and that really are the backdrop for most of Anne Petrie's writing. Old Saber, Hartford, New London come up again and again in her larger body of work beyond the street. Then I wanna give you a background on Anne Petrie's development, who she was as a writer, as a person and then finally at the end, talk about Anne Petrie sort of in the fullness of who she was enmeshed in this tiny town of Old Saber and all the family ties, her whole family was around her, shaped who she was and also shaped her writing throughout her life. So this is Liz Petrie, Anne Petrie's only daughter. So I just wanna start with Liz, both to honor her, give some context for why I care about the family, how I came to this story and kind of locate Liz within this larger lineage. So as you see here, Liz Petrie was the only child of bestselling novelist, Anne Petrie and Anne Petrie's husband, George Petrie. Liz was born in Old Saber, Connecticut in 1949 when her mother, Anne Petrie was almost 41 and sadly, Liz passed away unexpectedly last year, February 22nd, 2023 at age 74. In a lot of ways, I feel almost like Liz's representative today in the sense that she would be here speaking to you if she could today. She spoke tirelessly and relentlessly about the family and shared and advocated for their history. In a few minutes, I'll be playing a short video clip where you can see and hear Liz herself, but one of the last things she did was collaborate with me and a few other scholars on an exhibit at the Old Saber Historical Society on her family, which is where her hometown and her mother's hometown. So I wanna give you that background. One of the last things she did in October, 2022 before she passed away was attend the ceremony for the naming of a street after her mom and Petrie and Harlem. So right up until the end, she was speaking sometimes with me, sometimes with others, and advocating for this history. And how I came to the family history, how I came to this topic, how I came to African-American history, I had the good fortune of growing up in Middletown, Connecticut, just five doors from Liz Petrie and her husband, Larry Riley, and knowing them since I was a child as a result. Liz's stories of her remarkable best-selling novelist mother, Ann Petrie, inspired me to pursue my college degree, and then my PhD in African-American history. Liz was one of my first and best academic mentors, and by the time she passed away, one of my closest friends, despite our 35-year age gap, and I would say also because of it. Liz didn't get married to Larry until she was in her 50s and had no children of her own, so in a lot of ways, I kind of felt like a surrogate nephew who helped take the story to the next generation because Liz knew she was kind of the last generation in this lineage going from Ann Petrie's grandparents to Ann Petrie's parents to Ann Petrie, and then to Liz. So that was kind of how I was placed in all of this. In terms of who Liz was as a person and writer, I should just briefly acknowledge and mention Christy Billings is here from Middletown. She's the director of library programs in Middletown's Public Library, the Russell Library, and for a decade, just completely on her own volition, Liz Petrie ran a writing group for veterans, mostly World War II Korean and Vietnam veterans. They met every week for 10 years at the Middletown Public Library, and she, so she was the kind of person who encouraged everybody, encouraged their writing, and I kind of feel like I knew Ann Petrie through Liz, even though Ann Petrie passed away in 1997, and by all accounts, Ann Petrie was the exact same way, that she saw the potential in everyone, encouraged everyone, and inspired everyone. I told you I'd interrupt myself a lot, so my first interruption is, you know, when you go to Old Saybrook, it's just fascinating because a couple of you went to Old Saybrook to the historical sitey there, and even though Ann Petrie and the street are famous in literature and history, when you go to this tiny town of Old Saybrook, they're just the Petrie's and the James's. Everybody still remembers them, everybody still knows them. Their pharmacy that they ran for almost 80 years is still in the center of town, and everybody remembers it. Now it's a restaurant, but if you go into the restaurant, there's still photos and memorabilia all over the wall of the James's pharmacy. So I mentioned this just to say that when you go to Old Saybrook, there are people who say, you know, can recall conversations with Ann Petrie from 30, 40, 50 years back, who recall conversations in the pharmacy with her parents and aunts and uncles and grandparents, and you can still get writing advice from Ann Petrie's ghost by going to Old Saybrook. So people will still say Ann Petrie would say to them things like, if you wanna be a writer, don't tell anyone because you'll lose steam, you'll lose interest. She said, if you have a story, just keep it in your head, keep it in your heart until you get out on paper, because if you go around telling everyone the story, you lose all motivation to write it, which is pretty sound writing advice from a really acclaimed famous writer, right? Other writing advice from Ann Petrie is she said, people ask me how I write, and she said, I just write. So she said, I just sit down and I write out the story as best as I know it in my mind in one go, and then I go back and revise. So she was not the type to sit there and agonize over every sentence, like the typical writer's block, right? She's just like, write out the story as you know it as it comes to you, and then you can come back to it. In terms of, so in terms of Liz's work, she was a successful journalist and freelance writer, and after her mom Ann Petrie died in 1997 at age 89, Liz really carried the family history and legacy into the 21st century. You've seen the cover of these books in the exhibit in the hallway there, but Liz published two books about her family history. The one on the left, can anything be white? This book really is the genesis of the family history. So I told you that Ann Petrie's mom, who's the child in that photo, was Bertha James Lane, right? She, in old Saybrook, when she passed away, Ann Petrie inherited it and then Liz inherited it. It was a tin from the pharmacy that they shipped ice cream cones in around 1910. So you can picture a big tin that used to contain ice cream cones. And after Ann Petrie died, her daughter, Liz, inherited this weird three-foot-tall tin that used to contain ice cream cones. And Liz told me that she had to pry off the lid. She almost fell across the room trying to pry off the lid to this ice cream cone tin. When she finally pried open, there were 400 family letters inside from 1891 to 1910. And these are letters that Ann Petrie's mother, Bertha, had written and received from her siblings, the children from that 19th-century photo, and from her parents, who themselves had been enslaved and then taught themselves to read and write in their middle age. So this is a pretty remarkable find to have 400 family letters from an African-American family, a formerly enslaved African-American family, and a family in Connecticut, which is not known for having a huge African-American population in the 1800s. So can anything be white is Liz's family memoir based on those 400 letters. And then the other book at home inside is really where Liz, a few years later in 2009, wrote more of a personal memoir of what it was like to be Ann Petrie's daughter. So can anything be white is really a history of the family. In the 19th century, her at-home inside really rounds out our picture of who Ann Petrie was as a mother, as a person, as a writer, and her experience there. So I highly recommend both books. I'll be giving you highlights from both books in case you don't have time to track both down. But a lot of my talk going forward