6
Urban Village and Black Metropolis: John Fury and South Street

Ah, she said and she sank to the pavement. It's all over with us, she said.
Jack Dunphy, John Fury

South Street, great blood vein of a people.
William Gardner Smith, South Street

The postwar South Street literature begins with two midcentury novels that, like Algren's Man with the Golden Arm, imagine the industrial neighborhood order in crisis: Jack Dunphy's John Fury and William Gardner Smith's South Street. Both Dunphy and Smith grew up in South Philadelphia, absorbing the material for their novels from the Irish urban village and Black Metropolis in which they respectively lived. They shared roots in an industrial city that at midcentury was already showing signs of transforming into something new and strange—the postindustrial inner city. Smith's neighborhood, pushed by the influx of Southerners in the 1940s and the stirrings of a postwar initiative to win social justice for urban blacks, seemed at midcentury to be on the brink of an explosion. Dunphy's, still conforming at midcentury to the template of the immigrant ethnic village, was just beginning to feel the effects of a diffusion and contraction that would accelerate in the 1960s. The two authors, both of whom read widely from an early age, also shared an engagement with the Chicago neigh-

borhood novelists: Dunphy's spare, prose-poetic style glossed James T. Farrell's definitive portrait of Irish industrial urbanism with enough novelty to attract Farrell's displeasure; Smith set out to write protest novels that would develop the literary possibilities of social critique beyond what he called the "wooden, Dreiser-esque" example of Richard Wright.^[1]

Jack Dunphy, born in Atlantic City in 1914, grew up poor in St. Monica's parish, an area of particularly narrow streets and weathered rowhouses deep in South Philadelphia. His father was a linotype operator; his mother kept house. As Dunphy and his siblings described the Irish urban village to Gerald Clarke, a biographer of Dunphy's longtime companion Truman Capote, "the residents of those drab little row houses regarded themselves as members of a clan and held in fine disdain anyone who wanted to leave for the wider world outside." The making of an urban intellectual can be a violent process under such circumstances, especially in a neighborhood suspicious of boys who like opera and books more than sports. Dunphy's sister Olive tells of an episode in which a local boy taunted her bookish brother Jack, shouting "Come on down and play, Mary" until Jack threw down his book, "leaped over the porch railing and attacked him, smashing his head again and again against the sidewalk."^[2] Dunphy left high school to work in factories but found his way out of the industrial grind through dance. After studying dance, Dunphy toured with the Balanchine company in South America, performed at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and had a small part in the original Oklahoma on Broadway. He served in the army in Europe from 1944 to 1946, the year John Fury was published. A self-taught writer, and inspired by a reading of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, he had begun writing the novel years before while on tour in South America. John Fury was the first, and by most accounts the best, of his several books, setting the pattern for subsequent novels' examination of Irish Catholic family life.^[3] He also wrote plays, but his modest career as a writer after John Fury took place almost entirely in the shadow cast by Capote, his companion of thirty-five years. After separating from his wife, the dancer Joan McCracken, Dunphy met Capote in 1948, and they were together until Capote's death in 1988. Dunphy died in 1992. Dance, writing, and Capote took Dunphy a long way from South Philadelphia: to New York City's high life, to extensive travel in Europe, and to Sagaponack on Long Island, where the Nature Conservancy's Capote-Dunphy Preserve memorializes their resting place.

William Gardner Smith, born in 1927, grew up in family homes on Ninth Street, Wilder Street, and Twentieth Street, all within the black neighborhoods of South Philadelphia that bracketed South Street. His stepfather earned modest pay as a custodian, and the family had to make do in a climate of poverty. Smith reminisced in print about stuffing newspapers in the holes in his shoes,

losing belongings when a firetrap house burned down, and going to war as a member of the local street gang against the Irish gangs of Grays Ferry, the Italians across Reed Street, and other black gangs.^[4] Educated in the Philadelphia public schools, he was an early reader and took early to writing as well: he was producing copy for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's leading black newspapers, while still in high school; and he wrote his first novel, Last of the Conquerors, at the age of twenty upon his return from an eight-month tour of duty with the army in occupied Europe. South Street was his third novel (following Anger at Innocence) and his greatest critical and popular success. By the time of its publication in 1954, he had been living in Paris for three years, settled into the community of expatriate American black artists that included prominent urban intellectuals Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes. He lived in Paris, working for Agence France-Presse and writing one more published novel (The Stone Face ), until his death in 1974. He left Europe for only one extended period—to serve as an administrator of state television and the Institute of Journalism in Ghana, another meeting place for expatriate black intellectuals, from 1964 until Nkrumah was overthrown by a military coup in 1966. He also made two short visits to the United States, for a month at the height of the urban crisis in 1967 and again in 1968, gathering the materials for his last book, a journalistic account entitled Return to Black America (1 970).^[5]

Dunphy and Smith, two homegrown South Philadelphia talents who went far afield into the literary life, initiated the exploration of larger subjects in their South Street novels. Dunphy's exploration of the urban village's inner life in John Fury provided the template for one of the central themes of his artistic and personal life: the shock of Irish Catholic urban villagers' encounter with a wider world of high culture, wealth, and models of family and morality far removed from neighborhood norms. That theme finds fittingly confusing expression in the interpolation of an invented priest in crisis, a fictional character who seems to be a double of Dunphy, into Dear Genius, Dunphy's otherwise nonfictional account of his relationship with Capote. Smith's local exploration of the Black Metropolis in the postwar moment of protest and growth established the starting point for a literary and journalistic career dominated by the theme of urban black Americans' engagement with a larger world: the possibilities suggested by European race relations and culture; the postcolonial possibilities, suggested by Ghana, for reconstituting black locality under the auspices of black internationalism; the responsibility of black intellectuals to apply the lessons of Africa and Europe to the American inner city. Those themes were given final expression in Return to Black America, in which a much-changed Smith returns after sixteen years abroad to find his old neighborhood transformed by the urban crisis into a nascent postcolonial nation besieged by imperial America.

Dunphy's and Smith's literary journeys begin in the industrial neighborhood order of South Philadelphia at midcentury, the world given imaginative life in John Fury and South Street. This world, on the verge of postindustrial transformation, attracted and focused the attention of these two homegrown urban intellectuals: in that sense, it produced them, bringing them to literary maturity just in time to imagine its passing.

John Fury (1946)

The composite story of the postwar South Street literature begins deep in South Philadelphia with a white-ethnic decline. As the way of life native to the industrial villages of South Philadelphia began to contract, unravel, and disperse, versions of white-ethnic decline predictably appeared. John Fury, set in St. Monica's parish, imagines the decline of an urban people's way of life—that of prewar Philadelphia's Irish Catholic industrial workers—through the failure of John Fury, a close-mouthed and serious-minded "steady working man," to sustain his family and his way of life into the next generation. Spanning a period of perhaps thirty years that begins roughly at the turn of the century, from Fury's young manhood to his death at fifty-four, the novel proceeds as a series of family dramas: Fury's marriage to his first wife, Mame; the launching of their household and family; her death of consumption; the souring of Fury's second marriage; the familial shocks and separations as his daughters marry and his son goes bad; Fury's expulsion from the home, leading to his death. Fury dies after falling from his front steps while attempting to batter down his front door with an iron pipe, his second wife, Bridget, having locked the house against him in a dramatization of familial collapse.

In the novel's final lines, Fury's literal fall, culminating that of his family, further generalizes itself as the figurative fall of a people. His death sends a kind of impulse through the neighborhood—up two blocks on Twenty-third Street from Seigal Street to the corner of Moore Street^[6] —where it seems to transfix Mrs. Harrigan, a neighbor also driven into the streets and bewildered by the collapse of her household:

Ah, she said and though it pained her what she felt and though she held herself with the pain, her fist clenched hard and her fist's knuckles blue, jammed between her sagging breasts, she smiled.

