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| ISBN-13: | 9781101656174 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/28/2005 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 467,364 |
| File size: | 430 KB |
Dawn
Brewster Place was the bastard child of several clandestine meetings between the alderman of the sixth district and the managing director of Unico Realty Company. The latter needed to remove the police chief of the sixth district because he was too honest to take bribes and so had persisted in harassing the gambling houses the director owned. In turn, the alderman wanted the realty company to build their new shopping center on his cousin's property in the northern section of town. They came together, propositioned, bargained, and slowly worked out the consummation of their respective desires. As an afterthought, they agreed to erect four double-housing units on some worthless land in the badly crowded district. This would help to abate the expected protests from the Irish community over the police chief's dismissal; and since the city would underwrite the costs, and the alderman could use the construction to support his bid for mayor in the next election, it would importune neither man. And so in a damp, smoke-filled room, Brewster Place was conceived.
It was born three months later in the city legislature, and since its true parentage was hidden, half the community turned out for its baptism two years later. They applauded wildly as the smiling alderman smashed a bottle of champagne against the edge of one of the buildings. He could hardly be heard over the deafening cheers as he told them, with a tear in the corner of his eye, it was the least he could do to help make space for all their patriotic boys who were on the way home from the Great War.
The gray bricks of the buildings were the color of dull silver during Brewster Place's youth. Although the street wasn't paved-after a heavy rain it was necessary to wade in ankledeep to get home-there was a sense of promise in the street and in the times. The city was growing and prospering; there were plans for a new boulevard just north of the street, and it seemed as if Brewster Place was to become part of the main artery of the town.
The boulevard became a major business district, but in order to control traffic some of the auxiliary streets had to be walled off. There was a fierce battle in the city legislature between the representatives of these small veins because they knew they were fighting for the lifeblood of their community, but there was no one to fight for Brewster Place. The neighborhood was now filled with people who had no political influence; people who were dark haired and mellow-skinned-Mediterraneans-who spoke to each other in rounded guttural sounds and who brought strange foods to the neighborhood stores. The older residents were offended by the pungent smells of strong cheeses and smoked meats that now hung in the local shops. So the wall came up and Brewster Place became a dead-end street. There were no crowds at this baptism, which took place at three oÕclock in the morning when Mrs. ColliganÕs son, stumbling home drunk and forgetting the wall was there, bloodied his nose and then leaned over and vomited against the new bricks.
Brewster Place had less to offer the second generation of children-those of its middle years-but it did what it could for them. The street was finally paved under the WPA program, and a new realty company picked up the mortgage on the buildings. Cut off from the central activities of the city, the street developed a personality of its own. The people had their own language and music and codes. They prided themselves on the fact that Mrs. Fuelli's store was the only one in the city that carried scungilli and spinach fettucine. But it broke Mrs. Fuelli's heart when her son returned from the war and didn't settle on Brewster Place, and her cousin's son didn't either, or her second-floor neighbor's. And there were the sons who never returned at all. Brewster Place mourned with these mothers because it had lost children also-to the call of a more comfortable life and to the fear of these present children who were once strange but were now all it had. Brewster Place grew old with Mrs. Fuelli and the few others who either refused or were unable to leave.
A year before the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education realigned the entire country, integration came to Brewster Place on the rounded shoulders of a short, brown-skinned man who had been hired as janitor and handyman for the buildings. He moved into the basement of 312, and when asked his name would reply, ÒJust call me Ben.Ó And thatÕs all he was to be known by until his death. There was little protest over his living in the block because it got around that he was a nice colored man who never bothered anybody. And when the landlord was a postoffice box in another city, and the radiators leaked, or the sink backed up, or arthritis kept you from sweeping the front steps, it was convenient to have someone around to take care of those things, even this man with strange hair and skin and hints of stale liquor on his breath.
Ben and Brewster Place's Mediterraneans grew well acquainted from a distance. They learned that when they were awakened by the somber tones of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" he was on one of his early drunks, and there was no point in asking him to do anything that day-he would yessem you to distraction and just never show up. And he learned that no matter how great the quantities of homemade vegetable soup and honey nut loaves brought up to him by old ladies clucking softly about his womanless plight, he would be met with cold and suspicious eyes if he knocked on their doors without a wrench or broom in his hands. Consequently, no one ever knew why Ben drank. The more observant could predict the return of the early drunks because they always occurred the morning after the mailman descended the basement steps of 312. And if anyone ventured close enough the next day, Ben could be heard mumbling about an unfaithful wife and a lame daughter, or was it a lame wife and an unfaithful daughter? They could never tell which. And if they cared to ask, he probably could have told them, but after a while the mailman stopped descending those steps; yet Ben still drank.
