The Women of Brewster Place 827a correspondence course that instructs him to write
pieces on “Guy Fawkes Night, Some Village Super-
stitions, The Romance of Place Names (‘Your vicar
is likely to prove a mine of colorful information’).”
The weight of British tradition forces many, such
as Owad, one of the “gods” of Hanuman House,
into life as “mimic men,” affecting the attitudes of
an abstract world. Others, such as Biswas himself,
struggle to find success and identity in a world that
bears no resemblance to their hallowed traditions.
Joshua Grasso
NayLor, GLoria The Women of
Brewster Place^ (1982)
The Women of Brewster Place is Gloria Naylor’s first
novel and the winner of the 1983 American Book
Award. Subtitled “A Novel in Seven Stories,” the
book brings together the lives of seven women who
live in a walled-off “ghetto” neighborhood.
The “separate” stories of the novel, however,
belie a complex unity. Mattie Michael’s story is the
first and most fully developed. Her story begins
with an account of her southern childhood and
her adulthood as a single mother in a home with
a generous and loving surrogate mother. Like the
other characters, however, Mattie, too, “ends up” in
Brewster Place.
Unlike Brewster Place, the characters are not
“walled-off ” in their own stories. Mattie, as matri-
arch, connects their disparate lives: She “heals”
Luciella Louise Turner after the accidental death
of her child; councils Cora Lee about motherhood;
welcomes home Etta Mae Johnson from her travels,
chasing dreams of love and money; and acts as a
peacemaker when tempers flare and adviser when
neighbors falter, as with Kiswana Browne’s (the only
character who “chooses” to live in Brewster Place)
attempts to organize the community.
Mattie’s “magic,” however, cannot heal Brewster
Place. Lorraine and Theresa, “The Two,” who move
to Brewster Place to escape prejudice about their
sexuality, are the targets of innuendo and violence,
and the final block party, which depicts a redemp-
tive, if not destructive, liberation from Brewster
Place, is revealed to be merely a dream.
Christopher Hudson
The amerIcan dream in The Women of
Brewster Place
In many respects, The Women of Brewster Place
pre sents the antithesis of the so-called American
dream. The bleak descriptions of the streets and
alleyways, the apartments, and the coarseness of the
residents’ lives support the impression that Brewster
Place is the end of the line. Opportunity, prosper-
ity, and freedom—the typical constituents of the
American dream—are seemingly absent. The resi-
dents of Brewster Place are there “because they had
no choice” and “remain for the same reason.”
Gloria Naylor’s lyrical portrayal of the “hard-
edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily
pleased” women of Brewster Place, however, not
only balances the darkness with her account of “nut-
meg arms,” “ebony legs,” and “saffron hands” but also
with the persistence of dreams. The Women of Brew-
ster Place is, in fact, dominated by dreams. From its
epigraph—Langston Hughes’s poem “What Hap-
pens to a Dream Deferred?”—to Mattie’s dream
of an apocalyptic block party, dreams sustain and
delude every character in the novel. The same can
be said of the American dream itself: It is considered
a goal, a desire, even a right; it is also considered a
grand illusion that masks a less savory reality. More-
over, it is also clear the American dream is closely
associated with the trappings of material success, a
characteristic that is obviously absent in Brewster
Place. The novel therefore begs the questions: What
is the American dream when its materialistic aspects
are subtracted?
Mattie Michael’s story, for example, is such a
story of subtraction. Forced to leave her childhood
home in Tennessee because she becomes pregnant,
Mattie wanders to North Carolina, where she begins
her version of the American dream. She and her
baby son, Basil, are taken in by Eva Turner, who
gives Mattie a room and a home, urging her to put
her rent money in savings. After Eva dies, Mattie
inherits the house and manages to maintain it with
her work and savings. Her coddled son, though,
kills another man in a fight. Mattie hires a lawyer
who believes he can argue a successful defense, but
Basil jumps bail. As a result (and in an allusion to
the common financing of many “American dreams”),
Mattie loses the home “she exchanged thirty years of