Ah, she said and she sank to the pavement. It's all over with us, she said.^[7]

In those final lines, the novel completes its argument for Fury as an exemplar of a particular people caught in a particular place and time.^[8]

John Fury frames the microhistory of Fury's decline within an imagined historical moment—or, more precisely, within a heavily freighted myth-historical

moment: the passing of a horse-and-wagon Philadelphia in which people like John Fury, exemplar of the Irish who came to America to build its industrial cities, could work and raise families that sustained their way of life. A paragraph-long preamble to the novel, offering in miniature the kind of historical concordance that City on the Make supplies for Golden Arm, suggests in portentous mock-epic tones that John Fury is about this slipping into the past of Fury's Philadelphia. Introducing a novel of what happened when the city had been built and begun to change, the preamble concludes by describing the fate of the Irish in urban America: "they landed and a shovel was placed in their hands or a hammer or spade and they built Boston and New York and Chicago and Philadelphia. And in the evenings they walked home in the leaning shadows of the gray stone to their one room or two rooms and fell into bewildered sleep."^[9] The preamble thus promises a novel about the home life of these immigrant laborers, which John Fury surely is, but it also puts in motion a historical narrative. When the kind of work required by that earlier moment of city building is done, the way of life defined by that kind of work begins to fall to pieces along long-standing internal fault lines, much as does Fury's second marriage.

As a decline narrative, John Fury has a rich sense of the past and in fact projects a postwar moment of decline into the prewar past, but it has very little corresponding sense of the future as anything more than the extended decay of past and present. Familial barrenness serves as the central metaphor of this sense of winding down to a terminus. Even though Fury's daughters, Lizzie and Katie (both borne by his first wife, Mame), produce children into the next generation, Fury's family proves barren in the sense that it cannot reproduce its patriarch's way of life. Lizzie marries well and leaves the neighborhood, climbing toward a middle-class life in North Philadelphia; Katie marries badly, to a lace-curtain snob who reviles her family and eventually breaks with them in their last stages of violent decline. Fury's second marriage produces a son, John Jr., a drunkard and idler who sponges off his indulgent mother, will not work, and does not marry. Fury's only son, his father's physical duplicate but otherwise his antithesis, appears to be the end of the Fury name and the history of migration, neighborhood-based urbanism, and city-building hard work associated with it.

This familial barrenness comes to light in a series of emotionally and physically violent conflicts staged for the most part in Philadelphia's signature domestic landscape—the plain, orderly interiors of two-story rowhouses. Familial collapse as the collapse of an entire people's way of life takes final form in the paired figures of Fury and Mrs. Harrigan, each of whom is driven from a troubled rowhouse home to fall in the street. The argument that the Fury family stands for a people, that their inability to reproduce their way of life stands for a people's inability, is made clearest in those moments in which the novel takes to the streets of South Philadelphia.

John Fury plots its narrative on a high-industrial cityscape in the streets

south of South: modest rowhouse blocks, railroad tracks running down Washington Avenue at grade, horse-and-wagon traffic intermixed with cars and trucks. Fury's revealing walks through this world allow the reader to discern the meanings legible in its form. Denied work at his trade-—driving a coal wagon—by the foreman at his old job, Fury walks south on Nineteenth Street from Washington Avenue to his daughter Katie's house on Roseberry, a narrow side street. Fury's passage through it allows Roseberry Street to speak its message, to the reader if not to him:

It's [sic] houses smothered close together, jammed two stories high, and with small wooden porches hung on their fronts, looked like stony red-faced criminals serving a life sentence. Stuck together and dependent one upon the other, they seemed to live in constant fear that someday and somehow one would be pardoned and leave and so jeopardize the rest of them. They stood then, those square red bricked houses, and there were many of them in Philadelphia, tortured row upon row of them, doing penitence and allowing life with its worn semblance of freedom to crowd within them.

Only in summer with the sun beating upon their roofs and with the screaming of all the children and the women's nagging tongues did they seem to sag one row toward the other. Then, and who can blame them, did they appear to say, Let us fall all together. We have stood long enough. (219)

In moments like this, the cityscape argues for generalizing Fury's failure. Driven from his home and unable to work, Fury walks in the street with the two foundations of his way of life collapsing beneath him. Roseberry Street's fanciful collapse takes the form of rowhouses falling, because one "leave[s]" or because they "fall all together." The collapsing houses enact the implications of Fury's crumbling household, and the communal character of the collapse images the classic case for the way an ethnic neighborhood "goes," despite and because of its sense of solidarity: first one household, then all at once. The figure expands to include many similar blocks of Philadelphia and the neighborhood order for which they stand, the way of life they "crowd within them." In this way, the houses on Roseberry Street speak for the passing of an urbanism exemplified by Fury's household. It is therefore fitting that the bitter argument that marks this family's final, irrevocable collapse occurs at Katie's house on Roseberry, at a christening party.

That collapse begins early in the novel, just as, the preamble implies, the eventual collapse of the city-building immigrants' way of life is fated from the moment of their arrival. Fury's life goes wrong when his first wife, Mame, dies young. Standing outside the door of her bedroom at the moment of her death, he has a vision: "Suddenly with train whistles screeching, he felt himself racing his horses alongside the Washington Avenue tracks and beating the horses to go faster and faster and holding in one sweating hand the leathery reins

which kept stretching away from him." The reins continue to elongate and the train rushes past, "far up the tracks and his horses and wagon after it, leaving Fury stumbling behind dragging in the last of the long leathery reins" (51). When he returns to himself, she has died.

In that runaway scene, as in the moment of Fury's death, the novel elegizes the immigrant-ethnic urbanism made by Irish industrial workers. Fury's race with the train is not about the industrial train replacing the preindustrial horse, a progression familiar from Westerns. After all, the pervasiveness of trains in the Chicago literature reminds us that the railroad is an integral element of the industrial city inhabited by characters as different as John Fury and Sister Carrie. Rather, the race with the train provides an image of arrival at an urban limit, a moment we encounter throughout the literature of South Street in which some underlying and life-shaping urban logic impresses itself in palpable form on a character moving in the cityscape. The race with the train, like the replacement of the coal wagon by the "motorized truck" that helps put him out of work, allows Fury an insight into the impotence of his individual will: the order of work and family crowded within the rowhouse world depends not on his ability as working man, husband, and father to sustain it but on vast urban-industrial processes of technological change and business as usual that rush on and leave him behind. There may be individuals exercising their considerably more powerful wills to guide such processes, but they are hidden from the view of people like John Fury, whose experience of change is of seeing through the "worn semblance of freedom" to the metropolitan processes that shape life in the neighborhoods. The period in which his services were required having ended, the industrial city rushes on to the next thing, leaving him holding reins that do not control anything. Like Algren's Chicagoans—although none of those two-bit hustlers qualifies as a steady worker—Fury comes up against an iron logic expressed in the built form of the city's rail lines, which defeat him and delimit his world. In the parallel failures of family and work, figured in the scene of Mame's death via the hallucinated juxtaposition of domestic interior and industrial cityscape, the novel encapsulates the human dimensions of an urban order and its passing.

John Fury, then, is a standard white-ethnic decline, a generic sibling of Golden Arm and a forerunner of many, many declines to follow (including God's Pocket, discussed in chapter 7). Like Golden Arm, John Fury draws upon the language and themes used by the Chicago neighborhood novelists to represent industrial urbanism: a narrow landscape that expresses both social constraint and the characters' restricted understanding of their place in the urban system; violent familial collapse that dramatizes the injuries of class; individual will crushed or twisted to self-destructive ends by the encounter with powerful economic and cultural forces. Like Golden Arm, John Fury refits that prewar repertoire to the purposes of a postwar formula, the white-ethnic decline

that turns from social critique to something more like elegy. One can perceive signs of that refitting in Dunphy's prose style.