will be highlights from both of those books. Okay, the setting, right? Hartford and Old Saybrook. So I wanna just pause there. On the left is Ann Petrie's dad, Peter Clark Lane, his photos in the exhibit. He's known for a lot of things, but most known for being the first black man in Connecticut to get a pharmacist license. So he was the first licensed pharmacist in the state of Connecticut, and he did that in the 1890s. So at the height of the Jim Crow South is when he, or I should say the emergence of the Jim Crow South is when he did that. And on the right is Ann Petrie's father, Peter Clark Lane, in front of the drug store, the James Family Pharmacy in Old Saybrook. And you'll see some modern day images of that. It doesn't look terribly different. So that's him in front of the pharmacy. I wanna just put Old Saybrook and Hartford in the context of Ann Petrie's larger writing. So the street, Ann Petrie's 1946 novel, The Street, is certainly her best known book. It was her best selling book. I was published one year after World War II and three years before her daughter Liz was born in 1949. And as many of you know, it's claimed to fame is that The Street became the first novel by an African-American woman to sell a million copies in 1946 upon its publication and ultimately sold a million and a half copies. And in selling a million and a half copies, The Street earned Ann Petrie fame and celebrity status instantly, a status that this intensely private author detested and fled from as much as possible. And I'll tell you more about that later. But Ann Petrie, she lived 89 years and was writing for six decades of those 89 years. So her larger body of work includes the novel's Country Place published the following year in 1947 and The Narrows published in 1953 along with a dozen short stories collected and published as Miss Muriel and other stories in 1971. So living in Harlem from 1938 to 1947 inspired Ann Petrie to write The Street. Yet in the context of her long lifetime, not to mention the spans of her parents and grandparents' lives, Harlem is really a short blip in Ann Petrie's longer life story and the longer life story of her family. While she lived in Harlem for nine years, she spent the remaining 80 years of her life in the small town of Old Saber, Connecticut, the same town where her father, the first black man to receive a pharmacist's license in the state and her aunt, the first black woman in Connecticut to receive a pharmacist's license, owned the James Pharmacy for almost 80 years from 1900 to 1977. This family business, the town of Old Saberook and Ann Petrie's experience of being the fourth generation of her African-American family to live in Connecticut shaped her life and her writing immensely. In the time I have remaining, I'll tell you a bit more about the places in Connecticut and the people that Ann Petrie came from. That is the town of Old Saberook where Ann Petrie was born in 1908 and lived most of her life in the small capital city of Hartford, Connecticut where her parents were both raised in the decades right after the Civil War and their emancipation. And I'll discuss the remarkable previous generations of her family, her parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents that shaped this groundbreaking author. Ann Petrie's mother's parents had been born into slavery in the South, prohibited by state law from even learning to read or write before the Civil War. A generation later, Ann Petrie's father and aunt became the first licensed African-American pharmacist in Connecticut. And a generation after that, Ann Petrie became the first best-selling black woman novelist. It's no wonder that Ann's daughter, my friend Liz, felt called to preserve and carry on this family legacy. So going to the Janus Pharmacy, I'd like to play you now just a short clip, a video that this was produced in 2022, a few months before Liz passed away as part of that old Saybrook exhibit. So I just, in playing this, you can hear from Liz directly. Saybrook in the 1870s and 1880s was still largely forested with farms filling much of the remaining land along with a few homes and businesses. Shipping and fishing activities were found along the waters of the Connecticut River and Long Island Sound. Many merchants moved from Saber Point and North Cove to the new business district forming uptown that would not be until the 1890s when Peter Lane, an African American, opened a drug store on Pennywise Lane. The Lane family was just one of a handful of black residents in this small, almost entirely white New England village. They would face and overcome difficulties and discrimination through determination, education, perseverance, and mutual support. This film is the story of their experiences on the way to becoming valued and honored members of the community and the larger society, and in particular, two remarkable women, Anna Louise James and Ann Lane Petrie. Hello, I'm Elizabeth Petrie and I am proud to tell you the story of my family. My mother's mother, Bertha James, spent part of her summers here as a little girl in the late 1870s. Bertha and her mother, Anna Stelhausen, were guests of a wealthy white woman by the name of Emily Malbone Morgan, who operated rest homes for poor young women. One of these homes was called Hartzies. This home still stands on the North Cove. We can find the full video online. So I just wanted to give you a sample of Liz Petrie's voice and image for that. So I wanted to move forward again, returning to Peter Clarke Lane, tell you a bit more about Ann Petrie's father, Peter Clarke Lane, and where he came from. He migrated from New Jersey to Hartford with his parents around 1874, when he was three years old. This is his father, Ann Petrie's paternal grandfather. For the next 55 years, Peter's father, Ann Petrie's grandfather, Theodore Lane here, worked for Hartford Siss and Drug Company. Although the Hartford current nearly referred to him as an employee, Ann's grandfather, Theodore, or the major, as everyone called him, created his own brand of medications that sold all over the world. His son, Peter, Ann Petrie's father joined him in the family business in Hartford in the 1890s. During that decade, Peter obtained what his father never did, a pharmacist license, making him the first black man in Connecticut with that title. Ann Petrie's mother here, Bertha James Lane, was an entrepreneur in her own right, offering hairdressing and caropidae, chiroprate, foot doctor services, as well as opening a fine linen store in Old Saybrook. Bertha was born in Hartford in 1875, only 10 years after the Civil War. These are Ann Petrie's grandparents, her mother's parents, Willis, Samuel James on the left, and Anna Hauston James on the right. These photos were taken in Hartford around the 1890s. Bertha's parents here, Ann Petrie's paternal grandparents had both been born into slavery in the South. Bertha's father, Ann Petrie's grandfather, Willis Samuel James, was born on a Virginia plantation around 1843. During the Civil War, he, like thousands of other enslaved people, fled to the approaching Union army and seized his own freedom, even before the Emancipation Proclamation was passed by Lincoln. From there, Willis made his way to Hartford where he secured work as a coachman for the governor of Connecticut. This job gave him valuable contacts in Connecticut society, and helped launched him into Hartford's small, but decades old, middle class black community. He soon became a leader in Hartford's Pearl Street African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which had been founded by a free African-Americans three decades before the Civil War. Bertha's mother on the right here was born into slavery in Alabama in 1844. And I'll say that her life reads like a novel that Ann Petrie, her granddaughter, could have written. She was born in