It would appear that books, like genetic parents, beget books and the sheer proliferation of the work, if nothing else, inscribes an impression point at which the makers and patrons the traditional canon of American literature and the very structure of the values that decides the permissible must now stop and rethink their work.

Reading against the canon, intruding into it a configuration of symbolic values with which critics and audiences must contend, the work of the black women's writing community not only redefines tradition, but also disarms it by suggesting that the term itself is a critical fable intended to encode and circumscribe an inner and licit circle of texts.

—Hortense J. Spillers¹

Myth is a value, truth is no guarantee for it, nothing prevents it from being a perpetual alibi.

—Roland Barthes²

Winning the American Book Award for The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor added force to the impression currently being made by the black women's writing community upon both the literary establishment and the reading public of the United States. In her effort to “sit down and write something I hadn't read about … that was all about me—the Black woman in America,” Naylor opposed yet another fictional force that seeks to describe and define African-American women.³ The proliferation of fictional self-images generated by the black women's writing community in the 1980s coincides with the resuscitation of the tandem myths of the traditional family and the black matriarchy. Just as what Spillers calls the “critical fable” of a literary tradition establishes “an inner and licit circle of texts,” the political fable of the “traditional American family” circumscribes an “inner and licit”—or, in the parlance of sociological studies and government reports—a “legitimate” circle of citizens. The role played by fiction in constructing the fable of tradition suggests a more than rhetorical relationship between the “books” and the babies produced by black women as writers and as “genetic parents.” “The Black woman in America” serves as a textual terrain where the literary fictions of black women writers clash against the fictions with which recent Republican administrations would legitimate both the racialization and the feminization of poverty.⁴

THE BêTE NOIR

Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced the myth of the black matriarchy into government policy in 1964 with a report to the Department of Labor entitled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, since known as the notorious “Moynihan Report.” Through the mediation of then presidential assistant Bill Moyers, Lyndon Johnson delivered a policy speech based on the Report in 1965. In 1986 and again in 1989, Moyers himself rejuvenated the trope for television with the production of his own “documentary” and a follow-up: The Vanishing Black Family—Crisis in Black America.⁵ Both Moyers and Moynihan isolate an imaginary “Black America” remote from impact by an implicit “White America.” This distinction evades the issue of racism in the impoverishment of African Americans by locating the cause of poverty within the structure of the black family and de-emphasizes poverty as a phenomenon affecting society as a whole. Narrowing the discussion of poverty to one of “the Negro family” creates a closed economy in which the blame for economic oppression falls within the oppressed community. This tunnel vision leads to the conclusion that the amelioration of poverty requires a strengthening of moral rather than economic values. As sociologist Patricia Collins points out, Moynihan and Moyers rely on this conclusion in order to assert that “appropriate values and their accompanying behavioral outcomes produce economic success, while deviant values produce behaviors that incur economic penalties.”⁶

For Moynihan, the “deviant values” distinguishing impoverished African-American families from “traditional” American families promote “disorganization”—the “matriarchal structure”—of “the Negro family.”⁷ William Ryan observes that “illegitimacy looms large in the Moynihan report, in the text and in the illustrations … [I]llegitimacy … shines through the report as the prime index of family breakdown.”⁸ Moynihan relies upon the concept of “illegitimacy” to explain poverty. He voices the sexist assumption that views the birth of a child to a single woman as inherently undesirable in a pithy aphorism: “Negro children without fathers flounder and fail.”⁹ The only hope for these children and their mothers according to Moynihan lies in the reassertion of patriarchal authority within the Negro family. Moyers later develops that conclusion by suggesting “not that male power be enhanced but, rather, that female power be attenuated.”¹⁰ The sexist foundation of this prescription creates a paradox: the strength necessitated for the survival of African-American women weakens their families. In promoting the “traditional family” as a substitute for the survival skills developed by women struggling against poverty, Moynihan and Moyers prescribe silence and passivity in the hope that women might then acquire husbands who can provide economic support. The Moynihan Report and Moyers' documentary trap the African-American woman in a double bind by posing her strength as the weakness of her family and the undoing of her race. If she attempts to challenge this image, the formulation captures that challenge as proof positive of the black woman's debilitating strength. In proposing dependence upon men as the solution to poverty, the makers of the myth of the black matriarchy would silence black women and speak in their place.