John Fury's formal innovations mark its relation to a literature of industrial urbanism  defined for many readers by a fellow chronicler of the Irish in America, the Chicago neighborhood novelist James T Farrell. The volumes in Farrell's massive Studs Lonigan trilogy were canonical Chicago neighborhood novels, occupying the center of an established tradition of representing the world of the Irish and European "new immigrants" and their descendants in the urban village. Dunphy, writing in the 1940s, played off the expectations raised by working Farrell's literary turf.^[10] Showing the influence of Gertrude Stein, Dunphy turns Farrell's flat, descriptive "sociological" style into a kind of prose poetry by ostentatiously stripping it down to the bone: leaving out many commas, quotation marks, apostrophes, paragraph indentations, most of the main plot points, and about 250 pages of the naturalistic period detail one would expect in Chicago neighborhood novels, John Fury seems to expect that readers can fill in the details from their generic knowledge of Irish-American and proletarian narratives.^[11] That process helps to give the novel its elegiac charge: the worn familiarity of the industrial city of feeling, like that of industrial urbanism in general, marks its arrival at the end of the line. Farrell did not appreciate the intimation of decline or the backhanded acknowledgment of influence, finding John Fury's "relative brevity" and "impressionistic, sketchy manner" unfit for its subject. Predictably, he understood that subject to be not an elegy for industrial urbanism but rather another attempt to critique it in the manner he helped codify in the 1930s. "If [Fury] is to be presented as a passive victim of exploitation," he argued, "then the story would demand a fuller and broader use of detail, a use of detail which would bring more of his working life into the narrative."^[12] Farrell wanted those 250 pages back in the novel. So did Jack Conroy, another writer of Farrell's and Algren's circle, who seconded this opinion in a review that identified Dunphy's "typographical effects" (which smacked of "surrealistic or ultra-modernistic writing") as "an annoying impediment" to telling the powerful, familiar story of the "poverty-harried Celt."^[13] These reviewers registered discomfort with the signs of a generic progression: Dunphy was machining the older orders of the proletarian novel into the decline, and some Chicago neighborhood novelists did not like the signs of change in their literary neighborhood.

Those signs of change in the city of feeling paralleled changes in the city of fact. The industrial neighborhood order of South Philadelphia was still in full flower in the late 1940s, but postwar transformations were already on the horizon. One salient aspect of those multiple, interconnected changes was the growth of the black inner city. Conflict at the boundaries of black and whiteethnic neighborhoods was as old as racial prejudice but also as new as the postwar migrations of people and capital that put the social landscape of the inner

city in motion. Violent struggles between white ethnics and blacks in postwar South Philadelphia were some of the most obvious signs of a deeper, thoroughgoing change in urbanism that embraced both whites and blacks, both urban village and Black Metropolis.^[14] By the same token, the pattern of racial violence traceable in all of the South Street literature indicates an appreciation of the violence of urban process shared by novels of white-ethnic neighborhood life and novels of black neighborhood life.

Following the tracery of violence, one can see how the story of decline enters into conversation with complementary stories figuring the black inner city's postwar expansion and transformation, a process that became evident to observers in the 1940s and 1950s and eventually became the central matter of the urban crisis in the 1960s. One episode in John Fury opens a narrative link between the white-ethnic decline and the stories linked to the second ghetto's growth and maturation told by Smith, Bradley, and McKinney-Whetstone (and the authors discussed in part 3): early in the novel, on the day Mame gives birth to their first child, Fury knocks down a black driver who cuts in ahead of Fury's wagon at the company stable. The black driver responds by slashing Fury with a razor, after which another white driver takes away the razor and gives the black man a beating. In that violent moment—and in the judgment of Bridget's brother Thomas that Fury is an obstacle to her social advancement because he "never has a word t'say but goes around thrashin niggers" (79)—John Fury suggests how we can begin to move through the narrative of white-ethnic decline into the complementary acts and extended landscape of postwar South Street's composite drama. John Fury, like John Fury, has no interest in black urbanism-the black character is there only to be beaten—but the contours of John Fury's story fit with those of black characters in the South Street literature to follow.

South Street (1954)

If John Fury is about the gradual end of a people's way of life, William Gardner Smith's South Street, published eight years later in 1954, wants to be about the persistence and internal cohesion of community. If John Fury sees a neighborhood in decline—and even, in the novel's darker moments of insight, collapsing all at once—then South Street wants to see a neighborhood regenerating itself and reaffirming the continuing connection of people to place as it grows. Mapping a self-sustaining black community that resolves crises of internal division in order to meet the external threat of attack from John Fury's people, South Street takes up the problems of neighborhood raised by the midcentury battles fought at the boundaries of America's inner-city neighborhoods and workplaces. The growth of the city's black population and expansion of

black neighborhoods, the initial stages of contraction and unraveling in the system of white-ethnic urban villages, and the conflicts that arose out of these linked processes were all part of the larger transformation of urbanism after the war. The progrowth coalition of business and government responded to that larger transformation with the blueprint for postindustrial Philadelphia embodied in the comprehensive plan, which included the Crosstown scheme. Published just as the progrowth coalition was making plans that would drastically reshape Center City's (and thus South Street's) future, South Street occupies a historical moment that inflects the novel with a special irony. Projecting the future of the black inner city from a late-1940s template, the novel imagines its local heroes assuring black South Street's place in the industrial neighborhood order. But that arrangement of orders, John Mollenkopf's "blue-collar mosaic" undone by postindustrial transformation, was already breaking up under pressure from forces operating at the metropolitan, even the international, scale.

South Street takes place in an early stage of the overlap between the smaller and relatively stable prewar black neighborhood order and the second ghetto that would take mature form by the early 1960s. In the northern industrial cities, Philadelphia and Chicago prominent among them, the second ghetto was shaped by a volatile mix of factors: massive in-migration of Southern blacks during the war years and after; continuing residential racial segregation, leading to enormous population pressure in black neighborhoods; the economic and physical redevelopment of inner cities in response to deindustrialization and suburbanization; and politically charged efforts to respond to this urban racial crisis with government-funded slum clearance, relocation, and housing projects. South Street maps a neighborhood in which some of these transformative circumstances have begun to converge but have not yet coalesced into a new order.

The novel shows us a South Street that seems to fit the prewar model of Philadelphia's most established black neighborhoods. The middle classes are invested in the area for the foreseeable future (a condition encouraged by the strictness of forced residential segregation); there is a thriving commercial strip of black-owned stores, clubs, bars, and other businesses; the modest industrial-era housing stock is privately owned, low-rise, and for the most part well maintained. Despite the presence of classic 1950s juvenile delinquents, men and women stroll through the neighborhood at night with no particular fear of violence, and the only instance of drug use takes place among middle-aged jazz musicians. This older Black Metropolis, similar to Bronzeville on Chicago's South Side, was one among the ethnic villages ("like beads on a string" along South Street, in Denise Scott Brown's phrase) that made up industrial Philadelphia's neighborhood order. Deindustrialization and suburbanization, which had such a powerful influence on the postwar erosion of white-ethnic neigh-

borhoods, exerted an equally powerful but drastically different effect on black neighborhoods: as jobs and capital were redistributed toward the metropolitan periphery and its downtown center, inner-city blacks found it difficult to redistribute themselves as freely. They found themselves penned behind the second ghetto's "invisible walls."

