Book review: The Women of Brewster Place, by Gloria Naylor

The women of Brewster Place have ended up together in place and time. They are not necessarily friends, nor are they necessarily enemies, and at first look the book seems to be a collection of their individual short stories, but look more closely and it is much, much more. Though each of these women comes to Brewster Place with a story in tow, each with their own cross to bear, the book as a whole is less about their individuality than about their need to unite and claim their rightful place in the world.

In "The Women of Brewster Place" each character, seven women and one man, has followed her own road to come to the projects, to Brewster Place, where they have been shut off from the growing and modernizing world behind a wall erected long ago by those in power in the city, those who you can bet were neither African American or female. The women arrive carrying burdens, in many cases burdens that they have created for themselves, or have at least accepted, and further cripple their own strength by fighting amongst themselves, allowing the world to drive wedges between them. The end of the story shows them finally combining their strengths to tear down the wall once built by the outside world and release themselves from the cage they had been put in.

The thread of the African American story is strong Naylor's writing—stronger here than in Bailey's Cafe, but not so strong as in Mama Day. Shades of segregation and hints at abuse, and abuse of power, as well as the debate between embracing the culture of ancestry versus the culture of inheritance, all of these issues are very real, and Naylor brings them to life with her characters. But some critics have accused her of sidestepping the African American issue, of not making a real statement. And they may be right, but I don't think it's a matter of unwillingness, I just think she's writing about something else. While Gloria Naylor is often considered one of the most talented writers of contemporary African American fiction, the empowerment of women is also a common theme for her, and that is where her statement lies. She is writing about African American women.

Of the seven women we meet at Brewster Place, five have allowed themselves to be controlled or hurt by men or by their gender roles: Mattie by her son, Etta by her need of a man, Cora Lee by strict confinement to traditional gender roles, Ceil in the traditional sense by an abusive man, and Lorraine by both gender expectation and by male fear. And these women have more or less accepted their places, and are harassed not only by the world but by each other as well. They are trapped by their inability to change their situation.

Ben is their biggest hurdle. Though the janitor seems innocuous, he is the connecting piece between the neglectful, possibly abusive, landlord, and he has been there almost as long as the wall, is part of the wall as we see in the end. And it is because, at the behest of his wife, he refused to take action that his daughter suffered repeated rape and abuse at the hand of a white man. He allowed his wife's acceptance of that man's right to their daughter to stop him from acting, and when his daughter found her own strength and left, he lost her. Now he, and the wall, stand between the women of Brewster Place and their ability to find their strength and stop accepting the abuse, because that would lead to their leaving him just like his daughter. Lorraine is the first of the women to get to know him, and she sees him for what he is. After Ben is gone the women find their strength and they take the (rest of the) wall down together.

The characters of Brewster Place are expertly drawn, and the symbolism is woven finely throughout. Naylor's hallmark voodoo-like mysticism makes a short appearance at the end, and might be readable in the very beginning of Mattie's story as well, but I'd have liked to see more of it. I don't think Brewster Place is as tight a narrative as Naylor's other works, and the stories are not as neatly threaded together as they are in Bailey's Cafe, but The Women of Brewster Place is a beautiful novel and most definitely worth reading in its own right.

Book 25 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Bailey's Cafe, by Gloria Naylor

"Godfather always said that he made me, but I was born of the delta...I had no choice but to walk into New Orleans neither male nor female—mud. But I could right then and there choose what I was going to be when I walked back out." -Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Cafe

There is an Eve in this book. She is born of the earth alone, not born of man, and she is forced to make a pilgrimage. From the delta, the fertile womb of the earth, she walks to New Orleans, arriving caked in earth, stripped of the gender that has long been her assignment of sin. What she is when she walks back out is what makes this story a contemporary African American tale even more than the struggles endured by the rest of its characters, because she isn’t Eve of the bible and she isn’t the mother figure of European pagan beliefs. She is part earth, part magic, and she can conjure like a voodoo queen.

Eve's story is just one of many told here, but she is more ubiquitous than she at first seems, while the seemingly omnipresent personage of the narrator, Bailey, turns out to be just a supporting character. Bailey, after all, is Christianity's representative, and those in power get to write the histories, even those of contemporary Eve and her wards. Eve lets him tell it. That's the smallest of her battles. Religion as we know it, after all, and secular culture, are a man’s world, and Eve, as drawn by Gloria Naylor, has arrived to reclaim it.

I am a huge fan of Gloria Naylor's "Mama Day", which I read for the first time back in college and have revisited at least twice since, and Bailey's Cafe is another beautiful example of contemporary African American writing by this talented author. I love this book. I love its primal, driven message and the words with which it is told. Naylor's writing is clean and concise—she does not spend vocabulary on setting the scene, but uses every word to take the reader deeper into the lives of her characters, and her characters are most certainly deep. While at first glance, Bailey's Cafe is a handful of character studies tied together by a shared narrator, a member of their unique and mystical community, Naylor's real story is embedded in the depths of her characters and in the religious symbolism throughout. This isn't your run of the mill twentieth century religious symbolism, but a message about the violent struggle being played out between women, particularly African American women, and the patriarchal religions of the world.

Book 9 on my way to 52 in 2011