Ben and his drinking became a fixture on Brewster Place, just like the wall. It soon appeared foolish to question the existence of either-they just were. And they were the first sight encountered by Brewster Place's third generation of children, who drifted into the block and precipitated the exodus of the remaining Mediterraneans. Brewster Place rejoiced in these multi-colored "Afric" children of its old age. They worked as hard as the children of its youth, and were as passionate and different in their smells, foods, and codes from the rest of the town as the children of its middle years. They clung to the street with a desperate acceptance that whatever was here was better than the starving southern climates they had fled from. Brewster Place knew that unlike its other children, the few who would leave forever were to be the exception rather than the rule, since they came because they had no choice and would remain for the same reason.
Brewster Place became especially fond of its colored daughters as they milled like determined spirits among its decay, trying to make it a home. Nutmeg arms leaned over windowsills, gnarled ebony legs carried groceries up double flights of steps, and saffron hands strung out wet laundry on back-yard lines. Their perspiration mingled with the steam from boiling pots of smoked pork and greens, and it curled on the edges of the aroma of vinegar douches and Evening in Paris cologne that drifted through the street where they stood together-hands on hips, straight-backed, round-bellied, high-behinded women who threw their heads back when they laughed and exposed strong teeth and dark gums. They cursed, badgered, worshiped, and shared their men. Their love drove them to fling dishcloths in someone else's kitchen to help him make the rent, or to fling hot lye to help him forget that bitch behind the counter at the five-and-dime. They were hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased, these women of Brewster Place. They came, they went, grew up, and grew old beyond their years. Like an ebony phoenix, each in her own time and with her own season had a story.
Mattie Michael
I
The rattling moving van crept up Brewster like a huge green slug. It was flanked by a battered gypsy cab that also drove respectfully over the hidden patches of ice under the day-old snow. It began to snow again, just as the small caravan reached the last building on the block.
The moving men jumped out of the front of the van and began to unload the back. Mattie paid the driver and got out of the cab. The moist gray air was as heavy as the sigh that lay on her full bosom. The ashen buildings were beginning to fade against the gentle blanketing of the furry gray snow coming from the darkening sky. The sun's dying rays could be felt rather than seen behind the leaden evening sky, and snow began to cling to the cracks in the wall that stood only six feet from her building.
Mattie saw that the wall reached just above the second-floor apartments, which meant the northern light would be blocked from her plants. 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.
Someone was cooking on the first floor, and the aroma seeped through the misted window and passed across her nose. For a moment it smelled like freshly cut sugar cane, and she took in short, rapid breaths of air to try to capture the scent again. But it was gone. And it couldn't have been anyway. There was no sugar cane on Brewster. No, that had been in Tennessee, in a summer that lay under the graves of thirty-one years that could only be opened again in the mind.
Sugar cane and summer and Papa and Basil and Butch. And the beginning-the beginning of her long, winding journey to Brewster.
ÒHey, gal.Ó
A cinnamon-red man leaned over the Michaels' front fence and clucked softly to Mattie, who was in the yard feeding the young biddies. She purposely ignored him and ran her fingers around the pan to stir the mash and continued calling the chickens. He timed the clucking of his tongue with hers and called again, a little louder. "I say, hey, gal."
"I heard you the first time, Butch Fuller, but I got a name, you know," she said, without looking in his direction.
His long, upturned mouth, which always seemed ready to break into a smile, spread into a large grin, and he raced to the other edge of the fence and gave a deep exaggerated bow in front of her.
"Well, 'cuse us poor, ignorant niggers, Miz Mattie, mam, or shoulds I say, Miz Michael, mam, or shoulds I say Miz Mattie Michael, or shoulds I say Miz Mam, mam, or shoulds I . . ." And he threw her a look over his bowed shoulders that was a perfect imitation of the mock humility that they used on white people.
Mattie burst out laughing and Butch straightened up and laughed with her.
"Butch Fuller, you was born a fool and you'll die a fool."
"Well, least that'll give the preacher one good thing to say at my funeral-this here man was consistent."
And they laughed again-Butch heartily and Mattie reluctantly-because she realized that she was being drawn into a conversation with a man her father had repeatedly warned her against. That Butch Fuller is a no-'count ditch hound, and no decent woman would be seen talkin' to him. But Butch had a laugh like the edges of an April sunset-translucent and mystifying. You knew it couldn't last forever, but you'd stand for hours, hoping for the chance to experience just a glimmer of it once again.