The novel tells us, often in awkwardly informative asides, that historical pressures leading to the formation of the second ghetto have begun to transform the neighborhood and its relation to the city:

Since the great influx of workers from the South to defense plants during the war, the usual Negro sections of the city had become intolerably congested: even the wholesale transformation of houses into rooming houses, and the letting of rooms in private homes, and the building of housing projects (Government financed) on vacant ground, had done almost nothing to ease the situation. So, slowly, the Negro areas had been pushing outward, encroaching on territory formerly exclusively for white people; and those of the white population in this threatened area who could, hastily packed their bags and moved much further back, away from the "front lines." Some could not move. Between these, and the pressing Negroes, grew up conflict.^[15]

The parenthesis, "(Government financed)," is an awkward digression within a paragraph that awkwardly digresses from the novel's plot. The novel stops what it is doing, which is showing us a melodramatic feud between two major characters, to tell us about sociohistorical developments in midcentury Philadelphia. Written in the early 1950s and from an expatriate's perspective, South Street comes equipped to imagine the old neighborhood under strain, not the place it will become. The writers its characters invoke by name—poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Willard Motley, the early Chester Himes, and especially Richard Wright—are writers of the Black Metropolis. (Writing about the second ghetto, Himes later became a very different writer indeed.) The in-betweenness of the novel's historical moment finds expression in the gap between what the novel can show—how it can imagine its city and what it has precedent for showing—and what it can only tell us about the still-emerging postwar inner city. The language to represent that emergent inner city, especially its black neighborhoods in the throes of transformation, was still developing at midcentury. The novel's awkwardnesses are not just part of its tone and its charm—they are marks of its literary-historical moment.

Although South Street takes note of developments that will lead to the second ghetto's formation, it is still a novel of the Black Metropolis, and its spatial and political imaginations express that orientation. Embodying the external threat to South Street in young white-ethnic toughs very much like John Fury Jr., South Street turns its back on Center City to attend to the dynamics of

neighborhood in South Philadelphia. It concerns itself with relations between the industrial city's neighborhoods, a subject condensed in black South Street's violent encounter with the Irish of Grays Ferry. Center City does receive mention as a seat of power, but only in the abstract as the locus of machine government, the function of which is to help contain black South Street's expansion and autonomy. South Street, mapping a community in order to plot its campaign for self-preservation against other elements of the industrial neighborhood order, is therefore not positioned in time or space to conceive of the terrific blow about to take black South Philadelphia in the back in the form of the Crosstown Expressway plan. Not, of course, that the novel, or any work of fiction, is obliged to anticipate or prepare for such a blow from the city of fact. However, the novel's place in the South Street literature's composite narrative of postindustrial transformation creates opportunities to read it against a larger backdrop, including a future obviously unavailable to its author. Also, we are encouraged to read South Street in relation to its historical moment for two reasons that form main lines of analysis in my reading of the novel.

First, South Street's story of three brothers finding the means to ensure their neighborhood's integrity into the next generation—a passionately local, parochial subject—is undermined not only by what we know of the novel's historical moment but also (as I argue later in this chapter) by a line of counterargument within the text itself. Winding through the story of the three Bowers brothers' struggle to resolve linked family and neighborhood crises is a critique of the resolutions they accomplish. South Street suspects that forces beyond the imagination or control of its heroic urban-intellectual protagonists will render their triumph contrived and temporary. The subsequent history of South Street develops that theme in ways the novel could not imagine.

Second, the question of the relation of literary writing and literary intellectuals to their historical moment was at the center of Smith's work. South Street thinks at length about the black intellectual's relation to the inner city he represents, a subject Smith expanded upon in a critical essay—published in Phylon— on Wright, Himes, and the black intellectual's "duty" to avoid "social detachment."^[16] The story of Smith's heroes the Bowers brothers is about the formation of engaged black intellectuals suited to the task of representing the postwar inner city, and one of its governing themes is the problem of constructing a city of feeling from materials provided by the city of fact. We are therefore encouraged to perform a similar reading of the novel against the city of fact upon which it drew. Written during the great postwar wave of ghettoization and suburbanization, but more than a decade before that wave would crest in American cultural and social life during the ghetto-centered urban crisis of the 1960s, the novel's account of a crisis (ironically) resolved in the black inner city asks to be read against its historical moment.

The Neighborhood Reproduction Drama

South Street proceeds by shifting among the subjectivities of a large network of characters as they move through a landscape of streets, homes, and bars centered on South Street. It is a novel of long walks and long talks, with some of the principal walkers and talkers being Lil, the neighborhood's most coveted woman; Lil's boyfriend Slim, a successful hustler employed by the Italian numbers syndicate; the Old Man, an unspecified political machine's local black functionary; and a broadly archetypal blueswoman called simply the Blues Singer. At the novel's center are the Bowers brothers: Claude, a nationally prominent writer and civil rights activist; Michael, a Negro nationalist firebrand; and Philip, a would-be poet. They form a miniature character system around which the others revolve. The novel's various family and neighborhood crises—couplings and uncouplings, struggles against the Irish of Grays Ferry, problems of sustaining the neighborhood into the next generation—are resolved by the temporarily exiled Claude's return to South Street. Walking on South Street at the novel's dramatic climax, he returns to the neighborhoodbased identity that enables his intellectual work, throwing off the moral and intellectual paralysis that has threatened him during his self-imposed exile from the neighborhood: "endless, baffling Time and endless, terrifying Space? One could, should, be aware of them, in wonder and in awe. But one could not live in their contemplation; one could not live according to their all-paralyzing commentary. One lived—whether one wanted to or not—in the bounded time and the bounded space of one's own life and one's own world" (310-II). Having ventured into the larger time and space of the metropolis, Claude returns to the "bounded" time and space of the neighborhood to avert a riot at the novel's end. This exercise of leadership marks him as a fully engaged urban intellectual with the power and responsibility to protect his "own world."

Like John Fury's, the Bowers brothers' family history (further condensed, as with Fury and his no-good son, in the paternal line) encapsulates that of a people, extending from the moment of their father's lynching in the South to their various struggles to make a viable future for themselves in the urban North. Claude's romance with Kristin, a white classical musician, and his climactic decision to choose South Street over her; Michael's romance with black nationalism, unsatisfyingly consummated with acts of violence; Philip's romance with bohemia and highbrow detachment, which ends abruptly with his violent death—these narratives of family crisis and the making of inner-city intellectuals structure the novel as each brother tries to make sense of the neighborhood and his place in it. Each brother seeks a synthetic understanding of the kaleidoscopic bits and pieces of urban experience presented by the novel's episodic form and shifting subjectivities. Philip dies trying; Michael fails but helps Claude to succeed.

South Street's action extends through the streets above and below South Street, into Center City, to distant Philadelphia locations, and briefly as far as New York and Montreal, but South Street forms its spatial backbone and center. Specifically, the novel's South Street extends roughly ten blocks east to west, from about Twelfth Street (east of which were predominantly white-ethnic neighborhoods) to the three-way intersection of Grays Ferry Avenue, Twenty-third Street, and South. That intersection forms the community's best-defined border, marked by a post against which Claude Bowers leans, drinking a beer, "staring off, alone, thinking, dreaming, toward Grays Ferry" (171), the novel's white-ethnic terra incognita. Although there were white-owned businesses and white shoppers on this stretch of South Street in the 1950s, and although a rich variety of ethnic groups lived cheek by jowl in the areas around it, South Street renders South Street as an all-black space ending abruptly at a clearly marked border with an unmapped and homogeneously Irish Grays Ferry.^[17] This simplicity of spatial form and racial scheme allows the novel to pursue complexity where it wishes to—in the inner life of the black community it selectively assembles.

