Can Anything Beat White?: A Black Family's Letters

A treasure trove of correspondence among novelist Ann Petry's ancestors 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

Author: Elisabeth Petry
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 04/19/2012
Pages: 230
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.52d
ISBN13: 9781617033209
ISBN10: 1617033200
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Cultural, Ethnic & Regional | General
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies
- Literary Collections | Letters

About the Author
Elisabeth Petry is a freelance writer with a juris doctor from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Middletown, Connecticut, and is the author of At Home Inside: A Daughter's Tribute to Ann Petry, published by University Press of Mississippi.