Alabama in 1844, and she was biracial. Her father was not only white, but he was the plantation owner. He was the enslaver of her mother, sort of like Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, if you're familiar with that story. Unfortunately, it was not uncommon at all for enslavers to have children with enslaved women through all forms of sexual assault and sexual coercion, but this is a rare instance in which he brought the family nor through the underground railroad to free them instead of having them remain in Southern slavery like so many enslavers did. So he brought Ann Petrie's great-grandmother and their biracial children, six-year-old, Ann Petrie's six-year-old grandmother here to New Haven in Connecticut and freed them and set them up in a life in New Haven in 1850. The sad part of the story is that when Ann Petrie's great-grandfather went back to Alabama, his father and brothers killed him for quote stealing the family property and the quote family property was his own six-year-old daughter and five-year-old son. So you can see the ugliness of slavery and the ugliness of legally owning your own offspring, right? So I refer to this really horrible story. Well, it's horrible. It's also inspiring a lot of ways what they went through to get to Connecticut and to get freedom. But I think this is relevant when we look beyond the street to the larger body of Ann Petrie's work because her own family's history of slavery, history of enslavement, her own grandmother's escape through the Underground Railroad to Connecticut as a six-year-old really shaped her writing and her imagination for the rest of her life. So in addition, the street is really obviously about a black mother in Harlem in the 1940s, but some of her lesser-known work, Ann Petrie wrote a biography of Harriet Tubman for young adults inspired by the fact that her own grandmother had escaped on the Underground Railroad, like those Harriet Tubman led to freedom. And then, have you heard of her young adult novel? It's called Titchiba of Salem Village. That's part of, I actually read that as a middle schooler in Connecticut having no idea who Ann Petrie was, having real no idea of the history of slavery in New England. But years later, I found out, oh wow, that's my friend Liz's mom who wrote that book. And really, Titchiba of Salem Village, Titchiba was an enslaved woman from Africa who was the first accused of witchcraft during the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. So Ann Petrie kind of absorbing this family history of enslavement, of escape from slavery, of survival of slavery, went on to write books not only about free black families like hers, middle-class black families like hers, but also enslaved women that inspired her, like Harriet Tubman and Titchiba of Salem Village. So it's really a remarkable family history in so many ways. So going from her ancestors to her own life, this is Ann Petrie as a child on the left in Old Saybrook with her dad, Peter Clark Lane, the first pharmacist. Giving a little bit about her biography, she was born Anna Hauston Lane named after her grandmother, Anna Hauston, the one who came here through the Underground Railroad as a six-year-old in 1908 in the second floor quarters above her family's pharmacy. No Ann Petrie's later name change from Anna to Ann one of her many acts of self-invention and reinvention. Ann Petrie's parents moved from Hartford to Old Saybrook in 1900 when they opened the family drug store. And just to give you some context, in moving to a small town like Old Saybrook, Ann's parents were truly trailblazing black entrepreneurs. Back in Hartford, the African-American population had been small before the Great Migration, only about 2,000 African-Americans in a city of nearly 80,000 people, so just 2%. But upon moving to Old Saybrook, with its 1,400 white residents, the Petrie's were two of only about 36 black people in the whole town of Old Saybrook. And of those 36 black people, they were the only business owners. So they were really one of a kind. So you can kind of see the special status they had in Old Saybrook, right? The idea that there were only 36 black people at all in this village of 1,400 people, and they were certainly the only black business owners. Ann Petrie's daughter Liz wrote in her memoir, quote, based on descriptions in her short stories, on notes in her journals, and on stories she told, mothers early years in the little village of Saybrook were in some ways idyllic and in other ways horrific. Some people had tried to run them off as soon as they opened the business, saying they didn't want any, quote, end words in Old Saybrook. The father, Peter Clark Lane, said, well, tell them I'm from Madagascar and we kill people with our bare hands. So he was not gonna be run off. I think there's a good chance his grandparents were from Madagascar, but he completely kind of played up this idea of himself as playing with this trope of uncivilized or savage to say that if you try to run me out, I'll kill you with my bare hands. So that didn't work. So they were staying. They were staying in Old Saybrook. And they went on to become involved in the local church, local politics and leaders in the black community. At the same time, I'll talk a little bit more about some of the obstacles they overcame, but I wanna also talk about the other major figure in the story. This is Miss James. This is Anne Petriez-Anne, who was the first black woman pharmacist licensed in the state of Connecticut. Here she is standing in front of the James family pharmacy in 1918 when she was about 32. One cool story that Liz used to tell about Miss James, Anne Petriez-Anne, is that Catherine Hepburn said she was the only woman who ever intimidated her. Now, how was Catherine Hepburn vacation in Old Saybrook every year from 1913 until her death? So the actress Catherine Hepburn and other rich people would come to Old Saybrook every summer and the pharmacy was kind of a mainstay for everybody. That's where they got prescriptions, ice cream, postcards, soda. So she was a known entity to everyone, including Catherine Hepburn. She was, in 1908, she became the only woman and the only African-American in her graduating class of the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy. That's her graduation photo on the left, which is on display in the exhibit. And then I just want to point out, this is her great niece, Liz, wearing that same necklace 90 years later. So you can kind of see that necklace in color. Three years later in 1911, at age 25, Miss James became the first licensed black female pharmacist in Connecticut. She took over the James pharmacy from her brother-in-law and Petrie's father, Peter Lane, and ran it until her death in 1977 at age 91. Let's skip ahead a little bit. And Petrie wrote in her journal years later, quote, we use this formality, Miss James, because we felt the whole town would be calling her aunt or auntie and probably would have loved to if we had. Think of the racist character, sure of Aunt Jemima, that they were contending with, right? And Miss James maintained her dignity by going by Miss, even within her own family. In her wonderfully evocative short story, Miss Muriel, Anne Petrie turns the James pharmacy itself into a sort of character. She captures with sharp precision how her family navigated and maintained the boundaries between their inner worlds, their dignity as individuals and the integrity of their family in this all-white community. Despite the child narrator and Miss Muriel, based on Anne Petrie's own child self, is appalled when Mr. Beamish, an old white shoemaker, tries to court Aunt Sophrania, the character based on Miss James, her aunt Anna. As the child narrator chides Mr. Beamish, quote, the front part of the building, the part where the drug store belongs to everybody, the back