That community takes shape on the pavements of South Street. The novel opens with the first of many street scenes: "It was a hot Saturday in July, and South Street was crowded: people promenading, vendors with their wares, streetcars clanging, automobiles crawling slowly and honking their horns. The brown pedestrians wore, for the most part, no coats or ties; their shirts were open at the neck and their sleeves rolled up above their elbows. Slim burned in the heat, walking slowly" (3). The pedestrians we can see are brown (and, apparently, male); if there are whites, they do not rate a mention. Here, the crowd indicates the neighborhood's vigorous good health—the commercial liveliness of a good business day, the robust health of working people. Similarly, the figure of the crowded street in other scenes indicates cultural vigor, a viability of tradition and community. South Street's spring festival, especially, serves as a ritual of renewal in which the crowd ratifies the neighborhood's status as a community. Although "no one in the neighborhood knew exactly when, or under what conditions, the custom of having a festival had originated," the montage of marching bands, dance bands, beer drinking, politicians courting votes, speakers invoking "'the days of our forefathers"' (139), and contestants for the Elocution Prize reading poets of the Harlem Renaissance arrives at a moment of communal plenitude and integrity:

They listened, then, the audience—listened, even the youngsters, as they shuffle danced to the music which was the soul-beat of a people:

I hate to see that evenin 'sun go down

dancing, and the old people and the young, with cold beer running down their throats, and the knowledge of the neighborhood which was the world and the peo-

ple who were the universe, and fish burning tongue, and ice cream cold, and Holiday. (142-43)

The novel argues that South Street forms the spatial ground of this people's being, just as the blues forms its spiritual ground. In roping off the street and dancing in it, the crowd enacts the connection between the quality of neighborhood—proceeding from a shared way of life—and the neighborhood as a place in which that shared life takes form.

The "knowledge of the neighborhood which was the world" requires urban intellectuals who can grasp and articulate that knowledge. Their job, performed by the Blues Singer in the festival scene, is to reinforce and reproduce the neighborhood order by reminding the crowd that it is a self-contained, unified entity—"the people who were the universe." The festival passage achieves final refinement in a chaos of sharply defined impressions—"and fish burning tongue, and ice cream cold, and Holiday"—that somehow contain within them the meaning of neighborhood. Those who would take up the responsibility of representing the neighborhood, in both the literary and the political senses, must give form to those bits and pieces of neighborhood content. In doing so, these representers impart coherence to the neighborhood. There is, of course, a global component to this local responsibility: the bonds of race and social class, culture, and history that make the people of South Street a people are the same bonds that make black Americans a people. The intellectuals who wish to represent the neighborhood aspire to represent a race. Three candidates, the three Bowers brothers, aspire to that responsibility as writers.

If the crowd stands for a people, the Bowers family narrative both encapsulates that people's story and produces candidates for the task of writing it. Claude makes the case explicit in his own writing: "'A nation throws up its heroes, in whom are concentrated all of the group ideals, the group feelings, the group courage. The hero is himself nothing; he is a focal point, a galvanizer of the energies already latent in his people; his voice is not his voice at all, but their voices concentrated. And anything the hero does or says—it is they, his people, who do or say it"' (91). The Bowers family narrative considers the relation of three brothers—writers, intellectuals, potential leaders—to the notions of place and peoplehood conjoined in the term "South Street." Through a series of movements back and forth between South Street and other terrains, and by articulating the brothers' various relationships to the crowd on South Street, their stories are made to exemplify three versions of crisis in the formation of urban intellectuals accredited to represent the black inner city. In working out the writer's place in the world of South Street, the Bowers brothers provide a triple structural spine running through the novel along which its fragmentary forms and meanings—its writing—arrange themselves.

The aspiring poet and bohemian Philip, the youngest, proves himself inade-

quate as an urban intellectual by insisting on separating literature from South Street. The novel makes this clear by cross-cutting between South Street and the indeterminately located apartment in which Philip ("one of the two Negroes present") meets his circle of "actual or aspiring writers, painters, teachers or the like." The men of this group, "with coats off and sleeves rolled up," make a pale bohemian imitation of the shirt-sleeved South Street crowd presented in the novel's opening scene. They reach a rough consensus on the separation of the intellectual from the social order and historical circumstances embodied by the crowd, especially when "social stress and strain" compel him to "escape the convulsions and violence" of his historical moment. They agree that the intellectual "has always been detached from the mainstream of society" (87-88). Their endorsement of "detachment" marks their conclusion as precisely the opposite of the position that Smith took in his Phylon essay on the responsibilities of Negro writers, and South Street deploys its energies to demolish the misguided ideas of Philip's associates.

Their conversation, joined in midstream and departed in midsentence, forms a separate chapter significantly bracketed by two neighborhood vignettes that identify Philip as the wrong kind of urban intellectual. The preceding chapter describes how Lil's father had over the years made a habit of entering her room at night, culminating in an attempted rape, which Lil resisted by braining him with an ash stand—echoing Lutie Johnson's culminative act of violence in Ann Petry's The Street. The chapter following the intellectuals' discussion consists of three short paragraphs, reminiscent of Native Son's opening scene and markedly closer than the rest of the novel to Wright's starker setting and tone, in which a nameless tubercular woman, living in a South Street tenement and abandoned by her drunken husband, discovers a rat in her child's crib: "she felt the hideous biting and squirming in her hand, then she dashed the rat, with all her strength, against the wall" (90). Philip's notions of detachment, presented as an inability to accept the social and historical hard facts of South Street as the ground of his intellectual being, cut him off from Lil and the nameless woman. Were he the right kind of urban intellectual, Philip would know that his calling should be to speak their stories, in the manner theorized by Claude's notion of the hero, practiced by the Blues Singer in her music, and practiced as well by Petry and Wright in the novels to which South Street apparently refers via ash stand and rat. Philip's failure to recognize that calling, to understand the neighborhood's "bounded space and bounded time" as limits to be crossed at his peril, render him and South Street of no sustaining use to one another. That he dies just before his wedding day helps mark him as a barren element of the Bowers line, in that sense the John Fury Jr. of this family drama.

Philip's relation to the crowd must therefore ring false. Moving through it during the festival, he enjoys a mistaken feeling of connectedness: "He had never felt such strength before: moral and physical. He felt himself expand. . . .

Now, new-born, a new Philip moved in the world! He was with people now!" (149-50). The tinny, facile quality of this realization undercuts the moment, however, and Philip draws precisely the wrong conclusion. He feels that to be "with people" he must throw over his literary self: "Had that been life, the immersion into books, into endless discussions, into Freud, into Kafka, into Dostoievsky?" (147). Because he understands writing as removing himself from the neighborhood, his subsequent and inevitable return to literature, in the form of a retreat to his circle of literary friends and a library job, entails a complementary distancing from South Street. Philip's straying from home takes the spatial form of an ill-advised walk to the borders of Grays Ferry, where he fatally encounters a hard fact in the shape of a rock thrown by an Irish youth from the other side of the frontier. He is the first but not the last urban intellectual in the South Street literature to get hit in the head for misunderstanding his relation to the social landscape and the stories it houses.

Michael, the middle brother, "breathe[s] Negro nationalism" (193) and doles out, rather than receives, physical punishment. The family's advocate of direct political action, he writes speeches, not poetry. Unlike his brothers, Michael leaves South Street rarely and briefly and usually with violent results: he punches out a white man on Market Street in Center City; he leads punitive expeditions against the Irish youth gangs of Grays Ferry. Michael's violent tendencies point up his great weakness as an urban intellectual—an inability to grasp that South Street means a way of life to be nurtured and sustained by articulating its internal logic, not just territory to be defended. The faction-ridden Negro Action Society he founds never becomes a significant force because he cannot recognize, make coherent, and invoke the bonds of community that must underlie the kinds of political action he aspires to direct.