"Now that I done gone through all that, I hope I can get what I came for," he said slowly, as he looked her straight in the eyes.
The blood rushed to Mattie's face, and just as her mouth dropped open to fling an insult at him, he slid his eyes evenly over to the barrel at the side of the house. "A cup of that cool rain water." And he smiled wickedly.
She snapped her mouth shut, and he looked down and kicked the dust off his shoes, pretending not to notice her embarrassment.
"Yup, a scorcher like today is enough to make a man's throat just curl up and die." And he looked up innocently.
Mattie threw her feed pan down and walked sulkily to the rain barrel. Butch intently watched the circular movements of her high round behind under the thin summer dress, and he followed her rising hemline over the large dark calves when she bent to dip the water. But when she turned around, he was closely inspecting a snap on his overalls.
"Here's your water." She almost threw it at him. "I couldn't even deny a dog a drink on a day like today, but when you done drunk it, you better be gettin' on to wherever you was gettin' before you stopped."
"Lord, you Michael women got the sharpest tongues in the county, but I guess a man could die in a lot worst ways than being cut to death by such a beautiful mouth." And he threw his head back and drank the water.
Mattie watched the movement of the water as it passed down his long throat, and she reluctantly admired the strong brown contours in his neck and arms. His skin looked as if it had sparks of fire in it, and the sun played against the red highlights in his body. He had clean, good-natured lines in his movements which seemed to say to everyone-I'm here and ain't complaining about it, so why are you?
"Thank you, Miz Mattie, mam." He handed the cup back to her with a special smile that beckoned friendship on the basis of the secret joke they now shared between them.
ABOUT THE TITLES
"Gloria just gets smoother and better, doesn't she? The Men of Brewster Place is sort of like a clear, cool mountain stream; too cold to wade in; too swift to dare take a drink from; yet clear and inviting nonetheless: sort of like black men. 'Difficult and dangerous; delicate and deep,' in the words of James Baldwin. Maybe more like a winter day with that clear blue sky and though the sun is shining we know we need protection before going out. A natural precaution that in no way spoils the adventure; that, indeed, allows us to interact with varying phenomena. I'm so glad to know what happened to Basil and why he didn't return. Ben needed to tell his story. C. C. Baker has reason for rage albeit misplaced. The men are standing on the mountain top looking over into the valley. They, too, have dreams that are being deferred, no, destroyed. Gloria was very brave to once again follow this trail into the uncharted territory of the heart." --Nikki Giovanni
Dear Reader,
"Two or three things I know for
sure: and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of
love."
--Dorothy Allison
Fifteen years ago I wrote The Women of Brewster Place and whenever I traveled and spoke publicly about the book, I inevitably got the question, "Where are the men?" This always struck me as curious since I thought the title of the novel was self-evident. But what people were really asking was, where is the rest of the story? Or should I say, the other side of the story. It has taken me these many years to decide finally that I wanted to give the men who had appeared briefly in The Women a voice of their own. Like many in this country I was profoundly moved by the Million Man March and the images of all those black men calling themselves to task, promising to return home and be better citizens by concentrating on being better fathers and brothers. The march provided an alternative to the popular media image of the troubled black man. In The Men of Brewster Place, the women are still present, but they take a back seat as I look at these men in all their complexity, and in their relationships to their families, their community. But above all, I wrote The Men of Brewster Place as a testament to the hidden majority, men like my father who worked hard all of their lives, who struggled to keep their homes together against incredible odds and who remained even after their deaths unsung, unknown.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gloria Naylor was born in 1950 in New York City. Her father, Roosevelt Naylor, a transit worker, and her mother, Alberta Naylor, a telephone operator, immigrated north from rural Mississippi the year before Gloria's birth. From an early age Gloria was an avid reader, a passion she inherited from her mother, who used to go to great lengths to buy books she could not otherwise get from the Mississippi libraries because blacks were not allowed inside. Gloria was a shy and introverted child, but she found expression in a diary she kept as a young girl. This affinity for the written word continued throughout high school, where she was introduced to the English classics and where her own writing earned her praise and high marks from her teachers.
The year Gloria graduated from high school, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. The shock of this event compelled Gloria to postpone college. She chose instead to become a Jehovah's Witness missionary, and for the next seven years she traveled the country evangelizing. At age twenty-five she abandoned this effort and resumed her education, enrolling at Brooklyn College. There she experienced an awakening of sorts, realizing for the first time the importance of her identity as both a woman and a black American. She was introduced to some of the great black women writers, and this fueled her passion to produce her own work.