of our building and upstairs and the yard are ours. The yard is a private part of our lives. You don't belong in it, you're not part of the family. I bring this up to say both that Anne Petrie's short stories are wonderful and we should read them and also just to say that the front part of the building, the drug store, was where the James family were public figures, serving any white person who came in for medicine, ice cream, postcards or soda. Upstairs and in their home and out back, they belonged only to each other as husband and wife, father and daughter, aunt and niece. Most important, they belonged to themselves in their own minds and intellects, which leads me to Anne Petrie's self-development as a writer. This is Anne Petrie at her typewriter while writing The Street and this actually, once the street sold a million copies and she became a celebrity, Eboni Magazine, the major black magazine at the time to republish this of her, smoking at her typewriter. But just to give you some biography, some background, Anne Petrie did not start out as a writer. She started out as a pharmacist, like her father, grandfather and aunt before her. After graduating from Old Sabrec High School in 1926, she briefly attended Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute, the historically black college in Virginia that her mother's sister, Aunt Helen, had attended a generation earlier. After one year there, Anne Petrie shunned the courses in meal preparation and household expenses that were designed to train young black women like her as homemakers. If Anne Petrie hadn't broken away as a 19-year-old, the street and her other contributions to literature might never have been written. But first, Petrie took one more detour as a pharmacist, receiving her degree at the Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Haven. As there she fell inferior to her peers, due more to class than racism. Her classmates from New Haven's black elite, including Jane Bolin, who became the first female African-American judge in New York State and whose father was the black graduate of Williams College, Petrie wrote in her journal a decade later, quote, in comparison to all these people, I was fat, had no perceptual waistline, had no clothes, no money, no boyfriends, and was not well supplied with funds. The James's had respect, intelligence, and dignity, but remained working class, the pharmacy providing them a livering, but not a glamorous one. After graduating in 1931 at the height of the Great Depression, Petrie spent several years behind the counter of her family drug store in Old Saybrook. Six decades later, after receiving her fourth honorary degree, she wrote in her journal, quote, I think that's amazing, started out as a pharmacist, ended up as a writer with all kinds of acclaim, really quite extraordinary. Her path wasn't easy. While working at the pharmacy, Petrie began submitting her first short stories for publication and received nothing, but one rejection letter after another. As an aside, anybody who's attempted to publish their writing is well familiar with that experience. Aside from Petrie's mother Bertha, her family, you might be surprised to find our family did not encourage her aspiration to become a writer. Miss James even scolded her for, quote, wasting all that money on postage from all these rejection letters that kept coming back. Now that might seem really surprising, but I wanna point out that Miss James and Petrie's aunt and the other relatives who raised her were ambitious, educated and hardworking that gone from slavery to college educations in just one generation, but they had been pharmacists and teachers, entrepreneurs and educators. Writing fiction probably seemed impractical and more of a hobby than a career to these ambitious people. They saw themselves as leaders of the race who had communities of black children to teach and professional barriers to break. Writing fiction might have seemed too self-indulgent, but in her 20s and 30s, Petrie took a gamble on her writing and as we know it paid off. In 1938, surely after she married George Petrie, Liz's father, the couple moved from Old Saber, Connecticut to Harlem. There she wrote for the left-wing black newspaper, The People's Voice. As Petrie's daughter, Liz, wrote, living in Harlem, quote, amounted to culture shock for the young woman from the past door of the village of Old Saber-Oak as she witnessed urban poverty created by segregation and other structural racism for the first time up close. In Harlem, Petrie had access to experiences and people far removed from her family at the small town pharmacy in Old Saber-Oak. In addition to her newspaper work at The People's Voice, a Columbia University course with Mabel Louise Robinson helped launch her career as a writer. A professor of English at Columbia University, Robinson became an important mentor and teacher in Petrie's life. While living in Harlem, her short story is still being rejected one after another. And Petrie read the memoir of a well-known lawyer named Arthur Train and Arthur Train wrote, quote, if I wanted to be a writer and I was young, the first thing I would do would be to go to Columbia and see if I could enroll in Mabel Louise Robinson's workshop in writing. Petrie had instantly decided to do that. She enrolled in the workshop to apply she had to submit a short story. As Petrie called in 1988, quote, I made an appointment for an interview and took my story in my hot little hand and I can see her now. Professor Robinson looked me over very carefully and she sat and read the story in front of me, which is also embarrassing. Then she put it down, looked at me and said, well, that's a very good story. I thanked her and she told me when the course met and that was it. Within three years, Petrie's best-selling novel, The Street, came out shaped by her experience of living in Harlem and of her experience in Professor Robinson's writing course. But Petrie never felt fully at home in Harlem and felt even less at home with the attention and fame that becoming a best-selling author brought her overnight. As she recounted in her journal, quote, shortly after The Street was published, I decided I had a choice. Either become a professional writer, a celebrity and lose whatever privacy I had to be public property or to be a writer. I opted for being a writer. In order to write, I needed privacy and anonymity and I fiercely defended it. Moving to Connecticut was no accident. It was deliberate. So Petrie published The Street, became a celebrity and then instantly retreated to Old Saybrook because she wanted that quiet village life. And this is kind of remarkable. Another thing is that in addition, when she moved back to Old Saybrook, Miss James, her aunt, the first black female pharmacist in Connecticut, she was so well-known that people mistook her for her aunt. So here she is, this celebrity writer, but in Old Saybrook, her aunt was the famous one. And she really liked that. She loved her anonymity and Liz writes in the memoir how her mom would pretty much turn down almost every speaking engagement she was invited to. She hated public appearances. She avoided them as much as possible and she, quote, called it pressing the flesh. She said, the world is entitled to my writing. So here we all are reading The Street almost 80 years later, but she felt that we were not entitled to her life, her as a person. She hated personal questions. She hated personal interviews. So there's so few of them. And I also think about, she died in 1997, she would have hated social media, right? She died a few years before Facebook. Social media was so antithetical to everything Anne Petrie was and stood for. She really felt like writing was a secret, private, sacred, solitary activity that you kind of go inside yourself, you tell the story, you write out the