828 Naylor, Gloria
her life to pay for” and is forced to move to Brewster
Place.
The other characters’ versions of pursuing the
American dream have similar results. Etta Mae
Johnson follows the excitement and promise of big-
city life for years, but she ends up arriving at Brew-
ster Place in a stolen Cadillac. Cora Lee’s obsession
with baby dolls as a child turns into an unsustainable
cycle of bearing children with multiple “shadow”
fathers. As the children grow, her attention wanes
until she can again turn her attention to a new baby.
The gloom of her seemingly hopeless existence,
however, is briefly lifted while watching a produc-
tion of A Midsummer’s Night Dream in the park.
Ciel, exiled from the same home as Mattie,
suffers the death of a child and abandonment by
the child’s father, and she leaves Brewster Place.
She finally returns on the verge of financial and
emotional success . . . but only in Mattie’s dream.
Lorraine and Theresa come to Brewster Place with
the hope of escaping prejudice about their sexuality,
reasoning that the people of Brewster Place are so
low that they will go unnoticed. Their dreams, tragi-
cally, are shattered by rape and death.
Kiswana Browne can be said to function as
plaintiff ’s counsel for the women abandoned by the
American dream. Raised in Linden Hills, the Afri-
can-American apotheosis of the American dream (a
place and subject Naylor will address in her second
novel, Linden Hills [1985]), where the superficial
aspects of the American dream have all been met,
Kiswana rejects that life to organize and represent
“her people.” Her philanthropic dream, though, is
shown to be ineffective.
All of the women of Brewster Place, then, have
some experience or vision of an American dream. In
the novel, that dream is distilled of all its material
substance to its most basic essence. The women’s
dreams, though, struggle for existence on a “crowded
windowsill,” like the beautiful plants Mattie brings
from the sun room of her former home. While
the novel concludes with the notion that Brewster
Place itself will indeed eventually “die,” the residents
continue their struggle and pack up “the remnants
of their dreams and [leave] . . . to inherit another
aging street.”
Christopher Hudson
communIty in The Women of Brewster Place
Communities are usually places, and those places
are made up of individuals. The contrary, however, is
also true: Places full of individuals are not necessar-
ily communities, and communities do not necessar-
ily have to be places. The Women of Brewster Place’s
subtitle, “A Novel in Seven Stories,” draws attention
to this tension inherent in the idea of “community.”
The novel begins not with the seven stories but
with a brief and lyrical history of Brewster Place
itself entitled “Dawn.” Naylor uses the language
of childbirth and child rearing—“consummation,”
“conceived,” “parentage,” “baptism”—to describe the
creation of the area, suggesting a “natural” origin of
the neighborhood. Brewster Place, though, is the
“bastard child” of politics and money: It is not an
“organic” community but a compromise between
politicians and developers. Literally walled-off from
the unnamed larger city, Brewster Place is estab-
lished originally as a holding place for the Irish
community; later it becomes a “Mediterranean”
community; and, finally, it welcomes the “multi-
colored ‘Afric’ children of it’s old age,” a place where
people came because “they had no choice.”
It is the third generation of Brewster Place
inhabitants that populate Naylor’s novel. Their sto-
ries represent a shift of focus from place to individu-
als. Mattie Michael’s story is the first presented, and
it also is the most fully developed. Her story begins
with her moving van pulling into Brewster Place,
a sign of transience that she shares with all of the
novel’s characters. Her apartment, overshadowed by
the wall that marks off the neighborhood, scarcely
receives enough sun to keep the potted plants from
her former home alive, suggesting that Brewster is a
place of bare subsistence.
The other stories present various reasons why
the characters come to Brewster Place, all seem-
ingly trapped by socioeconomic circumstances. The
characters, however, are not isolated within their
own stories as Brewster Place is within the larger
city: Their everyday lives are interconnected in ways
that one would expect in a community. Mattie, for
instance, acts as a matriarch of Brewster Place: She
“heals” Luciella Louise Turner after the acciden-
tal death of her child, welcomes home Etta Mae
Johnson from her travels, and acts as a peacemaker