The substitution of myth for the voices of real black women enacts a symbolic impoverishment, an element Roland Barthes identifies as essential to mythmaking. Myth “does not suppress [the personal history of the mythified object], it only impoverishes it; it puts it at a distance, it holds it at one's own disposal.”¹¹ The mythmaker manipulates the personal history of the mythified object in order to further the mythmaker's own agenda, while retaining the recognizable outlines of that history. “[M]yth hides nothing: its function is to distort, not to make disappear.”¹² The myth of the black matriarchy retains the image of the African-American woman as a kind of ventriloquist's dummy through whom the mythmakers speak. Barthes elaborates:

[M]yth is a speech stolen and restored. Only speech which is restored is no longer quite that which is stolen: when it was brought back, it was not put exactly in its place. It is this brief act of larceny, this moment taken for surreptitious faking, which gives mythical speech its benumbed look.¹³

Moynihan's mythifying of “the Black woman in America” enacts a symbolic robbery of the speech of African-American women. This robbery deprives the image of all variation, replacing the diversity of African-American women with a monolithic mute.

The symbolic impoverishment of black women corresponds closely to the disproportionate economic impoverishment among African-American female heads of households. Margaret Burnham, a contributor to The Nation's 1989 special issue, “Scapegoating the Black Family,” points out, in arguments favoring the “dismantling of domestic social programs” the “most acute condemnation is reserved for the black teenage A.F.D.C. mothers, who are unable to make a case for themselves or to represent much of a political threat.”¹⁴ A racist and politically dishonest representation of both black women and impoverished families legitimizes efforts to obliterate social services. According to Marian Wright Edelman, director of the Children's Defense Fund, such program cuts further a “primary goal of the federal government in the 1980s”: “[T]o provide a ready supply of low-wage labor to employers and to ensure that the welfare system does not offer an alternative to jobs at below-poverty wages.”¹⁵ Edelman analyzes the economic condition of these easy targets for mythification as indicative of economic trends with far-reaching implications:

[I]n some important respects, trends for blacks foreshadow trends for whites, or are exaggerated representations of broader problems in our society, as blacks are often hurt earlier and more profoundly by social and economic program changes that injure all poor and working-class Americans.¹⁶

African-American women have a two-tiered relationship to the economic policies of the Republican agenda. Materially, given the high proportional poverty rate among blacks, the widening gulf between rich and poor pushes African-American women farthest first from financial well-being. Symbolically, the image of the black woman serves to legitimate economic policies with impact beyond that group.

Sociologist Charles Murray, in his book advertised as “the [Reagan] Administration's new ‘bible,’” constructs just such a legitimation. In Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980, Murray's nominal critique of the programs initiated in the War on Poverty provides a convoluted rationalization for examining the African-American community and poverty as equivalent phenomena.¹⁷ Murray reinscribes the picture of the black economy as distinct from the dominant society by blaming “black male joblessness” on a “ghetto lifestyle.”¹⁸ But Murray's solution for the African-American community ultimately clears a path for changes in federal policy extending far beyond that community:

The proposed program, our final and most ambitious thought experiment, consists of scrapping the entire federal income-support structure for working-aged persons, including A.F.D.C., Medicaid, Food Stamps, Unemployment Insurance, Workers' Compensation, subsidized housing, disability insurance, and the rest. It would leave the working-aged person with no recourse whatsoever except the job market, family members, friends, and public or private locally funded sources. It is the Alexandrian solution: cut the knot for there is no way to untie it.¹⁹

Despite the impact of these measures upon all impoverished and many middle-class people, the vast majority of whom are not African-American, Murray relies upon a racist lens to focus his argument in a section labeled “PART II: Being Poor, Being Black: 1950–1980.” Murray rhetorically divides and conquers the family when he places African-American women and children in a chapter labeled “The Family” and African-American men in a chapter labeled “Crime.” “The Family” chapter's two subheadings, “Illegitimate Births” and “Female Householder, No Husband Present,” identify the cause of the family's “fall”: the single African-American female. In “concentrat[ing] on two indicators that almost everybody agrees are important evidence of problems with the family: illegitimate births, and families headed by a single female,” Murray employs the same formula identified by Collins in the Moynihan Report and the Moyers documentary.²⁰ “[R]acial difference … explain[s] class disadvantage,” she notes, “while gender deviancy … account[s] for racial difference.”²¹ However, Murray significantly revises Moynihan's and Moyers' theses. The menace of the black matriarchy does not primarily lie in the emasculation of the black male—who appears in the family only as an absence and in the streets only as a criminal—but in the immoral fecundity of the black female which drains federal funds.