story, you don't tell everyone about the story because you'll lose steam and then you can reveal it. And the writing has a life of its own, right? And she felt like her writing was for the world, but she herself wasn't. So if you read Liz Petrie's At Home Inside, she starts out her memoir by saying, my mom did not want this book to exist. So she did not write about her mom till after her mom died for that very reason because she was so private. So as I said, within a few years they were back in old Saybrook. I just want to play a couple clips for you. I want to pause here in the time I have left. So you saw that this came out, this is a very rare newsreel that came out right after The Narrows was published in 1950. In that time, she brought up a daughter while writing and rewriting to perfection a book praised for its depth and human perception. The literary world eagerly awaits her next, but her family has a bird. So there's, that's Liz aged four. And then this is, she hated TV appearances, but she made this one TV appearance in 1975. His profiles in literature, featuring interviews with authors and illustrators prominent in American literature for children. The moderator for this series is Dr. Jacqueline N. Schachter, professor of children's literature with Temple University. The most favorite Connecticut comes today's guest, Ann Petrie, who writes for both children and adults. When we wanted to arrange Miss Petrie's visit, I had to contact her in Hawaii because in 1974, 75, she taught literature and creative writing at the University of Hawaii. Do share anything that you think will be of interest concerning your Hawaiian experiences. Well, I have to say first, that Hawaii is so beautiful, that it's unbelievable. In spite of all the stories and all the pictures, you don't really have any idea what it's like until you are there. And that applies also to the people who are stunningly. I have a couple of amusing stories. One of them, when I reached the end of the spring semester in a creative writing class, I said to my students, well, now is there anything that you would like to ask me? Do you have any questions? And I thought that they were going to ask questions about writing. And one young man, and I can only describe him as a fashion man, he really was a huge, great, enormous shoulder, a very athletic, said, well, there is one thing I would like to know, and I said, what is that? And he said, well, what does your husband do for a living? And I said, well, of course, I'd be very happy to answer that question, but I would like to point out to you that you have been conditioned by the culture in which you live because it would never occur to you to ask a man what his wife did for a living. And as far as what my husband does for a living, I'd be happy to tell you he is a retired advertising executive and he used to be in New York City. And that was that. The other story, favorite, and these are curious sidelines on Hawaii. I won't play beyond that, but I would just like to go on and talk a little bit in the remaining time I have left what this also says about Anne Petrie's lifelong fight against the constraints of sexism as well as racism, right? In that 1950s clip, 1950 style patriarchy and sexism are on full display as that male narrator literally speaks for Anne Petrie, assuring us that although she's a famous author, she's a wife and mother first, right? So he was assuring his, in the second clip, a rare 1975 TV appearance and Petrie pushes back against sexism just as she pushed back against racism her whole life. And that leads me to my last point, how she balanced her writing with her sense of responsibility to her large close knit family that surrounded her in Old Saybrook. I'll say sometimes she did balance them and sometimes she put her writing aside for months and even years at a time. In fact, some people in the 1970s, a reporter said, what did you stop, why did you stop writing? She said, well, first of all, I haven't stopped writing. Second of all, in the past year alone, I've been a nurse to my ailing aunt. I've been a real estate agent selling my family pharmacy. I've been a mother, I've been a cousin. So she saw her work as encompassing all of this, right? That her body of work was her writing, but also who she was as a person. One important often overlooked consideration is that Petrie wrote the street during World War II while her husband served in the army and Ann Petrie was living alone for the first and only time in her 89 year life. During World War II, Rosie the Riveter went to the factory while Ann Petrie was glued to her typewriter. The other women in her Columbia University writing workshop were also the wives of soldiers who were off to war, giving them newfound free time for their writing. And their professor, Mabel Louise Robinson, was a lesbian, giving her a sort of lifelong freedom from the common demands and constraints of mid 20th century marriage, motherhood, and gender norms. Even after the war, Petrie deferred having her only child lives until 1949 at nearly 41 years old, a highly unusual move for the time. During that time she managed to publish her second novel, Country Place, in 1947, just one year after the street. These couple years during and immediately after World War II proved to be the most productive of Petrie's long writing career. Yet even as she struggled to balance her writing with the expectations of being a wife and mother, a daughter and a niece, her family and their hometown inspired her personally and creatively immensely. Old Saybrook became the small town setting of Petrie's second novel, Country Place, a sharp contrast to the Harlem depicted in the street. Nine years earlier Petrie was living in Harlem but happened to be visiting her parents in Old Saybrook when the 1938 hurricane struck, trapping her in the small Connecticut coastal town. And that became the setting for Country Place, which took place in Old Saybrook during the 1938 hurricane. At the same time Aunt Petrie's daughter Liz wrote of her mother saying, quote, taking care of friends and relatives gave her a sense of accomplishment she had not seemed to fill with her writing. Coking, shopping and cleaning for a family three did not satisfy her urge to nurture and she spent years caring for various ailing relatives between 1949 and 1988. A large cast of characters moved through her life seeking advice or just a sympathetic ear and some of them truly were characters. Many times she exhausted herself caring for everyone. In a little bit I'll show you a clip from this fourth country coming documentary film that introduced you a bit more to her aunts and uncles and cousins who she talked about. But I wanna just briefly of all the aunts and uncles who inspired her I think crucial ones are Miss James the first black pharmacist and then I just wanna mention her mother's other sister Aunt Helen Chisholm. She was kind of the most immediate inspiration for Aunt Petrie as an aunt who was a woman who was an educated professional. So she after graduating from Hampton Institute historically black college in 1900 her aunt Helen went and traveled through the Jim Crow South by herself teaching at black schools. She then went on to Hawaii by herself as a young black woman in 1900 and taught there for four years. And then when she came back to she went to Atlanta after that and was a student of WB Du Bois for a couple of years the author of The Souls of Black Folks. So she was kind of I would say Aunt Petrie's most immediate inspiration in her short story Miss Muriel she says that Aunt Helen's the one who brought culture to the family who played Bach and Beethoven on the piano and who taught courses and wrote articles. So I just wanna briefly quote Aunt Helen in 1932 wrote an article about the future of black women in this country. She insisted that quote any