Naylor's early attempts at writing were hugely successful. One of her first short stories was published in Essence magazine, and soon after she negotiated a book contract. Published in 1982, that novel, The Women of Brewster Place, was an immediate success, earning her great critical praise as well as the National Book Award for the year's best first novel. From there, Naylor went on to publish Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1987), and Bailey's Cafe (1992). Each of these novels garnered much attention for their exploration of the modern black American experience.
In addition to her novels, Naylor has written essays and screenplays, as well as the stage adaptation of Bailey's Cafe. The Women of Brewster Place was made into a television movie starring Oprah Winfrey, who is an ardent fan of the novel and the writer. Naylor herself is the founder of One Way Productions, an independent film company, and is also involved in a literacy program in the Bronx. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from both the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, and frequently serves as a lecturer and visiting professor at universities across the country.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Q: You mention that you wrote The Men of Brewster Place as a response to the many readers who wondered about these characters. How much had you already developed their personalities and situations when you introduced them in The Women of Brewster Place, and how did they evolve as you were writing this book?A: When I was writing The Women of Brewster Place I had not developed these male characters beyond playing the roles of antagonists for the women who were my central concern. At that time the men were used as dramatic devices to bring conflict, of some sort, into the lives of the women. In The Men of Brewster Place they developed as characters in the same way that all characters evolve: I start with a few basic facts and watch the characters gain a life of their own with surprising twists and turns for me as well as for the reader.
Q: Many of the men's stories took surprising turns: Eugene's homosexuality; Moreland T. Woods's betrayal of the community; Basil's attempt to make amends with his deceased mother. To what extent were these developments a product of social changes--or changes in your own life--that occurred in the fifteen years spanning the two novels?
A: As you grow older hopefully you mature and gain insight about yourself as well as the world at large. But I believe that the major twists and turns in the situation of these men come from the characters themselves. I like to let my characters breathe and develop on their own as much as possible. Of course, what they develop into and what they see depends upon my own growth as a human being since I am the filter for their lives.
Q: In the fifteen years since you published The Women of Brewster Place how has your outlook on the role and condition of America's black man changed?
A: I now see that black men are in a dangerous situation in this country. While two-thirds of them are managing their lives as best they can and are providing for themselves and their families, there is that one-third who have succumbed to the pressures and don't see any hope for themselves. This is the one-third that helps to make up the prison population and the under-employed or unemployable.
Q: Unlike men, all women have a history of repression in this country. Is there a similar experience shared by America's black and white men, or are the men of the two races fundamentally different?
A: I believe that the two races are not only fundamentally different but irrevocably different because race determines everything in America. And while black women have had to battle both sexism and racism, the black man is seen as more of a threat than the black woman because of his race and gender. So while a few men have managed to excel in this country the majority find themselves having to overcome stereotypes and negative images.
Q: You have said The Women of Brewster Place was as much about all women in general as it was about black women in particular. To what extent is The Men of Brewster Place about race as opposed to being about gender?
A: The Men of Brewster Place is about both race and gender because you cannot separate the two when dealing with the black community or any community's experience. I wrote about a cross section of black men--some who were powerful like Moreland T. Woods, and on the other end of the spectrum some who were powerless like C. C. Baker.
Q: What difficulties, if any, did you experience writing from the male point of view? How is your connection to your male characters different from your connection to your female characters?
A: By this time in my career I have no trouble writing from the male point of view because I have been doing that from my second novel--Linden Hills--on to this one. While the new book is my first attempt to write a novel totally from a male perspective, I have had over ten years of experience with other male characters who played major roles in all my novels except for The Women of Brewster Place.
Q: Although both novels conclude with the destruction of Brewster Place, The Women ends on a note of despair, while The Men ends with a definite sense of hope. How would you account for this difference in outlook?
A: I don't see The Women of Brewster Place ending on a note of despair. The spirit of the street is still there even though the physical place is now deserted. So both novels end on a note--however small--of survival. This is because I believe that no matter how bad things might get, if there is still life within our bodies then there is hope.
Q: The Women of Brewster Place was your first published novel. How have you changed as a writer since then? Do you think your role as a writer is different?
A: I still see my role as a writer to be a guardian of the lives that were entrusted to me. I am still obligated to tell the best story that I know how.