To support this argument, Murray presents a brief history of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (A.F.D.C.), the program most commonly associated with welfare. Murray purports that the original purpose of A.F.D.C. was to allow the State to step in as a missing husband in order to support poor widows with children, but the program took a disastrous turn.

A.F.D.C. evolved into the bête noir of the social welfare system. By the fifties it had become embarrassingly, outrageously clear that most of these women were not widows. Many of them had never been married. Worst of all, they didn't stop having babies after the first lapse. They kept having more. This had not been part of the plan.

The most flagrantly unrepentant seemed to be mostly black, too. The statistics might show that whites have always been the largest single group of A.F.D.C. recipients, but the stereotype that enraged the critics was the family of four, five, six, and more children reared at government expense, and somehow the stories always seemed to talk about black families.²²

Not asking readers to pardon his French, Murray constructs a procreative “black beast” who menaces as the ultimate—the “most flagrantly unrepentant”—of female sinners. His history becomes a morality play in which the “black beast” represents the “lapse” into darkness of the widow who, once remarried to the State, continues to consort with mortal lovers. Murray hints at the importance of this welfare myth as “story” not statistical fact, but rather than refute this “stereotype” he perpetuates it in order to prove that the marriage between the State and the widow has turned into an illicit partnership with a faithless black beast who churns out babies for welfare checks.

While the “evolution” of A.F.D.C. depicted by Murray suggests an inevitable development given the structure of federal support, this evolution bears little resemblance to the most significant actual change in the system. The social program Aid to Dependent Children (A.D.C.) became A.F.D.C. in 1962, in the decade after Murray locates the shift in aid recipients. African-American women for the most part could not even receive federal aid before the 1962 change eradicated the eligibility distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor that assigned them to the latter category on the basis of race. Murray observes this shift in the composition of people receiving benefits “for white widows to unwed mothers and women of color”²³ poetically, as he figures the menacing black beast metaphorically for women he considers to have darker skin and more dubious morals. In order to legitimize the dismantling of welfare, Murray replaces the historical range of A.F.D.C. recipients with his own creation: a black female monster.

THE EBONY PHOENIX

The moral of the stories constructed by Murray, Moynihan, and Moyers—that the State has an interest in breaking the power of the black matriarchy—profoundly impacts the material conditions of the lives of many African-American women. To disarm these fables, Gloria Naylor employs the “Afro-American strategy of Signifyin[g],’ characterized by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as “a rhetorical practice that is not engaged in the game of information giving … [but] turns on the play of a chain of signifiers, and not on some supposedly transcendental signified.”²⁴ Rather than claim to represent the world the mythmakers falsify, Naylor's characters inhabit, in order to revise from within, the mythical world detailed by the myth of the black matriarchy. The women living in Brewster Place speak through individual short stories, loosely structured as a novel because, in Naylor's words,

… one character couldn't be the Black woman in America. So I had seven different women, all in different circumstances, encompassing the complexity of our lives, the richness of our diversity, from skin color on down to religious, political, and sexual preference.²⁵

In contrast to the monolithic image of the mythical black matriarch, Naylor refuses to portray one uniform image of the black woman or the black family: This strategy allows Naylor the freedom to discuss African-American women without confining their image to the shape of her discussion.

From the opening phrase, The Women of Brewster Place invades the terrain of the myth of the black matriarchy as Naylor enacts a “double-voiced representation in art [utilizing] … [r]epetition, with a signal difference.”²⁶ Naylor repeats claims for illegitimate children as the cause of poverty, but she shifts the stigma of illegitimacy from the illicit sexuality of single black women to the illicit partnership between government and commerce that created the ghetto: “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.”²⁷ To legitimate the “consummation of their respective desires,” the establishment powers of the city declared their intention to “help make space for all their patriotic boys who were on their way home from the Great War.” In the time of Naylor's telling, however, Brewster is space not for male military heroes but for “colored daughters [who] milled like determined spirits among its decay, trying to make it a home.” Naylor materializes the closed economy in which the government would place African-American poverty as the brick wall erected by the city legislature making Brewster Place a dead-end street. The wall serves a double function in both isolating the women and marking them as “different in their smells, foods, and codes from the rest of the town.” Naylor characterizes this difference not in the dehumanizing terms of the “black beast” but in the supernatural image of an “ebony phoenix” who will rise from the ashes of utter destruction.