discussion of achievement must take into consideration the fact that achievement is related to opportunity as well as initiative talent and energy have the quote Negro women of this country opportunity and if given opportunity have they talent and energy to achieve. Aunt Petrie's Aunt Helen concluded that although black women certainly possess the talent and energy opportunities remain severely limited for them. She insisted these women have quote great capacity for organization and direction opportunity is not given them they create it. And I just wanna point out that very moment just up the road at the James pharmacy Helen's 24 year old niece Aunt Petrie was creating her own opportunity working in her family's pharmacy by day she wrote short stories by night creating a path of opportunity that finally came to fruition 14 years later with the publication of her best selling novel The Street. But she did not forge that path alone. Her family from her formerly enslaved grandparents who built lives of dignity and refinement in Connecticut to her entrepreneurial parents to her college educated aunts shaped the incredible woman and the claimed author that she became. I'd like to pause there. And then in the time I have remaining I wanna point out one last thing and that is Aunt Petrie's cousin or first cousin once removed is named Ashley James and he's a well-known filmmaker who for the past several years initially with Liz Petrie's collaboration is making a documentary based on those 400 family letters that were found in that ice cream cone tin. So Ashley James is the cousin and nationally claimed filmmaker who's making this documentary. And in the last few minutes I have remaining I just wanna show you a trailer for this documentary to sort of further highlight some of the people and events I've been talking about. Ashley wants us to know that in the final version there will be film actors. So he's the narrator for all the parts right now but he wants you to know that there will be different film actors. And in fact, they're using AI to recreate Aunt Petrie's voice so she can speak in her own voice decades after her death. So there'll also be AI voice in the final version. I am a knowing gooder, a Connecticut Yankee. Four generations of my family have been born in Connecticut. So to borrow a phrase from the Quakers I am a birthright knowing gooder. But of course I am not. I'm an outsider, not a member of the club because my grandfather, bonus Samuel James was a runaway slave who came here on the underground railroad before the Civil War. Aunt Petrie is actually the link between a writer like Zorna Hurston who publishes her best-known novels in the 30s and the writers who we come to know in the 70s someone like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, or Toni K. Bambara. Petrie is one of the first women to give us a complicated working class African-American woman character dealing with issues like racism and sexism. I think what I admire about Aunt Petrie's work especially about her novel The Street is she really captures that feeling of Harlem in transition and maybe Harlem on the break. Just a few years after you have Langston Hughes's montage of Dream Deferred with its famous What Happens to a Dream Deferred? The question that became Raisin' in the Sun and all that history I think you sort of starts for me with Aunt Petrie's The Street. One of the things that she writes about is being a Connecticut Yankee. Born and raised in Old Sacred Connecticut. But she's very clear about the fact that she is not a member of the club. She is not a Connecticut Yankee. In fact, she describes herself as a survivor born in the USA. Old Sabruk is a very old town. It's filled with the smell of salt and the sound of water birds. I knew the difference in the smell of the air when the tide was going out and how refreshing when the tide was coming in. The coals and inlets and creeks offer a perfect resting place for migratory birds. It's the picture of perfect New England village, except the reality for me or something different. There's an ancient burial ground in town said to be the oldest cemetery in Connecticut. In the back, there's a gravestone with the name Rose Jackson, a colored woman. There's no other gravestone near it. It's the 19th century equivalent of the back of the bus. And it's not only segregated, but the stone is facing backwards. Sister Rose Jackson's grave looks to the rear. New England in many ways was the most homogeneous white region in the United States. William Lloyd Garrison called Connecticut the Georgia of the North. And despite a record of abolition and support for the Underground Railroad that's exemplary, that kind of undercurrent of racism among most white people in the state of Connecticut was consistent from the beginning of the Civil War through to World War I and in fact it increased after World War I and beyond. How did my family manage to survive intact in this largely white community? How did my parents manage to give their children a sense of self-confidence, self-worth? My father, Peter Clark Lane, Jr. was a licensed pharmacist. He opened a drug store in Old Sidbrook in 1902. And my mother, Bertha James Lane, was the eldest daughter of Willis James' six children. She was the rock of our family, a self-made entrepreneur, a mentor, and a guardian to all of us. And I had these amazing aunts and uncles. My aunt Helen was a school teacher who taught in the Hawaiian Islands and created a successful correspondence course in reading and literature. My aunt Lou, Anna Louise James, was the first woman pharmacist in Connecticut. She took over my father's drug store in the 1920s and it became the James pharmacy. It remains a landmark even today. And I had these extraordinary uncles. They were footloose and fancy-free and lived all over the world. They were roustabouts with circuses, seamen, pulmon porters, barbers. One of them smuggled Chinese workers between the U.S. and Canada. One of them was a functional soldier in the Spanish-American War. One spent time on a Georgia chain gang sentenced to five years after being caught in a small town after Sinslet. My uncles and aunts were storytellers, yarn spinners, and letter writers. Through these layers, I survived the pain and learned about the world outside of Old Seabrook, February 18th and 1902. Dear Peter, it has been snowing for the last two days and the weather is really sloppy. The farm work has thawed for a while and the snow was about four inches deep yesterday. There are about 500 coloring boys here and about 100 Indians. The Indians' room in a large brick building called the Wigwormer, the color boys' room in about eight different buildings. One of the Indian boys died in the hospital last week. His death was brought on by an accident he had last fall. His body was sent to Cherokee, North Carolina, where he belonged to the Cherokee Indian tribe there. My dear Bertha, is it long since I've written you? I have no idea whatever. Yet it seems weeks since I remember writing. On the broad veranda on which I am writing, one can look for miles across the Pacific, the eye trailing down the hillsides, covered with sugarcane, coffee and bananas. It seems as though the wonders of this place are inexhaustible. Nearly every night, the sky is brilliantly illuminated by the light from the volcano. And I have read there is nothing dangerous from the lava flow. This morning, Queen Lillua Kalani called, accompanied by her attendant and ward, Joseph Leah. She was very regal and gracious, and she shut my hand. Just think, I am Meta Queen. With my aloas to all I am ever fondly yours, Helen L. James. Joseph, Georgia, remember first to 1905. My dear sister, I would not write again, if I am in a terrible fix that I got in after leaving Savannah, Georgia. While I'm going through this place, I shot a white man