The Witness by Ann Petry

Paths of least and greater resistance combine the decision people make as individuals to systems of privilege. By using path of least resistance, one would be following the path most used in the system. The alternative path is one with greater resistance. Ann Petry’s “The Witness” represents racism, violence, and prejudices that traumatize the characters. In “Little Boxes” by Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds, it shows how society is structured and how people are inserted into society. Privilege, Power and Difference by Allan Johnson demonstrates how people make social systems happen. In each of these works, it shows how social life is structured and how people make it happen.

“The Witness” by Ann Petry is a short story illuminating people’s distorted lives regarding racism and sexism. It takes place in the suburbia of Wheeling, New York. The main character is Charles Woodruff, who is a retired English professor from Virginia College for Negroes. Wheeling was inquiring an English teacher, specifically an African American, to demonstrate the institutions were integrated. Woodruff thinks “someone probably asked why there were no black teachers in the school system and the school board and the Superintendent of Schools said they were searching for one.” The school consisted of student in which Woodruff described as “the Willing Workers of America”:

All of his students were being herded toward college like so many cattle. He referred to them (mentally) as the Willing Workers of America. He thought that what was being done to them was a crime against nature. They were hard-working, courteous, pathetic.

The way these students were coerced toward college demonstrated an endless cycle. It is a cycle that is expected by society in which students are presumed to devote oneself to college after high school. Woodruff is well liked by his students from his English classes. Due to the success, Dr. Shipley, the Congregational minister invites Woodruff to “assist him with a class of delinquent boys (p.2253)” that meets on Sunday nights.

Unlike the students from Woodruff’s English class, these delinquent boys followed the path of greater resistant:

But when he first saw those seven boys in the minister’s study, he knew that he could neither help nor assist the minister with them --- they were beyond his reach, beyond the minister’s reach. They sat silent, motionless, their shoulders hunched as though against some chill they found in the air of that small book-lined room. Their eyelids were like shitters drawn over their eyes. (p. 2254)

Their refusals to become good students like their parents expect them to demonstrate them choosing the path of greater resistance. Their parents are “the backbone of the great middle class in this town (p. 2254).” These sixteen year old boys were very bright and were required to attend this class by the Juvenile court. Although