Michael, however, shows a nascent promise as an urban intellectual, a promising fit to the social landscape in which he moves, that Philip never does. Michael's capacity for direct action, combined with his eleventh-hour reconciliation with Claude (the brothers having broken over Claude's marriage to Kristin), suggests that Michael, while yet misguided, might grow under Claude's influence into a viable leader. This future takes embryonic shape in the initial raid on Grays Ferry, when Michael joins forces with teenage gang members to retaliate for an Irish gang's attack on a black man. The political leader working hand in hand with gang members was to be one of Smith's enduring dreams. Sixteen years after the publication of South Street, having come from his home in France to survey black America in crisis, Smith articulated that dream at greater length in his nonfiction work Return to Black America. He saw a possible politicization of youth gangs as "one of the most significant phenomena I noted during my tour of the United States," suggesting to him a new convergence of interest among political leaders and violent young men around defense of the community. One gang member he interviewed imagined a fan-

tasy scenario that reads like a racially politicized variant of that in Sol Yurick's teen-gang epic The Warriors: the gang member envisioned a "'federation of gangs. All the black gangs in Philadelphia. Then, there ain't gonna be no more gang fights. Just one black army.'"^[18]

To Smith in the late 1960s, Michael would appear in retrospect as an early visionary, anticipating by more than a decade this transformation of youthful delinquents into actors in the arena of racial politics. In a sense, Michael is prepared and "saved" for such a future by a protest novel of the 1950s written at a time when that future, the urban crisis of the 1960s, could be conceived in only germinal form. However, the time for Michael's brand of leadership has not yet arrived in the world of South Street. His potential productivity, his capacity to lead the neighborhood in defending and reproducing itself by harnessing the energies of its youth, takes misguided form in the raid on Grays Ferry, which in turn leads directly to Philip's death: an Irish boy nursing a beating from a gang raid decides to get even by throwing the fatal rock. In that sense, Michael kills Philip.

The novel's climax is the return of Claude, the oldest Bowers brother, to South Street. Having left the neighborhood's circle of community to be with Kristin, he has been living with her in her studio near the city's edge. Although Claude has resisted the pull of South Street, Philip's death makes clear to him the necessity of his return. Claude's decision to commit himself anew to South Street asserts itself as the event that organizes and makes sense of the many bits and pieces—narrative threads, shifting subjectivities, fragments of anecdote and imagery—that make up the novel's portrait of South Street. Walking on South Street after Philip's death and his own break with Kristin, Claude understands that meaning must be pursued "in the bounded time and the bounded space of one's own life and one's own world, within the bounded nature of one's spiritual core." That is, he feels himself to be placed: "This was his blooded world, his cross, his love, his challenge—South Street" (311).

In Claude, South Street ultimately possesses an intellectual embodying Claude's own model of the race hero, singularly equipped to synthesize and express the experiences and needs of the people he encounters on his climactic walk—"an old man with white hair; couples chuckling; . . . a youth, with pork-pie hat and wide-legged trousers" (310). This reverse generational progression of age, coupling, and youth suggests in shorthand the range of South Street's character system: the Blues Singer and Michael, the juvenile delinquents and the Negro Action Society, Lil and the nameless tubercular woman, an old manual laborer who tells Claude about Marcus Garvey and a young law student who tells Claude that he wants to try cases before the Supreme Court —a line extending all the way back to the South and the Bowers brothers' martyred father. The novel's succession drama ends with the emergence of a figure who can effectively represent the neighborhood. Claude combines the formal

sophistication of Philip's aesthetic impulse and the social engagement of Michael's political imperative. Each element cancels the other's negative charge—Philip's social detachment, Michael's blindness to culture as the key to community—so that only Claude can encompass and speak for the way of life rendered schematically as the novel's character system and the street on which it is deployed. Claude, the only Bowers brother whose writing has reached a wider audience, is therefore the only character who can stop the self-destructive riot brewing after Philip's death: "'I tried to stop it,'" Michael says, "'but no one listened to me. They listened to Claude. They always listen to Claude"' (305—6).

South Street's last line offers an image of the neighborhood's continuing vitality: "The Blues Singer threw back her head and opened her mouth and began to sing" (312). That portrait of the most "organic" of urban intellectuals doing her cultural work—reinforcing the cultural ties that bind—clinches the novel's argument for South Street as a sustaining conjunction of place and peoplehood. The critical internal division represented by Michael's feud with Claude has resolved itself, and the Bowers family romance has resolved the neighborhood's crisis of reproduction by putting Claude in a position to represent South Street and lead it into the next generation.

The Counterargument

Looked at from another angle, however, the resolution of this crisis smacks of irony and incompleteness. After all, if family narrative provides the central metaphor of the community's reproduction, the Bowers brothers prove to be if anything more barren than the Furys: Philip dies before he can marry his fiancée; Michael's grim courtship of Philip's erstwhile fiancée, Margaret, who worships Claude, promises to remain loveless; and Claude, the only married brother, makes leaving his wife, Kristin, the condition for his return to South Street. The male Bowers line (about whose mother we know nothing) has purified itself through crisis and sacrifice but has not formed a subsequent generation of family groups. If the neighborhood's crisis of reproduction seems to end in resolution, with Claude on South Street and the Blues Singer singing, the male Bowers family's crisis of reproduction—which has been offered to us as the microcosm of a people's—ends in a kind of Pyrrhic spinsterhood, with no prospect of producing even the next batch of Bowers men.

Kristin provides a key to the novel's counterargument, which unravels the Bowers family narrative's argument for reproduction and continuity. Claude's solution to the novel's central problem, leaving Kristin, does not succeed in the fantasy project of erecting a hermetic barrier around the closed communal circle of South Street. Lines of what Michael and even Claude would understand

as "outside" influence persist in shaping life on South Street, a state of affairs that the novel acknowledges in several ways.

Kristin is one of several whites who move through the festival crowd, each representing a significant external influence that modifies or threatens the ideal of a self-sustaining, all-black South Street. The Italian gangster Pete, who dances with Lil at the street festival before taking up with her, represents the shadow government of organized crime. He underpays and abuses Slim and the other black numbers writers and finally has Slim, who is Lil's boyfriend and one of South Street's leading figures, beaten for insubordination. Similarly, the city's mayor (who opens the festival) and various policemen represent legitimate government. Paralleling Slim's fealty to Pete, the Old Man's authority on South Street proceeds in large part from his fealty to white politicians downtown. Like Pete's humiliation of Slim, episodes of police harassment and brutality—one of the issues around which Michael's Negro Action Society tries to organize neighborhood opinion—make it violently clear that metropolitan authority shapes the inner life of South Street in important ways.

It is, however, the gentle violinist Kristin, not the powers represented by gangsters or police, who poses the greatest threat to the Bowers brothers' reconstituted South Street. That the novel's climactic moment boils down to Claude's choosing South Street and the crowd over Kristin marks her as the novel's central problem. This is a curious framing of the problem for at least two reasons. First, the novel presents her as its only racial innocent, unable to see color as anything more than an aesthetic category: "Her problem was simple—she could not understand the great uproar that arose out of the color of a skin . . . Why, brown was a beautiful color, for all that, and, looking over groups of Negroes, noticing the infinite variety of shades—of textures, even—she had often felt a positive envy that her skin was a colorless white!" (204). Second, she endorses the Bowers brothers' vision of black South Street as a vital, closed circle. While she moves among the "groups of Negroes" in the festival crowds on South Street, her subjective experience catches the bits and pieces of imagery that make up the building blocks of a community: "Her eyes caught everything: 'beautiful' faces, odd-angled dancers, a man in ecstasy playing the saxophone." Her response to these raw materials of neighborhood endorses the novel's argument for South Street as the incarnation of a thriving way of life: "Life! There was life in the air of South Street." Watching the crowd dance in the street, she feels a "sharp wave of pain that she was outside of this nation of people, a stranger looking on" (146), ratifying by her discomfort the self-containment and boundedness of peoplehood—she sees a "nation"—that this dancing has been posited to mean.

