The Women of Brewster Place

“All the beautiful plants that once had an entire sun porch for themselves in the home she had exchanged thirty years of her life to pay for would now have to fight for light on a crowded windowsill. The sigh turned into a knot of pity for the ones that she knew would die. She pitied them because she refused to pity herself and to think that she, too, would have to die here on this crowded street because there just wasn’t enough life left for her to do it all again.”

Like most of Brewster Place’s tenants, Mattie Michael moves to the apartment block because she is out of options. After her son flees his bail, she loses the home she worked for 30 years to maintain, as well as the son that she dedicated her life to raising. The implication that some of her plants will also die suggests that her loss is not yet complete. However, Mattie’s resilience is evident, even if it is only because she has no other option. Her dream is dead, and she maintains no illusion of building a new one, but she has no choice but to carry on. Ultimately, this inner strength will allow her to become a powerful matriarchal figure in Brewster Place.

“The young black woman and the old yellow woman sat in the kitchen for hours, blending their lives so that what lay behind one and ahead of the other became indistinguishable.”

Eva Turner’s gesture of kindness toward Mattie is the novel’s first instance of the healing power of female friendship. As the women talk in the kitchen, their differences fall away, and they confide anything and everything to one another. Despite their many differences in temperament and lifestyle, they have experienced many of the same struggles, and this commonality binds them together.

“She had demanded nothing all these years, never doubting that he would be there when needed. She had carefully pruned his spirit to rest only in the enclaves of her will, and she had willed so little that he had been tempted to return again and again over the last thirty years because his just being had been enough to satisfy her needs. But now her back was tightening in the mornings, and her grass was growing wild and ragged over the walkway while she pulled herself painfully up the stairs, alone.”

In this passage, Mattie contemplates her son, Basil, whom she has dedicated her life to raising. Determined to give him a better life, Mattie coddled her son and did everything she could for Basil. However, instead of appreciating his mother’s love and effort, Basil grew up to be selfish and spoiled. Now that Mattie is aging and needs more help at home, he is not there to support her.

“Etta and Mattie had taken totally different roads that with all of their deceptive winding had both ended up on Brewster Place.”

Etta and Mattie have been friends since childhood, even though they are very different people. While Mattie was always a well-behaved girl who played by the rules, Etta’s feisty nature always got her into trouble. She chased men around the country while Mattie worked and raised her son. The fact that both women now live on Brewster Place suggests the systemic nature of the struggles they face, for whether they play by the rules or not, the deck is stacked against them, and they are both robbed of the benefits that they strove to attain.

“Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over. Mattie realized that this moment called for all three.”

This passage illustrates the depth of Mattie’s intuition and understanding. Although Mattie knows that she is correct in her assessment of Reverend Woods’s intentions toward Etta, she knows that her friend has to learn the truth of this for herself. She never judges other women or forces her opinions on them, and as the end of this particular vignette proves, she remains a steady, supportive presence when the dreams of others are shattered.

“She stopped straining when it suddenly came to her that it wasn’t important what song it was—someone was waiting up for her. Someone who would deny fiercely that there had been any concern—just a little indigestion from them fried onions that kept me from sleeping. Thought I’d pass the time by figuring out what you see in all this loose-life music.”

When Etta returns, discouraged from her outing with the reverend, she realizes that Mattie is waiting up for her despite their earlier argument. Etta feels comforted by the knowledge that someone loves her and that she is not as alone as she often feels. This realization helps her to heal from the disappointment of the lost dream of becoming a respectable preacher’s wife.

“When all the smoke had cleared, you found yourself with a fistful of new federal laws and a country still full of obstacles for black people to fight their way over—just because they’re black. There was no revolution, Melanie, and there will be no revolution.”

Here, Mrs. Browne argues with Kiswana over her idealized concept of revolution. While Kiswana accuses her mother of forgetting her roots and selling out to join the middle class, Mrs. Browne’s concept of revolution is more nuanced and realistic than her daughter’s. Mrs. Browne understands that Kiswana’s education and position of relative privilege will allow her to make a greater impact by working within the system.

“I gave you my grandmother’s name, a woman who bore nine children and educated them all, who held off six white men with a shotgun when they tried to drag one of her sons to jail for ‘not knowing his place.’ Yet you needed to reach into an African dictionary to find a name to make you proud.”

Kiswana changes her name from Melanie to the more African-sounding name of Kiswana in an attempt to feel more connected to her heritage. She wants to distance herself from her middle-class childhood, which feels less authentically Black to her. However, her mother points out that Kiswana is forgetting the bravery, resistance, and pride to be found in her own family history.

