"Before the Bottom, before Brewster Place, there was the Narrows (also called the Eye of the Needle, the Bottom, Little Harlem, Dark Town, Niggertown). Before China, one of the whores in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, there was China the whore who lived in the Narrows.Before Alice Walker's sexy blues singer Shug Avery, there was Mamie Powther, the busty, sensual, blues-singing woman desired by all the men of the Narrows and beyond. And before Milkman Dead, the middle-class protagonist of Morrison's Song of Solomon, was Link Williams, the Robesonesque lead character of Ann Petry's final novel, The Narrows." –Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University