for bothering me, and I tried to get away, but they put the blackhounds on my track, and they caught me in a swamp and tried to lynch me. But the sheriff held him from me and got me to the jail where I am at present. I get tried Monday morning, but the sheriff is afraid they'll get me when I'm taken to the trial. He told me, if I had any folks, I'd better write to them at once and try to raise $35 to pay off his guards before the trial, and he would spirit me away in the night to Florida. Now, Bertha, for dear mother's sake, don't let me stay here to be killed by these white folks where the little of nothing will save me. Do this, and I will never forget your kindness. Kiss Louise for me, and if I never see you again, may God bless you and protect you. Goodbye from your own dear brother, Will James. This is just the trailer, but it's in production, it's being finished soon. So, in the remaining time I've left, I'd love questions, discussions, open it out. I've studied and taught African American literature, and, you know, Richard Wright, James Bull, Lorraine Haster, certainly the first. I'd read them all. I've never heard of Petrie before this semester. How come? I think, wow, I do think part of her own private nature helped that. You know, I think that she shied away from publicity and attention. I think that's a big part of it. I also think that she, so she shied away from attention. I also think she doesn't quite fit easily into categories. So, for instance, in speaking of categories, so at the time, some people said she was the female Richard Wright, for instance, because her book, The Street Came Out A Year After Richard Wright's Black Boy, and she hated these kind of false categorizations, false comparisons. So, I think that she might have fallen through the cracks of these genres, fallen through the cracks of these categories, that, you know, her protest novel was eclipsed by black men's protest novels, and then her books about white people, like Country Place, didn't really fit into the genre of this new black literature that was coming out in the 50s and 60s. So, I think it's more a genre problem than a problem with her writing. You know what I mean? I do. I think that that's a big issue. I will say, luckily, that all of her books that I've mentioned are in print and have all been reissued within the past decade, so the books, I kind of feel like she's having a renaissance is my point, that it's only within the past ten years that new issues of the narrows and Country Place have come out from Northwestern University of Press and others. I would say that Liz was instrumental. Her daughter was instrumental in getting those books back into print, and now it's sort of upon all of us to teach her writing, spread the word. I think this documentary helps. I hope that's a satisfactory answer, but I do, I think it's she was at this weird intersection in terms of gendered categories, racial categories. She kind of defied genre. She defied categorization, and she was also herself kind of private and not self-aggrandizing. So I think all those things make her, you know, made her harder to pin down or sort of harder to be representative of one thing, you know, or one category. Yeah. I didn't know the name, and I looked at the date of the book and it's been around for a long time. I thought it was going to be, you know, 1946, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'll try this. I'm not sure I can articulate this. So I facilitate the library book club and we read this book last month or so, and nobody had heard of it or read it before. Everyone loved it. Some people thought it was shocking that it was published back in the decade it was, the time it was. I think people were shocked that she wasn't from Harlem and so my question is it tempting to, you know, we're always trying to separate the biographies from the work itself. But when you give us her family history and their trajectory from slavery into Connecticut there's sort of an anomaly all throughout there and I hope itself also the popularity of it the readership, the fact that it has eight million different covers the fact that it's still in print the fact that nobody's heard of it and everybody loves it when they do find it and they feel like they're discovering it for the first time it almost feels like, and her desire to keep it quiet is it tempting to not try to separate? Like isn't there a new litter gesture to not separate the story from this book? I would say so from now again, I'm in history more than literary criticism but there is an archival turn in literary studies where literary scholars are trying to excavate the lives of the authors and go deep into the archive and look at those intersections between the biography of the author and the work so I would absolutely say and Liz herself in her memoir basically said I think the fact that she wasn't from Harlem could have contributed to it in the sense that here she is again defying all categories. She's black but she's from a nearly all white village in Connecticut. She's middle class but her family's facing racism and has working class and she has these left wing pro-labor policies opinions but then she goes to Harlem and she was kind of like things like seeing people drunk on the street coming out of bars. Like this horrified her sensibility like there were you know Old Saybrook was you know one little road it still is. So I think she approached Harlem in some ways as a visitor, well as a visitor as an outsider, sort of as a spectator so she saw it from a vantage point that she would not have if she had been born and raised there so in some ways it's almost like a travel perspective sort of you know this outside view. So in some ways the fact that she's not from Harlem is a big part of it but you know I didn't have time to get into you know there's so many things I cut out because of the limitations of time but you know people are sometimes shocked that she you know they're saying how did this genteel woman who spoke like the Queen of England write the street right but she recalls in Old Saybrook for example her first day of school from kindergarten coming home and boys from her class throwing stones at her and tearing her dress and you know so being literally you know being having stones thrown at you as a four year old I think of course she could not she was no stranger to sort of horror, racist horror, violence so that kind of in terms of you know life experience it's like you can be middle class and genteel and refined but also be subjected to like racialized racist horror at four years old in a way that sort of you know certainly disillusions for you for the rest of your life so she was a very disillusioned genteel person you know she did not she was not up in the ivory tower at all because of her race you know and because of her family background like in the you know she's saying in in her journal like I'm a Yankee in the sense that I lived in this small Connecticut town my whole life I go to the congregational church I plan the library book sales but I'm not part of the club you know I'm the descendant of enslaved people the townspeople can't share that experience because they're the descendants of enslavers and in terms of Connecticut and all that I do think one thing that's interesting about this if you look at Ann Petrie's family on her father's side her mother's side basically every facet of black history and US history is represented in her ancestor so on her dad's side they had been enslaved in the north in New Jersey on her mom's side they'd been enslaved in Virginia and Alabama so you have northern slavery, southern slavery some went south, some remained in New England so they fanned out all over the country to Hawaii you know it's pretty incredible so I think I think coming from that family background such widely