Without color prejudice, attracted by the neighborhood's folkways, Kristin aspires to acceptance by the crowd. When the Blues Singer invites her to join

the dancing crowd on South Street, Kristin feels that "for this moment—she belonged" (146). Just at the moment when Kristin feels that she has stepped within the closed circle of black community, the novel marks her as its central problem. The mark takes the form of a wink. The Blues Singer winks at Claude from behind Kristin, an unreadable gesture (mockery? conspiratorial good will? irony?) until it is rhymed later in the novel with another wink at Claude, this one from a white newsvendor who has previously made clear his disapproval of Claude's marriage to Kristin. Near the end of the novel, having decided to leave Kristin, Claude stops at a red light not far from her studio: "the newsvendor at his stand suddenly caught Claude's eye and winked and waved. Claude looked at the newsvendor. With a slight smile, he waved back. He remembered, now, from where it was that he knew the newsvendor" (308). How does the memory of the Blues Singer's wink allow Claude to "know" the newsvendor, a minor character who exists in the novel only to react unpleasantly to the idea of interracial marriage? In order to understand how Claude's marriage to Kristin unites the newsvendor and the Blues Singer, who is the living embodiment of black community, we need to understand how Kristin threatens South Street. The novel's characters discuss at least two ways to formulate an answer, and the history of South Street suggests a third.

Michael Bowers argues, in the protest novel's clankingly analytical register, that Kristin is a white American above and beyond anything else she might be: "Is Kristin a woman of steel? Is her spirit wrapped in some new alloy which is absolutely impervious to all the superstitions about us that are held by her society, her parents, her friends?" (227). Following this reasoning, her manifest racial innocence and saintliness are therefore all the more pernicious in that they might encourage Claude to forget the unalterable social fact of her whiteness. She threatens South Street, in Michael's view, as an agent of white America, and Claude's marriage to her would therefore denature him as an urban intellectual by driving a wedge of difference between him and his people. The newsvendor's and the Blues Singer's winks endorse this logic of strict separation: the two find common ground in seeing Claude's place as South Street and Kristin's as anywhere else.

In the end, Claude does not accept Michael's argument in full, remaining convinced that Kristin lives, as her brother puts it, "in a vacuum," a world of music and form in which color has only an aesthetic meaning, but he accepts Michael's essential point. Claude concludes that his liaison with Kristin inevitably creates distance between him and the neighborhood. The novel suggests a historical reason for Claude and Kristin's inability to find an apartment near South Street or in any black neighborhood: newly arrived Southern migrants have crammed these neighborhoods so that "some families of four or five were living in a single room at rents as high as those charged for houses" (87). The Blues Singer's wink suggests a more important thematic reason that

Kristin cannot live on South Street: the circle of community Kristin encounters at the festival remains closed to her. Unable to rent an apartment together in a white neighborhood, either, Claude and Kristin therefore have to take up residence in her studio, which lies at the edge of the city in a largely undeveloped area—a spatial expression of the artist's detachment from social order in which Philip misguidedly believes. Claude finds himself living in a place that is not a neighborhood, a spatial vacuum to match the racial vacuum in which Kristin lives, far from the South Street milieu that he will finally come to see as "the bounded time and bounded space" of his "own life" and his "own world." Choosing Kristin would eventually drive Claude, South Street's leading intellectual and an influential voice in national and international discussions of race, from America altogether. He and Kristin are in fact planning to flee to Canada when Philip's violent death forces Claude's return to South Street.

These two explanations of what Kristin represents—Michael's strict construction of her as white America and Claude's looser construction of her as unfortunately not black and thus not of South Street—lead to the same point: Claude's marriage to Kristin constitutes a major crisis in the Bowers family narrative and thus (by the novel's logic) in that of the South Street neighborhood and the black America it stands for. Kristin's entry into the Bowers line would necessarily explode the fantasy of a hermetic, self-reproducing black world, a fantasy promulgated by people like Michael, enacted by the crowd in the street, and argued for in the novel's final image of the Blues Singer making the special music of a self-contained people. Claude seems to resolve the crisis by his return to South Street, where Kristin cannot follow, making it possible to again imagine an all-black Bowers family, an all-black South Street, a closed circle of community and culture.

The continuing presence on South Street of white men like Pete and the police, however, seriously compromises this community's hermetic integrity. The sight of Pete dancing in the street with Lil at the festival, precisely on the sacred ground and at the key ritual time of the novel's construction of a self-contained black world, suggests that the novel knows itself to be imagining an ideal of racial separation it cannot sustain even as fantasy. In that sense, even though Claude leaves her, the crisis caused by Kristin (also seen dancing in the street) continues to point up the inadequacy of the Bowers family narrative's proposed resolution by showing that the reconstituted fantasy of a self-contained black South Street is dangerously parochial. The fantasy blinds itself to lines of force and influence that extend across the borders of that local world from the metropolitan orders operating at a greater scale beyond it.

The gendering of the Bowers family narrative speaks to this point. Given that the South Street community's drama of leadership and succession takes the form of a family narrative, a childless all-male resolution asserts its own incompleteness. The character of Margaret helps to underscore the point, as the

three Bowers brothers orbit tellingly around her: she rejects Philip, worships Claude from afar without success, and, although she finally takes up with Michael, she appears dissatisfied with his strictly political passions. The novel's female characters, more generally, suggest the limitations of the male characters' authority to sustain and reproduce the neighborhood order. Lil, having attacked Pete with a razor to avenge the beating he gave Slim, immediately leaves town for good (heading out on a Chicago-bound train, again a parallel to Petry's Lutie Johnson) because she knows South Street will not shelter her from Pete's cronies. The Blues Singer, high on heroin, curses the Old Man as a transparent fraud: "Your whole goddamn life's a lie! Open your goddamn eyes! Face it!" (289). Just as his hollow sexual advances fail to conceal his age and timidity, the Old Man's air of political insiderhood fails to mask the impotence of a local functionary controlled and disdained by City Hall. Lil and the Blues Singer, then, suggest that Claude, having finally arrived at a moment of heroic plenitude by eliminating Kristin, remains blind to the ways in which white people still shape black South Street.

If the gendering of South Street's succession drama undercuts the Bowers brothers' victory, then Kristin's extratextual "return" to South Street further reveals the futility of regarding her elimination from South Street as an exorcism of outside influences. As a type, she figures in a succession drama, extending far beyond the novel's horizons to the present day, in which the southward march of Center City's new postwar population made it impossible to sustain even the myth of South Street as a locally self-determining conjunction of place and peoplehood.

We might see Kristin as a far advanced outrider for an approaching army who, rushing into the "void" left by the Crosstown plan, would remake South Street in the 1970s and 1980s as downtown Philadelphia's "alternative" main street. Their way of living, an urbanism built by pointedly non- or postethnic service professionals and artists (Pete is an Italian gangster; Kristin, a violinist, is just white), was still in its nascent stages in the 1950s. In 1954, the year South Street was published, the City Planning Commission and its powerful mentors in the private sector began work on what was to become the comprehensive plan.^[19] The plan envisioned a Center City designed to attract the more cosmopolitan element of the growing service sector's largely white professional workforce, people who would live conveniently near to the office towers in which they worked, the universities in which they taught, and the upscale businesses they would own and support. Center City's "secondary uses, such as small restaurants, specialty stores, and galleries," would thrive in concert with a new generation of housing—new apartment houses, rehabilitated rowhouses, and town houses forming the plan's desired "band of healthy housing extending from river to river and meeting the core cleanly without a layer of blight between."^[20]

To establish the advance outposts for this order, there had to be pioneers much like Kristin, an adventurous, open-minded, mildly bohemian artist with a rich, perhaps patronizingly aesthetic appreciation of lively streets and black culture. Were they to remain together, she and Claude—a musician and a writer, probably with young children—would have been ideal buyers for a rowhouse that needed work on a transitional block somewhere near South Street.^[21] If they weathered the racial tensions and disinvestment of the 1960s, they would have been natural leaders for the neighborhood-based anti-Crosstown coalition that eventually scuttled the expressway project. But by depressing property values and increasing the rate of decay, abandonment, and turnover of building stock, the Crosstown plan helped to make possible the gradual southward movement of the new inner-city urbanites to South Street. The unbuilt Crosstown made it possible for them to colonize much of South Street in the 1970s and 1980s as their local commercial strip—upscale on the east, atmospherically "gritty" further west.

