The Women of Brewster Place

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1982

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Interlude 1-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapter 7-Interlude 2

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapter 7-Interlude 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “The Block Party”

After Ben’s death, it rains for a full week. The residents of Brewster Place are trapped indoors, unable to gossip about the dramatic events in the neighborhood. All the women—even the little girls—dream about Lorraine, “the tall yellow woman in the bloody green and black dress” (175). As the week progresses, the residents begin to worry that the block party will be rained out.

The narrative describes the details of Mattie’s dream. She dreams that the day of the party is clear, and she is grilling ribs when Lucielia arrives and tells her that she needed to get as far away from Brewster Place as possible, so she kept going until she reached the ocean. Now, Lucielia lives in San Francisco and has a new boyfriend. She apologizes for never writing, but Mattie understands. Ciel tells Mattie and Etta that she had a strange dream about Brewster Place, something about a tall woman in a green dress and Ben, and felt that she needed to visit. It is the same dream that all the women in Brewster Place have shared since Ben’s death, but Mattie and Etta don’t say anything to Ciel. The party swirls around them, but Mattie sees clouds forming and worries that it will rain. A beach ball lands on the grills, and Kiswana runs over to retrieve it. She is playing with Cora Lee’s children while Cora looks on, pregnant again and complaining about her “miserable” children. The threat of rain seems imminent, and the party starts to break up. Kiswana rushes around, warning people to start clearing up before the rain starts, but no one pays attention to her, and she starts to cry.

Meanwhile, Cora Lee is searching for Sonya, her youngest daughter, who has just started walking. She spots Sonya beside the wall, picking at something with an old popsicle stick. As the first drops of rain fall, Cora pulls Sonya away from the wall and notices a bloodstain on the edge of the brick. Upset, Cora starts digging out the brick with her fingers. She brings the brick back to Mattie, who passes it to Etta, who continues to pass it through the assembled women. Mattie returns to the wall with Cora, and together, they begin pulling out other blood-stained bricks. The other women join in, tearing at the wall. Kiswana tries to stop them, insisting that there is no blood, only rain. Lucielia says it doesn’t matter and passes Kiswana a brick. Kiswana throws it into the street, where cars are trying to dodge the barrage of flying bricks. At that moment, Theresa comes downstairs with her suitcase; she is moving out of Brewster Place. However, the cab she hails speeds off with her suitcase before she can get inside and she complains of a “riot” on the street. Cora comes to Theresa with an armload of bricks, asking for help. She begs, “Please,” and Theresa takes the bricks from her but tells her, “Don’t ever say that again” (187). Theresa throws the bricks into the avenue, where they “burst into a cloud of green smoke” (187), and the rain pours down.

Mattie is awakened from this dream by the stifling heat in her room. The rain has cleared, and the residents are now outside setting up for the block party. Etta calls for Mattie, telling her to get ready.

Interlude 2 Summary: “Dusk”

The final vignette details the death of Brewster Place. In its final years, Brewster Place is “tired and sick,” and watches as its “Afric’ children” are taken away. The building falls into disrepair, and one by one, the residents “[pack] up the remnants of their dreams and [leave]” (191). However, the “colored daughters” who move away continue to hold onto their dreams and the reminders of hope that they once nursed in Brewster Place, and therefore, the old dead-end street “still waits to die” (192).

Chapter 7-Interlude 2 Analysis

The ending of The Women of Brewster Place contains multiple symbolic meanings, for the final chapter, “The Block Party,” utilizes the surreal landscape of dreams to bring the characters together, using graphic and near-cinematic metaphors to emphasize the nature of the ties that bind them even as it illustrates the underlying issues that have always divided them. When most of the chapter’s events are revealed to be part of Mattie Michael’s dream, this narrative twist emphasizes the symbolic nature of the chapter as a whole and reaffirms the importance of the dreaming motif by calling back to the Langston Hughes poem about a “dream deferred.”

Initially, the most notable symbol of the chapter can be found in the continuous rain, which connotes a morose attitude of mingled grief, regret, and anxiety coupled with the inertia of helplessness. As the Brewster Place residents endure the endlessly weeping skies in the week after Ben’s death, the weather prevents the residents from congregating outside and discussing the tragic events. This dynamic is meant to emphasize how profoundly Lorraine’s assault and Ben’s death have fractured the community. Rather than bonding over mutual discussion, the residents are left to analyze the events largely in isolation, a circumstance that leaves everyone restless and out of sorts. However, the implicit bonds that still join the community are emphasized when every woman on Brewster Place dreams of Lorraine in her “bloody green and black dress” (175). The shared nature of the women’s dreams implies their kinship with Lorraine and indicates that she is not so different from them after all. The women share the dream because they have also experienced violence and abuse at the hands of men. Even though the women of Brewster Place ostracized Lorraine and Theresa because of the two women’s romantic relationship, they can all imagine themselves in Lorraine’s position and are keenly aware that her fate could have befallen any of them.

Throughout the novel, the wall that closes Brewster Place off from the rest of the city stands as a symbol of the women’s oppression and separation from society. As the rain starts to fall on the block party in Mattie’s dream, Cora Lee’s discovery of the bloodstain on the bricks injects a tone of surreal horror into the otherwise mundane scene, and the bizarre nature of the ensuing interactions intensifies the unreality of the moment, ultimately signaling that unlike most chapters in the novel, this one does not take place in the real world. Cora says of the blood, “It ain’t right; it just ain’t right. It shouldn’t still be here” (185), and this reference to the blood summons a new awareness not just of the recent violence, but of the wall’s very existence, for as the opening of the novel has already established, the wall should not be there either. Kiswana tries to point out that the bricks are wet with the falling rain, not with blood, to which Lucielia replies, “Does it really matter?” (186). Motivated by the violent attack on Lorraine, which reconfirmed their precarious existence in society, the women now want the wall gone, along with the oppression it represents. This underlying bitterness and anger explains their symbolic act of collectively working to tear the wall down. Even Theresa helps, emphasizing the message that the women’s individual differences must be overcome so that they can work together to fight the marginalization they all face. However, the fact that this act of rebellion occurs only in Mattie’s dream represents the difficulty—if not the impossibility—of overcoming the systemic barriers that the women all face.

“Dusk,” the interlude that ends the novel, aptly closes the metaphorical day that begins with the first interlude, “Dawn.” The final chapter is designed to echo the final message of Mattie’s dream, emphasizing that the women in the novel do not succeed in tearing down the wall that ensures their continued exclusion and marginalization. As Brewster Place’s “last generation of children” is “torn away […] by court orders and eviction notices” (191), the block is condemned, and the residents are left “to inherit another aging street and the privilege of clinging to its decay” (191). However, the women who made up this uniquely nuanced society still refuse to abandon their dreams, and although society remains set against their attempts to attain some meager form of prosperity, the women of Brewster Place will continue to survive, to resist, and to dream.