traveled aunts and uncles and grandparents and those who wrote such prolific letters and such vivid letters she was from this little village in Connecticut but you know at a young age her imagination was global right like she had she had been reading about the queen of Hawaii since she was a kid and through her aunts very personal letters so you know that she said that world opened up to her through her family and what great writers and storytellers and travelers they were which is not typical at all few people of any race were going to Hawaii and Virginia and you know Florida in 1898 you know that was they were somewhat exceptional as such wide travelers and you know entrepreneurs yeah just to follow which suggests that she has an authenticity that can't be pinned down and that as a reader you can't argue with it you know she gets to tell this she has some sort of credentials that we know Barbara Lee maybe shouldn't be telling the story of the South or that novel American version of their things who gets to speak and that's maybe part of why we weren't reading you know that people didn't know where to put her I mean really want to hear it in some way because there was nothing you could say except to listen that's true and she got some pushback from other white from white authors and white friends being like your works too brutal and she's like this is reality I think now in this moment more people are ready to hear really brutal things brutally honest things some not you know there's also a backlash to that but you know in the 40s and 50s she got pushback from people she considered friends being like this is too much this is horrifying like you know so tone it down you know so that could be part of it too yeah yeah I would just say I mean and then in terms of sort of that Rose Jackson the only black woman in the cemetery in Old Saybrook I mean for context Connecticut and Rhode Island were really twin states in terms of the history of slavery here so within New England Connecticut and Rhode Island had the most enslaved people and were the most involved in the triangle trade the transatlantic slave trade so I if you just go within a few miles I'm sure you'll find graves of enslaved people here in Bristol as well so this is not unique to Old Saybrook do you know about the DeWolfe family of Bristol okay okay so I'm preaching to the choir here you know the DeWolfe here they are in New England and in the late 1700s they were the largest traffickers and enslaved people from Africa in all of the United States and that's because in the late 1700s there was no north south divide over slavery that slavery was you know throughout the Americas so New England was the leader in the triangle trade because there had not been this sort of Mason-Dixon line developing yet you know so I'm glad you all know that story so and it's not unique and that documentary trace of the trade made the DeWolfe family kind of famous or infamous but Middletown Connecticut where I teach and live they hundreds of enslaved people were brought up to Connecticut River to Middletown in the triangle trade as well so it's not like like Bristol's now become the kind of the poster for it but all of this is to say that when Ann Petru's grandparents came here from the south they encountered a history of slavery and racism in New England that was home grown to New England they weren't they didn't escape race they didn't escape slavery they they escaped southern slavery and then fit within a sort of a racial hierarchy here that came out of northern slavery right and that's that's how Ann Petru ended up having stones thrown at her first day of kindergarten it wasn't the south made them do it it's the north had this long history of slavery and and racism as well so so many threads to this story and I just wanted to communicate that that you know there's so many threads in this story and then once you think about the family and Ann Petru's biography putting the street in context of the dozens of other things she published in her 89 year long life right and I'm interested in all of that and I think it hopefully it helps sort of put the street in that sort of panoramic 360 degree view right that it's not isolated you know to just this novel that it fits in the body of her life her larger work and then this really fascinating web of narratives that she came from would say growing being from Connecticut I think she has some local you know local cred people know about her as a old Saber person but it's interesting that if you go just the next state you know she wasn't being assigned and Petru's work I mean so that's a problem that we're addressing but should be addressed yeah so I just want to like know your opinion like a lot of us students talk about like most of you are in high school that are great at speed do you think that the street would be like something good to teach in high schools for the younger generation or do you think that would kind of go against and Petru's wishes of being this private writer so let me clarify the answer is yes it should be I just want to clarify that and Petru drew a real sharp line between her writing and her personal life the rest of her life so she wasn't like don't read my books she was just like don't read my books and then call me and ask me all these personal questions about my life and I think going back to that question about biography here we are after her death sort of dissecting her life and its place but within her lifetime she tried to really not be a quote celebrity and not have her life dissected but you know in the passage of time I think it's fair game to say who was she as a person right so and she did I should also say this family left a lot of material like she left dozens of journals that are now at some of you saw drafts of the street at Yale the letters are at Yale and Petru herself gave Boston University archives some of her journals but she did edit them first so she was like you don't get a full you know you don't get an unedited view of me but here's dozens of my journals that kind of so she did leave some of her inner thoughts for the archive yeah so I don't want to be misconstrued I don't think we should suppress her books just I'm saying within her lifetime it's just interesting to think about her philosophy of sort of the writer as private person versus the work right and their their work is public yeah yeah curious I'm curious that's that's fascinating I'm not sure I don't know if we have a record of the distribution of those million-f copies like geographically are you like are these sort of like northeasterners like who cosmopolitan folks that's that's a really good question I wish I knew off top of my head where these million have copies were distributed to I mean I do I was thinking about this a lot in this sort of this immediate post World War II moment where like Richard Wright's book Black Boy becomes a sensation so there was this moment after World War II like just defeated the Nazis and fascism where things were opening up a bit and there was kind of this like more of this liberalism like what are our American values our American traditions of you know equality and of course Jim croaked in and for a long time thereafter but I think it was if this come out before World War II I think it would have been a different story you know there wouldn't have been that reception so I think it was this like opening up in the post World War II but that's I'll try to get an answer to that sort of where these were being distributed yeah yeah and I will say I hope that with especially with her short stories and her other book there's a real rich body of work to dip into within Petrie and I hope it does get a wider and wider recognition and hope you all see that documentary when it's finished so anything else thanks this was a pleasure thank you for having me