“And she looked at the blushing woman on her couch and suddenly realized that her mother had trod through the same universe that she herself was now traveling. Kiswana was breaking no new trails and would eventually end up just two feet away on that couch. She stared at the woman she had been and was to become.”

After their argument, Kiswana suddenly realizes that her mother is not so different from herself. The realization is set off by Mrs. Browne’s admission that her husband likes it when she polishes her toes, and this mirrors Kiswana’s experience with her own boyfriend. Despite their differences, both Kiswana and her mother must navigate the complexities of life as Black women, and this brief moment unites them.

“Her heart became full as she realized, this is the only thing I have ever loved without pain.”

Here, Lucielia looks down on her sleeping daughter. Lucielia is a woman who dreams of love, but her relationship with Eugene is a complicated mix of love and hate. She loves him deeply, but his selfishness and aggression hurt her just as deeply. What Lucielia feels for her daughter is the pure love she is searching for.

“‘And what the hell we gonna feed it when it gets here, huh—air? With two kids and you on my back, I ain’t never gonna have nothin’.’ He came and grabbed her by the shoulders and was shouting into her face. ‘Nothin’, do you hear me, nothin’!’”

Here, Eugene berates Lucielia for her second pregnancy. This passage illustrates the vast disconnect between Eugene and Lucielia. Having a family is Lucielia’s dream, but Eugene selfishly sees his children as an inconvenience that takes away from the success he could have on his own, and as a result, he heaps abuse on his wife for a situation that he had an equal part in creating.

“‘No! No! No!’ Like a black Brahman cow, desperate to protect her young, she surged into the room, pushing the neighbor woman and the others out of her way. She approached the bed with her lips clamped shut in such force that the muscles in her jaw and the back of her neck began to ache.”

After the loss of Ciel’s baby girl, Mattie sees death in the younger woman’s eyes and acts quickly to save her surrogate daughter. This passage illustrates Mattie’s intuition and her fierce motherly love. Although there are others in the room, only Mattie recognizes that Lucielia has given up living, and her love and determination save Lucielia from the ravages of her unexpressed grief.

“Babies had to cry sometimes, and so Sammy and Maybelline’s father had to go. And then there was Brucie’s father, who had promised to marry her and take her off Welfare, but who went out for a carton of milk and never came back. And then only the shadows—who came in the night and showed her the thing that felt good in the dark, and often left before the children awakened, which was so much better—there was no more waiting for a carton of milk that never came and no more bruised eyes because of a baby’s crying.”

This passage details Cora Lee’s relationships with men and with life. Like other women in the novel, Cora has faced both violence and disappointment in her relationships. Now she enjoys sex with anonymous “shadows” and feels no desire for a stable relationship. This attitude reflects the fact that she has suffered so many let-downs in life that she makes no further efforts to sustain hope for either herself or her family. In many ways, she has resisted the process of growing up herself; doing so allows her to avoid the harsh realities of life, but in the process, she creates a harmful environment of neglect and indifference for her ever-growing collection of babies who have grown beyond her limited ability to love and care for them.

“Cora Lee listened to Kiswana’s musical, clipped accent, looked at the designer jeans and striped silk blouse, and was surprised she had said that she lived in this building. What was she doing on a street like Brewster?”

From Kiswana’s perspective, she is poor and Black and belongs in Brewster Place. However, from Cora’s point of view, Kiswana is clearly different from the other tenants. Her clothes and accent reveal her education and middle-class upbringing and suggest that unlike the other tenants, she could easily live somewhere besides Brewster Place if she chose to move.

“‘Babies don’t take up much space. You just bring in a crib and a little chest and you’re all set,’ Cora beamed.

‘But babies grow up,’ Kiswana said softly and handed the child back to Cora with a puzzled smile.”

As Cora encourages Kiswana to have a baby of her own, she reveals the depth of her delusion about the correlation between babies and growing children. Despite the horde of children running around her apartment, the difference between having a sweet baby and raising children is still lost on Cora.

“They had seen that—done that—with their men. That shared moment of invisible communion reserved for two and hidden from the rest of the world behind laughter or tears or a touch. In the days before babies, miscarriages, and other broken dreams, after stolen caresses in barn stalls and cotton houses, after intimate walks from church and secret kisses with boys who were now long forgotten or permanently fixed in their lives—that was where.”

