The Women of Brewster Place 829when tempers flare. Mattie’s matriarchal position in
Brewster Place is important, particularly given the
almost total absence of males in the novel—she is
the anchor of this community of women.
The novel’s most dramatic scene, however,
belies this sense of community. Lorraine and The-
resa (“The Two”), lesbians who move to Brewster
Place to escape prejudice about their sexuality, are
the targets of rumor and innuendo. Lorraine nev-
ertheless befriends Ben (the first black resident of
Brewster Place), and they begin an almost father-
daughter relationship. However, she is brutally
raped by a neighborhood gang of young men, and
in a moment of anger and pain, she strikes out and
kills Ben.
The final chapter, “The Block Party,” shows the
residents of Brewster Place coming together after
the violence in an effort to raise legal funds to press
the absentee landlord for repairs. The party seems to
be a success. As rain clouds gather and a downpour
begins, though, Cora finds a blood-splattered brick
left after the rape. The women gather and begin to
tear apart the wall brick by brick and toss the pieces
into the boulevard. The block party becomes indis-
tinguishable from a riot.
Like the Langston Hughes poem that serves as
an epigraph to the novel, the dream of a community
coming together explodes. Ironically, that dream is
itself a dream. The communal gathering (both joy-
ful and violent) is merely Mattie’s dream. The seven
stories end as Mattie awakens on a sunny morning
the day the party is supposed to take place.
The Women of Brewster Place concludes with
the individuals who constitute the novel seemingly
erased and returns to a narrative about the place
itself. Brewster Place is to be condemned and “die.”
But the women of Brewster Place, like an “ebony
phoenix,” pack up “the remnants of their dreams . . .
to inherit another aging street.” Despite the separate
stories of individual residents, there is nevertheless
an overriding sense that the women of Brewster
Place do indeed form a community—and that com-
munity extends far beyond the wall that confines
them and represents the struggle of poor black
women across the United States. Naylor’s focus,
though, is a reminder that this broader community is
not just a demographic statistic but is also made up
of individuals, who “each in her own time and with
her own season had a story.”
Christopher HudsonGender in The Women of Brewster Place
Any reading of The Women of Brewster Place is bound
to raise the question of gender because the novel is
so clearly focused on the stories of independent (vol-
untarily or involuntarily) women and their struggles
to survive life at the “end of the line.” At the time the
novel was written, government reports highlighted
the absence of the father figure as a major reason for
the impoverishment, culturally and economically,
of African-American families. Challenging this
interpretation, Naylor presents a clearly feminine
“community.” One can speak of Mattie Michael as
a matriarchal figure, the community of women as
a bulwark against patriarchal society, and the indi-
vidual struggles of the characters as representative of
the broader struggles of women. In these cases, as in
the novel, men are almost entirely absent except as
negative apparitions—ghosts that wander through
the novel as through Cora’s bedroom, as intangible
as sociological statistics, leaving the women to fend
for themselves, or as nightmarish entities that per-
petrate senseless violence, leaving only statistics in
their wake.
It would take Gloria Naylor another 15 years
to return to Brewster Place and compose a novel
about the men who certainly were present there.
While The Men of Brewster Place gives flesh to some
male characters of the neighborhood (though Ben
remains a ghostly presence), the males of The Women
of Brewster Place function as traces of the patriarchal
social structure that Naylor places outside the walls
of Brewster Place and into the realms of memory,
transience, and violence.
We know from the first pages of the novel that
Brewster Place was begotten as a “bastard child”
of a presumably male-dominated social order. And
it is easy to list the males who play any significant
role in the novel: Ben, the first black to move into
the neighborhood and the surrogate father to Lor-
raine, who later kills him; Butch Fuller, the man
who seduces Mattie and begets Basil, who abandons
her; Mattie’s father, who beats her, searching for
the name of the father; Etta’s temporary loves and