Can Anything Beat White?: A Black Family's Letters (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies) [Hardcover]

Elisabeth Petry (Editor), Farah Jasmine Griffin (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2005 | Series: Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies

Ann Petry (1908-1997) achieved prominence during a period in which few black women were published with regularity in America. Her novels Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1988), along with various short stories and nonfiction, poignantly described the struggles and triumphs of middle-class blacks living in primarily white communities.

Petry's ancestors, the James family, served as in-spiration for much of her fiction. This collection of more than four hundred family letters, edited by the daughter of Ann Petry, is an engaging portrait of black family life from the 1890s to the early twentieth century, a period not often documented by African American voices.

Ann Petry's maternal grandfather, Willis Samuel James, was a slave taught by his children to read and write. He believed "the best place for the negro is as near the white man as he can get." He followed that "truth," working as coachman for a Connecticut governor and buying a house in a white neighborhood in Hartford. Willis had sixteen children by three wives. The letters in this collection are from him and his second wife, Anna E. Houston James, and five of Anna's children, of whom novelist Ann Petry's mother, Bertha James Lane, was the oldest.

History is made and remade by the availability of new documents, sources, and interpretations. Can Anything Beat White? contributes a great deal to this process. The experiences of the James family as documented in their letters challenge both representations of black people at the turn of the century as well as our contemporary sense of black Americans.

Elisabeth Petry is a freelance writer with a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She lives in Middletown, Connecticut. Her work has appeared in Northeast (the magazine of the Hartford Courant) and Work-Boat magazine.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Petry offers a mesmerizing look at the everyday lives of a middle-class African American family in the nineteenth century through a glimpse of the 400 cards and letters saved by the James family between 1891 and 1910. The family, who settled in Hartford, Connecticut, just after the Civil War, demonstrated enterprise and determination, giving rise to several entrepreneurs, adventurers, and the critically acclaimed novelist Ann Petry (1908-97). The family of former slave Willis Samuel James and his second wife kept up a steady correspondence around the nation and the world, as the five children ventured out to become farmers, drug-store owners, educators, and soldiers. They chronicle the race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 and in Atlanta in 1906, as well as the service of black soldiers in the Philippines following the Spanish---American War, and the rise of the Niagara Movement as the emerging black middle class asserted its rights to full citizenship. The reader is treated to a rare look at life for ordinary black middle-class family members and their perspectives on history. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Publisher

This treasure trove of correspondence among novelist Ann Petry’s ancestors:

* Contributes tremendously to historic understanding of black middle class life just after the Civil War

* Provides over 400 letters between four generations of family

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (September 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578067855
• ISBN-13: 978-1578067855
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,019,751 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating history lesson, November 14, 2005

By 

Gina Greenlee (Hartford, CT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Can Anything Beat White?: A Black Family's Letters (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies) (Hardcover)

I'm not a history buff per se but I found the James family collection of letters fascinating because it tells the story of an African-American family that was solidly middle class in the late 1800s at a time in America's history when most people were poor or struggling. Though historically rich, the book is told through the original voices of family members through their letters to one another so the reading is engaging and fast-paced. I wish I had read more like it when I was in school.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rare and epic family saga, December 30, 2008

By 

Steve Courtney (Terryville, CT USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Can Anything Beat White?: A Black Family's Letters (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies) (Hardcover)

Meet the Jameses and the Lanes, the Chisholms and the Hudsons - all members of an extraordinary family of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who come alive in the pages of Elisabeth Petry's Can Anything Beat White? A Black Family's Letters (University Press of Mississippi). Despite the Southern publisher, most of the African Americans portrayed in this epic tale are Yankees. They are descendants of a Civil War hero who served as coachman for an 1870s governor of Connecticut; they are also the ancestors of the author and her mother, Ann Petry, a prominent writer who grew up as the daughter of pharmacists in coastal Old Saybrook. (In The Street, she later vividly chronicled the Harlem experience.)

The letters in this book were preserved by a member of the family in a tin can used to store the drugstore ice cream cones. They were written during what Elisabeth Petry calls the "nadir" of the American black experience, the period 1890-1910, the years of lynchings and the Supreme Court's Jim Crow decision, Plessy vs. Ferguson. But these were also the years of black progress, of the dueling worldviews of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. The ordinary lives of this handful of African Americans is set against this backdrop - a friend writes frighteningly of the murderous 1906 Atlanta race riots - but there is so much more.

There is the attempt of members of the family to do well in business, in educating themselves, in the military. There are the stumbling of any individuals in close relation - the father who neglects the daughter's graduation, requiring her to seek charity for her white dress for the occasion; the son who shoots a white man in the South, then appeals for money to bribe the sheriff; and the sense of shame that led the keeper of these letters quite clearly to destroy some of them. But there are heroes in here, the beautiful Bertha, who took care of her brothers and sisters, the main characters of this drama; her sister Harriet, full of spirit, who died an untimely death; and the brilliant Helen, who studied at some of the few venues available for African American women, Hampton Institute and Atlanta University, taught at an orphanage in Hawaii and later in a rural school in South Carolina. Her writing is the most memorable, as when she described a Hawaiian church service in which an old man "spat on the floor until he was tired of it, then from a little distance sent it through a broken pane of glass in a sash behind the minister."

Elisabeth Petry has wisely turned her collection of letters into a narrative, weaving together the threads of her family's tale while quoting copiously from them, so that the themes of striving and family troubles and hope shine through. She hints at each character's tale, then devotes entire chapters to each one, so that we end up feeling as though we'd lived though important years of their varied and intriguing lives.

Petry has now (2008) published another family-related work with Mississippi: At Home Inside: A Daughter's Tribute to Ann Petry. Judging from the first, it should be another compelling read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Amazing Snapshot of History, August 22, 2008

By 

M. E. McMillan (Perry, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Can Anything Beat White?: A Black Family's Letters (Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies) (Hardcover)

Liz Petry does a masterful job of combining history as we learned it with history in the words of those who were actually there. Finding and sharing letters from her ancestors and presenting them in the context of the world as they knew it is an incredible gift to our generation. This gem of a book gives a clear look at the everyday lives, the education and ambition of people who overcame the rigors and abuses of slavery and took their rightful places in post Civil War society. I found it enlightening and fascinating that it took only one generation to progress from slavery to college degrees. These wonderful people then passed their legacy of education and achievement to their progeny. In my opinion, this book should be required reading in every American History class in every high school and every college.

I was so taken by this brilliant composition, that I recommended it to a cousin working on a thesis concerning northern desegregation between 1954-1980 in the hope that such wonderful, first-hand, historical information would be helpful. He was thrilled.

Congratulations, Liz. Your work is superb, and I look forward to your next book, "At Home Inside: A Daughter's Tribute to Ann Petry."

M. E. McMillan

Author of "Rebirth of the Oracle - Tarot for the Modern World," and as Elizabeth Blackstone, author of "Virtual Strangers, A Woman's Guide to Love and Sex on the Internet" and "The Commoner's Guide to Dog Breeding."