Under the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, the tradition of Black American literature has also attracted more attention. New books have appeared, but old and classic texts have also been rediscovered. Ann Petry is one of the writers whose works are now available in German translations. Her novels, such as “Die Straße” or “Country Place”, were internationally successful in the late 1940s and 1950s. But she also publishes books for young people, one of which in 1955 is dedicated to the life of Harriet Tubman, the pioneer of slave liberation who was born around 1820 and died in 1913 and whose portrait has actually been supposed to adorn the twenty-dollar bill since 2016 – which Donald Trump, however, thwarted has been.
Ann Petry paints the picture of a black woman who often walks in men’s clothes and is always armed,
Ann Petry tells of this woman in novel-like scenes, enriching each larger chapter with an appendix on the history of slavery. In this way, readers follow the path of a girl who was born to slaves in Maryland and who, at times away from her parents, had to work hard at the age of six. As a young adult, she flees to the north of the USA, where the abolitionist movement has been gaining strength since the 1830s and the illegal “Underground Railroad” is being organized in secret, which, carried by blacks and whites, travels risky routes long before the American Civil War smuggles about 1000 people a year into the Northern States or Canada.
Harriet Tubman becomes a driving force behind this underground railroad, which borrows only the name from the “railway”. As soon as she arrived in the north herself, she returned to Maryland to lead her family and then around 600 other people to freedom: on nocturnal paths and in hiding places, threatened by bounty and slave hunters, ruthless against herself, demanding in her dealings with those who confide in her. Ann Petry draws the picture of a black woman who is often out and about in men’s clothes and is always armed, who also works as a spy for the northern states during the civil war – and for all of this only receives scant official thanks decades later.
You can hardly talk about it more vividly than in this book – so it’s a shame that the German translation of Hella Reese by Nagel & Kimche has not yet been aggressively advertised as a work for young people. It’s also a pity that a certain half-heartedness characterizes the handling of the text: On the one hand, the transfer is based on an old American edition from 2006 – while in the USA a new edition with a foreword by the radical activist Black writer Jason Reynolds was published in 2018 builds a bridge between Ann Petry’s work and the present of #Black-Lives-Matter. On the other hand, however, the translation strives for the linguistic and moral correctness that befits new texts, but in this case a narrator corrects the vocabulary “negroes” or “indians” that was common at the time, with which she told young people almost seventy years ago about the jointly experienced want to report discrimination.
You can do that, but 1955 is the year Emmett Till is murdered and Rosa Parks in Montgomery defends her right to a seat on a bus; it is also the year that James Baldwin’s Of A Son Of This Land is published. Does a black writer, also writing about oppression in 1955, really need to be posthumously taught that it should be called “blacks” or “indigenous peoples”? The qualities of the text do not diminish these interventions, they are also more aimed at today’s reading public – the indecisiveness of this edition is above all proof of the collective insecure handling of the bad white conscience. (from 12 years and young adults)
Ann PetryHarriet Tubman. Escape agent on the Underground Railroad. Nagel & Kimche 2022. 256 pages, 16.50 euros.