Old neighborhood hands like Kristin and Claude would no doubt decry the coming of "yuppies" and wax nostalgic for a lost golden age of community, but today's South Street is the product of a process begun in part by people sharing Kristin's sensibilities and background. Mounting a defense of the Black Metropolis in transition, South Street posits Kristin as an interloper to be banished, but the novel's counterargument opens the way for her return and the larger drama of succession that return suggests.

South Street and Greater Philadelphia

Seen in its historical moment, in the shadow of Center City and the second ghetto, Claude's epiphany on South Street—"great blood vein of a people" (310)—seems dwarfed by the scale of forces at play in the metropolis. His return to South Street pales in light of our knowledge that in the following decades significant breaks will occur in the connection of people to place that the novel so passionately and selectively constructs—a connection the novel asks Claude, the model urban intellectual, to sustain into the future. The Bowers brothers, principals of the novel's argument, share an inward communal turn and a limited sense of political geography—figuring "white" territory as Grays Ferry rather than Center City or the suburbs—that, while surely appropriate to the neighborhood boundary disputes of midcentury, seem naively parochial in light of the forces already in motion on South Street. The novel's counterargument presents those forces—embodied in Kristin, Pete, and the Mayor—as in fact not external even to the mythic neighborhood formation constructed by the novel's argument. The Citizens' Council on City Planning and the Greater Philadelphia Movement came into being to influence the outcomes of vast metropolitan processes like suburbanization and redevelopment, a drastic reshap-

ing of the city as part of a significant spatial redistribution of capital and population. These are not "outside" forces; rather, they operate at a grander scale than that of the neighborhood, and South Street shows that the Bowers brothers remain unequipped by their unrelievedly local sense of neighborhood to grasp this fact in the way that Lil and the Blues Singer do.

Read against the scale of time and space on which the comprehensive plan pursues its vision of the metropolitan future, Claude's epic struggle to return to the local becomes a retreat. Let us return once more to his climactic walk on South Street, when he concludes that this return provides a way to throw off moral and intellectual paralysis by stepping within a charmed communal circle: "endless, baffling Time and endless, terrifying Space? One could, should, be aware of them, in wonder and in awe. But one could not live in their contemplation; one could not live according to their all-paralyzing commentary. One lived—whether one wanted to or not—in the bounded time and the bounded space of one's own life and one's own world" (311). The grotesquely inflated language makes us wonder, here and elsewhere, whether South Street is being pretentious or poking fun at its characters' pretensions, but it is clear that Lil and the Blues Singer have suggested a deflating irony that extends to Claude as well. Without a grasp of the scale at which South Street's future was at that moment being determined—and, in fact, retreating from any understanding of that "baffling," "terrifying" scale—Claude is an urban intellectual destined to receive a nasty surprise from his historical moment.

Looking back to John Fury and forward to the coming upheavals of the 1960s, we might begin moving toward subsequent acts of South Street's composite drama by imagining South Street's historical moment more broadly. We can read the novel as carrying us from horse-and-wagon Philadelphia, the industrial city in which Smith's and the Bowers brothers' South Street thrived, to the eve of a round of race riots ignited by stresses of the postwar period in which that industrial neighborhood formation would suffer from disinvestment and disruption. That historical sweep is figured in a runaway wagon episode similar to Fury's vision at Mame's deathbed.

In the novel's first chapter, Slim's nephew Joe (later to receive a terrible beating from the Grays Ferry Irish) loses control of a horse pulling a wagon loaded with his friends. The runaway wagon makes a tour of the neighborhood, west on Carpenter and north on Nineteenth, at the last with its wheels caught in the streetcar tracks, before Slim regains control. Read with Fury's vision, which depicts a personal defeat that John Fury expands into a communal and generational one, the scene takes on new meaning. The defeat is again communal—with passengers aboard—and familial and generational, as the transfer of reins from Slim to his nephew Joe produces chaos. The wagon caught in the streetcar tracks, like Fury's wagon racing along the railroad tracks and like

Algren's bewildered survivors contained by the El structure, images a people arriving at an urban limit. Like Fury's vision, this episode suggests that the passage of time, the unfolding of a future in the urban space delineated by the horse's route, will go hard on the community invested in that piece of terrain. Slim gets the reins back from Joe, but a deeper lack of control is foreshadowed: "outsiders" beat Joe, but Slim will be reminded of the arrangements of power within the neighborhood by a beating from his boss Pete, and in the aftermath Slim's girlfriend Lil will be forced to leave the city entirely.

The novel's final chapters introduce a still-germinating urban crisis, as Claude and Michael head off a riot brewing in the aftermath of Philip's death. The reader has been told that the riot has its origins in tensions particular to the moment: population pressure at the borders of an increasingly overcrowded ghetto, organized and violent teenage gangs, new currents of black nationalism. Claude and Michael must stop this riot before it destroys the neighborhood. (By the late 1960s, however, Smith's Return to Black America follows the logic of urban crisis in depicting the intellectual's duty as transforming the self-destructive riot into a well-planned insurrection, in large part by harnessing the violence of youth gangs.) South Street, then, wants to balance runaway urban process with local control as its community of characters effects a passage from horse-and-wagon Philadelphia to the postindustrial inner city on the sacred ground of their neighborhood.^[22]

If John Fury "never has a word t'say but goes around thrashin niggers," we might say something similar of Michael Bowers, amending the phrase to reflect his incessant speech making and altering the racial epithet to describe whites. Rather than the raids on Grays Ferry, it is Michael's attack on a white man in the heart of Center City that points the way to the next phases of the South Street literature's composite drama.

Out walking on Market Street, Michael and Philip happen upon an argument between a white man and a black man, and, without ascertaining the issue at hand or what either party has to say, Michael pushes through the bystanders and levels the white man with a sucker punch. That moment of casual violence visited upon a white man on Market Street by a black man from South Philadelphia represents the Center City planners' worst nightmare, an obverse face of the cosmopolitan Center City urbanism so invitingly sketched out by the comprehensive plan. Unlike the sharply delineated frontier at Grays Ferry Avenue, South Street renders the border between Center City and South Philadelphia as vague and permeable. Philip and Michael wander up to Market Street for a movie and a bit of unscheduled racial violence; Philip and Margaret

also stroll up to Market Street for a movie and walk back through Rittenhouse Square, "past the pleasant streets, then across Lombard and South again, and on into the gloomier neighborhoods" (21).

Philadelphia's planners intended the Crosstown Expressway not only to carry traffic but to form Center City's clearly defined southern boundary, to "reinforce the margins," helping to produce "a clear and forceful image of a desirable physical environment, related to some definite physical symbol."^[23] A product of the 1950s, the plan thought primarily in terms of traffic flows and of elegant design on the grand scale. Reinforcing the margins of Center City should not be read as a transparently coded rationale for building the expressway to keep black people (and other South Philadelphians) out. But as the 1960s wore on, and especially after Philadelphia's riot of 1964 helped to usher in the urban crisis, planners and business activists on one side and anti-Crosstown forces on the other did come to see the Crosstown as just such a social barrier. The plan was not ready to consider (and never mentioned) the fear of criminal violence, whether in the form of riot or mugging, that would during the urban crisis of the 1960s become a principal figure of inner-city social pathology and a principal rebuttal to the plan's vision of the urban future.

Racial violence, and violence in general, has been a favored means of representing postindustrial urbanism, the abrupt emergence of which was attended not only by violence in the streets but also by parallel wrenches and dislocations in the city of feeling. Michael's punch, and its repercussions in the novel and in the composite narrative recounted by the South Street literature, is charged with the deep-sunk force of postindustrial transformation. The further consequences of that transformation, coming into view as the postindustrial inner city matured in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, are sketched by the three novels that make up the South Street literature's postindustrial phase.