Naylor not only reveals the complicity of the establishment powers in the construction of the ghetto, she parodies the welfare myth presented as legitimation for ghetto conditions by those powers. In the story “Cora Lee,” Naylor plays on the convention in Shakespearean comedy identified by Northrop Frye: a romp into the forest temporarily topples conventions in order to expose social hierarchies, but these hierarchies remain in place within the society beyond the forest, to which the characters must return.²⁸ Naylor borrows the forest from a production of Shakespeare to expose the conventional myth of the welfare mother as (literally) A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The story begins with a reading direction lifted from the play:

True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.

This fragment instructs readers to approach “Cora Lee” as “nothing but vain fantasy.” Naylor brilliantly maneuvers this passage from Shakespeare in order to shift the accusations of laziness and relentless reproductivity away from A.F.D.C. mothers to the makers of the welfare myth whose “idle brains” themselves “begot” the fantastic “children” of Cora Lee. Reminiscent of Murray's description of the bête noir, Cora Lee's “babies just seemed to keep coming—always welcome until they changed” into demanding youngsters. Cora Lee's desire for babies serves as the tautological reductio ad absurdum for the faulty causality posited by Murray in which welfare mothers procreate for profit: she has babies for the sole pleasure of having babies.

Cora Lee's story negates the salvation the Moynihan Report promises with the return of the absent father, because the men “who had promised to marry [Cora Lee] and take her off Welfare” deliver only violence. “A pot of burnt rice would mean a fractured jaw, or a wet bathroom floor a loose tooth. …” In the place of a permanent partner we find black men in the image sociologist Elliot Liebow observed in his 1967 anthropological study Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men. “The adult male, if not simply characterized as ‘absent',” Liebow writes, “is a somewhat shadowy figure who drifts in and out of the lives of the family members.”²⁹ When the fathers-in-residence of her older children leave, Cora Lee makes love with “only the shadows—who came in the night and showed her the thing that felt good in the dark.” The shadows “would sometimes bring new babies” but at least “didn't give you fractured jaws or bruised eyes.” Moynihan and Murray's idyllic image of the nuclear family relies upon the repression of the potential for domestic violence in order to present marriage as always and everywhere preferable to mothering alone.

When black middle-class activist Kiswana Browne invites Cora Lee to an all-black production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, she proffers tradition in its literary essence as a panacea for Cora Lee's inadequate mothering. In accepting Kiswana's invitation, Cora Lee accepts the equation of great books and good citizens championed by former Secretary of Education William Bennett and director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, among others.³⁰ Naylor parodies this simplistic equation by having Cora Lee imagine that through exposure to “Shakespeare and all that” her children would “do better in school and stop being so bad.”

In preparation for the play, Cora Lee costumes her children in rare respectability after a burst of housekeeping in which she fit the children and house alike to the drama of the traditional family. “She lined up the scoured faces, carefully parted hair, and oiled arms and legs on the couch, and forbid them to move.” At the theater, Cora Lee monitors the behavior of her children in the mainly white audience in order to “show these people that they were used to things like this.” Their directed behavior parallels that of the actors who awed Cora Lee because “she had never heard black people use such fine-sounding words and they really seemed to know what they were talking about.” Naylor does not question the ability of African Americans to succeed as doctors, lawyers, or Shakespearean actors; rather she questions the roles assigned to African Americans in the received white dramas labeled Tradition. The narration of Cora Lee's vision of “what would happen to her babies” as she planned to “check homework,” attend P.T.A., and set up her children in “good jobs,” progresses synchronically with the action of Bottom's dream as the play approaches the last act. Significantly, Bottom awakens in the last act estranged from the queen of the faeries, and is once again merely a Mechanical giving an inadequate performance before nobility amused at his expense.

In subsequent stories, the reader finds Cora Lee pregnant again and the children still in disarray, belying critic Charles Johnson's rosy conclusion that “by the story's end, Cora has changed, found a light she'd lost.”³¹ Cora Lee returns home not to “light” but to “the shadow, who had let himself in with his key.” The return of the “shadow” creates new meaning for Puck's epilogue, reproduced in part in the text:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this and all is mended:
That you have but slumber'd here,
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream …

By stopping here, Naylor reassures those would find the traffic of shadows through Cora Lee's bedroom offensive: they need only wake up. She insists that the “weak and idle theme” presenting a lazy, procreative welfare mother who keeps her children from the salvation of acculturation into white patriarchal society is “no more yielding but a dream.”