PRAISE
"-Finally, what all of us who loved Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place were waiting for: the stories of the men of Brewster Place! In this elegantly constructed book, we hear the voices of men struggling to understand themselves and the women in their lives. Gloria Naylor gives us the other half of the story and so creates a fuller, more comprehensive vision, not just of Brewster Place, but of the human heart." ---Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and Yo!
"-Steeped in the blues tradition, The Men of Brewster Place is a heart-stopping, richly layered companion to its sister novel. Neither sinners nor saints, the Brewster Place men demand your empathy, forgiveness, and ultimately, your love. Nayler proves yet again she is one of contemporary American fiction's master storytellers." --Lisa Jones, author of Bulletproof Diva
"-Naylor's prose makes readers want to shout for joy about the power of love and the strength of language." --Detroit Free Press
"-One is quickly beguiled . . . so gracefully does Miss Naylor fuse together the epic and the naturalistic, the magical and the real." --The New York Times
"Gloria Naylor brings an ability to look into the mirror of souls that reflect black experience and to extract richly crafted characterizations that are prototypes rather than stereotypes. Instinctively, we know these people." --Los Angeles Times
"Gloria Naylor's is a commanding fictional voice: sonorous, graceful, sometimes piercing, often spellbinding.At its best it's the kind of voice that moves you as if you were dreaming." --The Washington Post
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
The Men of Brewster Place1. How would you describe Ben's role in this novel? What insights does he bring to each man's story? Why do you think Naylor resurrected his character?
2. What does Ben mean when he says, "We all live inside?" How is he, among the rest of the men featured in the novel, singularly able to make that statement?
3. Like Ben, Brother Jerome serves a universal function in the novel; although we don't discover much about his character, how does his story pave the way for the rest of the stories in the novel? What do his genius and his mental deficiency represent?
4. On the whole, do you feel sympathetically toward the men in this novel and their particular plights? To what extent are they responsible for their misfortunes, and to what extent are they the victims of social bias?
5. Two of the novel's most disparate characters are Moreland T. Woods and C. C. Baker, yet each man is responsible for hurting many people. How do they represent both ends of the spectrum of the black male experience? How do their respective dreams of greatness get in the way of becoming truly great?
6. The climax of the novel takes place in Max's barber shop, a place where "the men who sit . . . done solved every problem in the world before the shop closes each day." Why do you think Naylor chose it as the setting for Greasy's violent death? What importance does his death carry in relation to the lives of the other characters?
7. Ben claims that, "although a man grieves different from a woman, a whole lot more is kept inside to bite him a little here, a little there, until the blood begins to flow." How do the men of Brewster Place manage their grief? Is there a "better" way to grieve?
The Women of Brewster Place
1. What do you think of the novel's structure? How does each woman's individual voice reinforce the novel's themes as a whole? Does this group of women represent a cross section of women in general?
2. In what sorts of ways do each of these women find comfort in the hardships of their everyday lives? How does this reflect the strengths and weaknesses of each woman?
3. Each of these women cope with enormous loss in their lives, but each manages their grief differently. Compare, for instance, Mattie's loss of her house and her son with Ceil's loss of her baby. What could these women learn from each other?
4. How does Naylor portray the South, where many of these women came from, as both a land of plenty and a land of harsh deprivation? How are these women's lives different living in the North--are they happier? more fulfilled? more subject to racial bias? Is there more opportunity for them in Brewster Place than in the South?
5. What do you think of the way Lorraine and Theresa are treated by the other women in Brewster Place? What is Naylor saying about prejudice? Why do you think she concluded the novel with their story?
6. Each of these women is capable of enormous love, but they are often hurt by their loved ones. What do you think Naylor is saying about a woman's capacity for love? Is this sort of love "worth it"? Would these women be happier if they had hardened their hearts to those who eventually let them down?
7. What do you think the "death" of Brewster Place means for the future of its residents? How does Brewster Place continue to live on, once it is vacant? What do you make of Mattie Michael's dream, in which the women of Brewster Place dismantle the structure, brick by brick?
Pertaining to both novels:
1. Compare the endings of both novels. Does one ending feel more hopeful than the other? Considering that both novels end at the same time historically, yet were written fifteen years apart, how do you think the events of the last fifteen years affected Naylor's perspective on her characters' futures? Do you perceive a change in outlook in her writing?
2. Which of the male characters' stories surprised you, and why? Has knowing their "sides" of their stories changed the way you feel about them?
3. The epilogues of each novel, both quoting Langston Hughes, refer to "a dream deferred." What does this phrase signify in the lives of Brewster Place's men and women individually? How, in general, do the experiences of the women differ from that of the men? How are they similar?
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