When one of the neighbors sees a moment of intimacy between Theresa and Lorraine, its implications are not immediately understood. However, the women soon recognize that the two women share the special connection of lovers, something that most of the tenants also experienced in the days before “broken dreams” and life on Brewster Place. Perhaps this stirring of memory contributes to the hostility that the women turn on Theresa and Lorraine. These beautiful young women who are in love remind the others on Brewster Place of their younger selves and all they have lost.

“Well, look out that window, kid. There’s a big wall down that block, and this is the end of the line for me.”

In an argument with Lorraine, Theresa makes this statement about Brewster Place and draws attention to the symbolic importance of the wall at the end of the dead-end street. Brewster Place is the figurative end of the line for all its residents. They live there because they have nowhere else to go.

“Kiswana had hung a red banner across the wall, ‘Today Brewster—Tomorrow America!’ but few understood what that meant and even fewer cared.”

When Kiswana hosts the first meetings of the tenants’ association, she hangs a banner on the wall that speaks to her still-lofty aspirations for revolutionary change. However, the other residents’ ignorance of or disregard for the sign again indicates Kiswana’s social distance from the rest of the group. Instead of being excited about revolution, the other tenants are more concerned with the mundanities of apartment repairs, and they aren’t concerned with the implications that the tenants’ association might have for greater equality in a more general sense.

“‘But I’ve loved some women deeper than I ever loved any man,’ Mattie was pondering. ‘And there been some women who loved me more and did more for me than any man ever did.’”

This is another example of the acceptance and non-judgment that characterizes Mattie’s approach to life and relationships. Although both she and Etta admit that there is something about Lorraine and Theresa’s relationship that makes them uncomfortable, Mattie is the only resident in Brewster Place who makes an effort to understand the two women. She even reflects on her own relationships with women, pointing out something that has been true for almost every woman in the novel: that their relationships with women are deeper and more loving than their relationships with men.

“If you was half a man, you coulda given me more babies and we woulda had some help workin’ this land instead of a halfgrown woman we gotta carry the load for. And if you was even quarter a man, we wouldn’t be a bunch of miserable sharecroppers on someone else’s land—but we is, Ben. And I’ll be damned if I see the little bit we got taken away ’cause you believe that gal’s lowdown lies!”

In this passage, Ben’s wife, Elvira, berates him for his inability to provide for his family. While their poverty and occupation as sharecroppers is a result of structural violence and systemic racism, Elvira portrays this hardship as being entirely Ben’s fault. Thus, the abuse that his daughter experiences at the hands of her white employer also becomes Ben’s fault, and the guilt of his failure to put a stop to it and protect her haunts him for the rest of his life.

“Born with the appendages of power, circumcised by a guillotine, and baptized with the steam from a million nonreflective mirrors, these young men wouldn’t be called upon to thrust a bayonet into an Asian farmer, target a torpedo, scatter their iron seed from a B-52 into the wound of the earth, point a finger to move a nation, or stick a pole into the moon—and they knew it. They only had that three-hundred-foot alley to serve them as stateroom, armored tank, and executioner’s chamber. So Lorraine found herself, on her knees, surrounded by the most dangerous species in existence—human males with an erection to validate in a world that was only six feet wide.”

Here, Lorraine faces the group of young Black men who prepare to rape her in the Brewster Place alley. Born into a misogynistic society that encourages strength and even violence from men, these men have had their ability to exercise power taken away by the systemic racism that they face. The men have no opportunities outside of Brewster Place, and they take their anger and frustration out on Lorraine.

“Although only a few admitted it, every woman on Brewster Place had dreamed that rainy week of the tall yellow woman in the bloody green and black dress. She had come to them in the midst of the cold sweat of a nightmare, or had hung around the edges of fitful sleep. Little girls woke up screaming, unable to be comforted by bewildered mothers who knew, and yet didn’t know, the reason for their daughters’ stolen sleep.”

This communal dream suggests that even though the women have shunned and ostracized her, Lorraine is not so different from them. While in real life, the unresolved trauma of Lorraine’s assault remains unresolved, the dreams that the women have proven that they have all experienced violence at the hands of men and can all see something of themselves in Lorraine and her tragic fate.

“Women flung themselves against the wall, chipping away at it with knives, plastic forks, spiked shoe heels, and even bare hands; the water pouring under their chins, plastering their blouses and dresses against their breasts and into the cracks of their hips.”

In Mattie’s dream at the end of the novel, the women work together to tear down the wall that makes Brewster Place a dead-end street. The wall represents the obstacles the women face in society, and in Mattie’s dream, even Theresa helps to tear it down, suggesting the necessity of working together and overcoming adversity in the community.