Michael C. Cooke lists The Women of Brewster Place as an Afro-American novel that “experiment[s] technically with kinship along feminist lines.”³² As an alternative to unquestioned acceptance of an ideal patriarchal family, Naylor offers a federation among the women of the street, headed by Mattie—an incarnation of the Mat(tie)riarch deplored by Moynihan. Naylor widens the circle of permissible family in her representation of what Dorothy Height calls the “black tradition of the extended family [which] grew out of the primary need to survive, an urgency that for the most part made gender largely irrelevant.”³³ This relationship finds poignant expression when Mattie serves as a spiritual substitute for the husband Etta Mae, Mattie's girlhood friend, failed to obtain. After an unsuccessful attempt to seduce a visiting minister into marriage, “Etta laughed softly to herself as she climbed the steps toward the light and the love and the comfort that awaited her” in Mattie's house.

Opposing the strength of the female-headed household to the picture of that household as a sign of family breakdown, Naylor risks perpetuating the erasure of the black male under the label “absent father.” Despite Naylor's assertion that she “bent over backwards not to have a negative message come through about the men,” Charles Johnson asserts that “except for the old sot Ben, nearly every black male in this book resembles the Negro Beast stereotype described so many years ago by white racists as the brutal, stupid creatures of violent sexual appetites.”³⁴ However, Naylor carefully separates the acts of individual black men from the patriarchal system in which those men might participate. The metaphorical portrayal of Mattie's single sexual encounter with Butch Fuller as eating sugar cane runs counter to the community's view of Fuller as a “low-down ditch dog.” Against the over-determined sweetness of the portrayal of sex as the ingestion of sugar, Naylor opposes the violence of a system that restricts sexuality outside marriage by stigmatizing single motherhood. Mattie's father beats her to extract the name of her child's father:

Mattie's body contracted in a painful spasm each time the stick smashed down on her legs and back, and she curled into a tight knot, trying to protect her stomach. He would repeat his question with each blow from the stick, and her continued silence caused the blows to come faster and harder.

As the beating of the daughter by her father suggests, male violence in The Women of Brewster Place occurs not in connection with sexual appetites but with attempts to subject black women to patriarchal authority.

Naylor directly addresses the proposition that black men need only assert themselves as patriarchs to overcome poverty in her story “Luciella Louise Turner.” The argument for marriage as the family ideal (commonly phrased “for the children's sake”) is refuted in the desperate attempts by Mattie's adopted daughter Luciella (Ciel) to hold on to her husband Eugene; attempts producing first an unwanted, sacrificial abortion and later the accidental death of their toddler, Serena. As if following advice from the Moynihan Report, Eugene asserts patriarchal power by expelling Mattie from their apartment and denying her offer to watch his child. “She can stay right here,” Eugene br[eaks] in. “If she needs ice cream, I can buy it for her.” Rather than providing security for his child, however, Eugene's commands leave Serena unattended during an argument in which Ciel attempts to keep him from leaving her. While the lovers dispute in another room, Naylor manipulates the emotions of her readers as she draws us with the child behind a roach walking toward a wall socket. The scene breaks one moment before certain disaster: “Picking up the fork, Serena finally managed to fit the thin flattened prongs into the electric socket.” The readers' horror grows with Ciel's increasing awareness of her self-degradation as she implores: “‘Eugene, please.’ She [listened] with growing horror to herself quietly begging.” Ciel shifts her thirst for love from her husband to her daughter too late. Naylor punctuates the moment at which Ciel decides to accept the legitimacy of the female-headed household with her daughter's death:

Ciel began to feel the overpowering need to be near someone who loved her. I'll get Serena and we'll go visit Mattie now, she thought in a daze.

Then they heard the scream from the kitchen.

The substitution of the scream for the pleading “please” that marks Ciel's decision to let Eugene go emphasizes the function of the female-centered household as a survival method rather than an immoral, or even unequivocally feminist, choice.

