In the early 1940s, according to Lawrence P. Jackson, Ann Petry tried to interest the big-time magazines in her short stories, “but she only took rejection slips from Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, American Mercury, and Story Magazine” (144). In 1946, Petry was submitting stories to The New Yorker. On 8 November of that year, fiction editor William Maxwell wrote to Petry’s agent, Henry Volkening, rejecting “The Necessary Knocking on the Door” for being “a rather too melodramatic treatment of the negro problem” (Maxwell). (The story was eventually published in The Magazine of the Year in 1947.) Indeed, in an essay for the 1950 anthology The Writer’s Book, Petry claimed to have “collected enough rejection slips for [her] short stories to paper four or five good sized rooms” (39). Her early stories appeared in African American periodicals, such as the The Afro-American (Baltimore), The Crisis, Phylon, Negro Digest, and Opportunity. It was not until 1958, having published three wellreceived and best-selling novels—particularly The Street (1946), the writing of which had been supported by a prestigious Houghton Mifflin literary fellowship—that Petry finally had her New Yorker breakthrough. On 25 October, “Has Anybody Seen Miss Dora Dean?” her story about an African American butler who committed suicide thirty-three years prior, was published in the magazine. This article considers this story in the context of The New Yorker’s preoccupation with domestic workers at mid-century. With attention to the proliferation of servant-themed stories, cartoons, and anecdotes in the magazine in the postwar period, I argue that Petry’s story—with its several allusions to cakewalking (most particularly in the title)—enacts what Soyica Diggs Colbert terms “the insurgent playfulness at the heart of the cakewalk” (107). As Eric Sundquist, among others, contends, the cakewalk “occupied a liminal territory with a significant

中文翻译：

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安·佩特里（Ann Petry）的Cakewalk：世纪中期的家庭工人和纽约客

根据劳伦斯·杰克逊（Lawrence P. Jackson）的说法，在1940年代初期，安·佩特里（Ann Petry）试图在她的短篇小说中引起人们对大型杂志的兴趣，“但是她只接受了《大西洋月刊》，《纽约客》，《哈珀集市》，《美国水星》和《故事杂志》中的拒绝单。 ”（144个）。1946年，皮特里（Peter）将故事提交给《纽约客》。当年11月8日，小说编辑威廉·麦克斯韦（William Maxwell）写信给佩特里（Petry）的经纪人亨利·沃尔肯宁（Henry Volkening），否认“对门的必要敲门”是“对黑人问题的一种过于机灵的处理”（麦克斯韦）。（这个故事最终在1947年发表在《年度杂志》上。）的确，在1950年选集《作家的书》的一篇文章中，佩特里声称“为她的短篇小说收集了足够的拒绝书，可以发表四到五个好论文。大小的房间”（39）。她的早期故事出现在非裔美国人期刊中，例如《非裔美国人》（巴尔的摩），《危机》，《菲龙》，《黑人文摘》和《机会》。直到1958年，出版了三本畅销书和畅销小说（尤其是《街头》（1946年），其著作得到享有盛名的霍顿·米夫林文学奖学金的支持），佩特里终于在《纽约客》上取得了突破。10月25日，“有人见过Dora Dean小姐吗？” 她的故事讲述了一个三十三年前自杀的非裔美国人管家的故事，并在该杂志上发表。本文在本世纪中叶《纽约客》对家庭佣工的沉迷中考虑了这个故事。关注战后时期杂志中以仆人为主题的故事，卡通和轶事的泛滥，我认为，佩特里（Perry）的故事-涉及到步行蛋糕的几处暗示（最特别是标题中的内容）-体现了Soyica Diggs Colbert所说的“在步行蛋糕中心的叛逆嬉戏”（107）。正如埃里克·桑德奎斯特（Eric Sundquist）等人所争辩的那样，“蛋糕步道”占据了一个边缘区域，