Ciel's collapse after Serena's death allows her to receive her adopted mother's spiritual legacy. Mattie nurses Ciel back to health through a ritual “baptism” into maternal history and female-centered survival:

[Mattie] sat on the edge of the bed and enfolded the tissue-thin body in her huge ebony arms. And she rocked … She rocked her over the Aegean seas so clean they shone like crystal, so clear the fresh blood of sacrificed babies torn from their mother's arms and given to Neptune could be seen like pink froth on the water. She rocked on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children's entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on.

Mattie rocks Ciel as a mother rocks a child, carrying her over the grief of mothers bereft of their children due to massive, institutionalized violence. The strength of motherhood rests not in any essential or mythological characteristic of black women, but in the necessity of overcoming violence. As black writer/historian (and former welfare recipient) Barbara Omolade puts it: “black families headed by women reflect the strength and difficulty of black life in the 1980s.”³⁵

Mattie's wordless rocking gives Ciel the strength not to support her pain, but to expel it. Her body “was exorcising the evilness of pain,” through retching. Ciel mouths her weakness and her strength; she marks her need for a husband with the word “please,” her pain with a scream, and her expulsion of pain with retching. The discussion of black women's mouths in Tally's Corner illuminates the threat that female speech—which can expose and expel as well as submit to oppression—poses to male authority within the African-American community. Prohibited from fulfilling patriarchal expectations by socioeconomic conditions, the “streetcorner man”

… avoids the “why” of [his female partner's] nagging behavior and complains of the “how.” He does not deny the legitimacy of her exhortations but objects to their insistent repetition and the unrelieved constancy of it all.³⁶

Perceived as the remainder of, rather than the partner in, the economic hardship of the black man in white society, the mouth of the black woman becomes a target for violence. One man derisively refers to his wife as “The Mouth” and another recounts his action to a light-skinned lover who called him names associated with his darker skin: “I put my fist in her mouth.”³⁷ The myth of the black matriarchy stops the mouth of the black woman by stealing her voice, and serves the white patriarchy by attempting to silence black women on a national scale. In the gesture of writing a novel, Naylor not only reclaims the voices of black women stolen by the myth, but inscribes the motif of the violent stopping of mouths into the stories those voices tell. Naylor transforms the “nagging behavior” lamented by the men in Tally's Corner into the “insistent repetition” of violent attempts to silence black women, with the “signal difference” of containing those attempts within the narrative voice of a black woman writing.

The double-enunciation of a black woman writer “speaking the silencing” of black women culminates in the narration of the gang-rape of Lorraine in “The Two.” The title of the story refers to a middle-class lesbian couple, Lorraine and her lover Theresa, who flee more affluent neighborhoods only to discover in Brewster Place the same homophobia they had hoped to escape. “The Two”—a female-female household—represents a departure from the patriarchal structure that neither Murray, Moyers, nor Moynihan even consider. The gang-rape signifies an attempt to force “The Two” back into a patriarchal power structure. As Barbara Christian observes, Lorraine becomes “an accessible scapegoat”³⁸ for the racism and powerlessness in the community as experienced by “the most dangerous species in existence—human males with an erection to validate in a world that was only six feet wide.” Those “six feet,” reminiscent of a grave, dramatize the closed economy of oppression within the wall around “Black America,” literalized as the wall at the dead end of Brewster Place. This wall blocks the young black men from access to full patriarchal power by conferring on them the status of “dwarfed warrior-kings” with “appendages of power, circumcised with a guillotine.” The young men do not rebel against the social forces that built the constricting wall, but rather resort to terror against black women to assert themselves as patriarchs.

The gang rapes Lorraine against the same dead-end wall that limits their own power, emphasizing the misdirection of such “resistance” trapped within the enclosure of the African-American community. The attack on Lorraine, in Christian's explication, represents “an attack on all women, not only because lesbians are women, but because lesbian stereotyping exposes society's fear of women's independence of men.”³⁹ The penis of gang-bang leader C. C. incarnates the phallic power promoted as part of the ideal of the traditional family. C. C. violently imposes patriarchy on Lorraine by announcing his intention to “slap that bitch in her face and teach her a lesson.” This lesson links voice and gender transgression as C. C. first threatens to “stick [his] fist in [her] cunt-eatin' mouth!” and later, as a prelude to rape, rubs his penis in her face saying, “See, that's what you need.”

Naylor's graphic depiction of this attack denies the rape any connection with sexuality. She thus starkly negates the potential for prurient pleasure in the reader and for the rationalization of violence in the mythology of black male sexuality. This act of violence again targets the black woman's voice, silencing her through sexual terror: “He slammed his kneecap into her spine and her body arched up, causing his nails to cut into the side of her mouth to stifle her cry.” Naylor frustrates the rapists' attempt to impose a fiction of their own power upon Lorraine's body by disrupting the external representation of violence.⁴⁰

The narrative moves from a depiction of the rapists' action and a description of Lorraine's body to an internal account of Lorraine's experience of pain. With the first blow she received from C. C., Lorraine emitted the word “Please,” linking her experience of violence to Ceil's attempt to retain her husband. The narration moves inside her as she “clamped her eyes shut” and pushed the word “please” out a second time. Rape serves as a method to stifle the black woman's voice, forcing her into a script of submission. The boys then stop her mouth/voice with a paper bag and begin penetration. The narration works to reverse the action of penetration by moving from the “tearing pain inside her body” outward: “screams tried to break through her corneas into the air.” The stifling of those screams “screamed to death” Lorraine's ability to think and feel. The rape serves as a negation of her experience, leaving “what was left of her mind centered around the pounding motion that was ripping her insides apart.” Naylor narrates the final actions in negative terms: “She couldn't feel the skin that was rubbing off her arms”; “She couldn't tell when they changed places”; “She didn't feel her split rectum or the patches in her skull. …” Denied a voice to expel her pain, Lorraine retreats into a realm where she can no longer feel. The negation of voice effectively negates experience.

Naylor completes the circle of resistance trapped in the closed economy of oppression with a reversed gender dynamic in Lorraine's murder of her friend Ben. Ben tells Lorraine earlier in the novel: “You remind me lots of my little girl” (his daughter), who also suffered repeated rape. The sexual exploitation of Ben's daughter by a white neighbor re-emphasizes the inaccessibility of white patriarchal power to the impoverished black man. This exploitation takes place down South, where Ben cannot earn enough money to support his family. His wife blames Ben personally for their troubles, rather than the sharecropping system through which her white neighbor wields power over her husband.

If you was half a man, you coulda given me more babies and we woulda had some help workin' this land instead of a half-grown woman we gotta carry the load for. And if you was even a quarter of a man, we wouldn't be a bunch of miserable sharecroppers on someone else's land—but we is, Ben.

Ben internalizes his wife's blame and drinks alcohol to dull his sense of inadequate manhood. Naylor links the inebriation of the “old sot” Ben directly to the closed circle of oppression, as his drunkenness serves as the plot mechanism that allows for his death. Lorraine's act of murder resonates symbolically: she hits Ben on the mouth with a brick. The bricks from the wall erected by the city provide the currency of violence in the closed economy of oppression, circulating from the gang that silenced Lorraine, to Lorraine's hands, providing the tool to smash Ben's mouth. By positioning Mattie at her window during this sequence, a distant witness too late for Ben's murder and Lorraine's rape, Naylor deflates the destructive strength attributed to the mythical matriarch. Mattie can only follow behind the violence engendered by the economic and symbolic circumscription of the African-American community, nursing or burying the victims.

The final story, “The Block Party,” replaces the Moynihan and Murray myths of the black matriarchy with the dreams of the women who live on Brewster Place. Mattie, the putative matriarch herself, dreams of the destruction of the myth that “created” her. Rain bursts into Mattie's nightmare, dispersing the block party initiated by Kiswana and designed to bring the neighborhood together in confrontation with the landlord. One of Cora Lee's children discovers blood on the bricks, presumably residue from the attack on Lorraine. Cora “yanked the brick out,” calling to Mattie to join her in tearing down the wall, while “[a]ll of the men and children now stood huddled in doorways.” Mattie starts a chain, in which the brick “was passed by the women from hand to hand, table to table, until the brick flew out of Brewster Place and went spinning out onto the avenue.” All seven of Naylor's women throw the resistance to oppression they circulated among themselves out into the dominant society, breaking the flow of that society past Brewster Place as “[c]ars were screeching and sliding around the flying bricks.” When Cora Lee asks Theresa to join the rest of the women with the words “Please. Please,” Theresa demands: “Now, you go back up there and bring some more [bricks], but don't ever say that again—to anyone!” In throwing the bricks, Theresa throws away the word “please” and discards the script of submission imposed upon African-American women.

In Mattie's dream, the seven women of Brewster Place unite to tear down the wall that the city legislature built. In Naylor's novel, they speak together to tear down the definition of the African-American family erected by Murray, Moyers, and Moynihan. Mattie awakens from this dream, but the epilogue tells us that the dreams of “the colored daughters of Brewster … ebb and flow, ebb and flow, but never disappear.” Gloria Naylor's stories telling “all about me—the Black woman in America” feed the tide of African-American women's fiction which threatens to submerge the mythical black matriarch. While the fictional images of African-American women conceived by black women writers cannot eradicate the material impoverishment of black women, their articulation provides a security against continued silencing. Naylor registers a profound protest against the robbery of the voice of African-American women attempted by makers of the myth of the black matriarchy who would use her to legitimize the robbery of funds from the nation's poor.

Notes

1. Hortense J. Spillers, “Afterword,” Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 250–51.

2. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), 123.

3. “The Women of Brewster Place,” Ebony 41 (March 1989)1: 126.

4. See Margaret B. Wilkerson and Jewell Handy Gresham, “The Racialization of Poverty: Sexual Politics of Welfare,” The Nation 24/31 (July 1989), 126. “The feminization of poverty is real, but the racialization of poverty is at its heart. To discuss one without the other is to play a mirror game with reality.”

5. Jewell Handy Gresham, “The Politics of the Black Family,” The Nation 24/31 (July 1989), 117–18.

6. Patricia Collins, “A Comparison of Two Works on Black Family Life,” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (Summer 1989) 4: 876.

7. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, Publishers Reprint, 1981), 30. In a more recent work, Family and Nation (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987), 145, Moynihan extends his critique of “illegitimacy” from African-American women to all women as he notes: “… by the mid-1980s, it was clear that family disorganization had become a general feature of the American population and not just an aspect of a frequently stigmatized and appropriately sensitive minority community.” This generalization has chilling implications given his prescription—a strengthened patriarchy—to redress such “disorganization” in family life.

8. William Ryan, “Savage Discovery—The Moynihan Report,” in The Black Family: Essays and Studies, ed. Robert Staples (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., 1971), 59.

9. Moynihan, Negro Family, 35.

10. Collins, “Two Works,” 881.

11. Barthes, Mythologies, 118.

12. Ibid., 121.

13. Ibid., 125.

14. Margaret Burnham, “The Great Society Didn't Fail,” The Nation 24/31 (July 1989), 124.

15. Marian Wright Edelman, Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 82.

16. Ibid., 24.

17. Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984). See pp. 54–55, where Murray essentializes poverty as a racial characteristic, arguing that “a black-white difference murkily reflects a difference between poor and not-poor, not a racially grounded difference.”

18. Ibid., 81.

19. Ibid., 227–8.

20. Ibid., 125.

21. Collins, “Two Works,” 882.

22. Murray, Losing Ground, 18.

23. Wilkerson and Gresham, “Racialization of Poverty,” 128.

24. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 52.

25. “The Women of Brewster Place,” 123.

26. Gates, Signifying Monkey, 51.

27. Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 2.

28. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 141.

29. Elliot Liebow, Tally's Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1967), 5–6.

30. Cheney and Bennett make this equation to oppose the entrance into the classroom curricula of literature by writers other than canonized white men. Both have represented the classroom as the site of salvation for the West, which must be sealed against black and female voices if not against black and female students. Cheney feels that “too many colleges are neglecting the achievements of Western culture [while] requiring ethnic courses” (New York Times, 23 Sept. 1988, A-16). Bennett worried aloud about Stanford's curriculum: “But how are we supposed to protect the West if we set about systematically robbing ourselves of opportunities to know and study it?” (New York Times, 19 April 1988), A-18.

31. Charles Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 110.

32. Michael C. Cooke, Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 111.

33. Dorothy Height, “Self-Help: A Black Tradition,” The Nation 24/31 (July 1989), 137.

34. Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison, “A Conversation,” Southern Review 21 (1985) 34: 579; Johnson, Being and Race, 111.

35. Quoted in Wilkerson and Gresham, “Racialization of Poverty,” 130.

36. Liebow, Tally's Corner, 128.

37. Ibid., 183.

38. Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (New York: Pergamon Press, Inc., 1985), 196.

39. Ibid., 196.

40. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 18. “In torture, it is part of the obsessive display of agency that permits one person's body to be translated into another person's voice, that allows real human pain to be translated into a regime's fiction of power.”