SOURCE: Matus, Jill L. “Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place.” Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 1 (spring 1990): 49–64.

[In the following essay, Matus discusses the role of dreams in The Women of Brewster Place and considers why Naylor chose to end the novel with a dream.]

After presenting a loose community of six stories [in The Women of Brewster Place] each focusing on a particular character, Gloria Naylor constructs a seventh, ostensibly designed to draw discrete elements together, to “round off” the collection. As its name suggests, “The Block Party” is a vision of community effort, everyone's story. We discover after a first reading, however, that the narrative of the party is in fact Mattie's dream vision, from which she awakens perspiring in her bed. The “real” party for which Etta is rousing her has yet to take place, and we never get to hear how it turns out. Authorial sleight of hand in offering Mattie's dream as reality is quite deliberate, since the narrative counts on the reader's credulity and encourages the reader to take as narrative “presence” the “elsewhere” of dream, thereby calling into question the apparently choric and unifying status of the last chapter. The displacement of reality into dream defers closure, even though the chapter appears shaped to make an end. Far from having had it, the last words remind us that we are still “gonna have a party.”

The inconclusive last chapter opens into an epilogue that too teases the reader with the sense of an ending by appearing to be talking about the death of the street, Brewster Place. The epilogue itself is not unexpected, since the novel opens with a prologue describing the birth of the street. So why not a last word on how it died? Again, expectations are subverted and closure is subtly deferred. Although the epilogue begins with a meditation on how a street dies and tells us that Brewster Place is waiting to die, waiting is a present participle that never becomes past. “Dawn” (the prologue) is coupled neither with death nor darkness, but with “dusk,” a condition whose half-light underscores the half-life of the street. Despite the fact that in the epilogue Brewster Place is abandoned, its daughters still get up elsewhere and go about their daily activities. In a reiteration of the domestic routines that are always carefully attended to in the novel—the making of soup, the hanging of laundry, the diapering of babies—Brewster's death is forestalled and postponed. More importantly, the narrator emphasizes that the dreams of Brewster's inhabitants are what keep them alive. “They get up and pin those dreams to wet laundry hung out to dry, they're mixed with a pinch of salt and thrown into pots of soup, and they're diapered around babies. They ebb and flow, ebb and flow, but never disappear” (192). They refers initially to the “colored daughters” but thereafter repeatedly to the dreams. The end of the novel raises questions about the relation of dreams to the persistence of life, since the capacity of Brewster's women to dream on is identified as their capacity to live on. The street continues to exist marginally, on the edge of death; it is the “end of the line” for most of its inhabitants. Like the street, the novel hovers, moving toward the end of its line, but deferring. What prolongs both the text and the lives of Brewster's inhabitants is dream; in the same way that Mattie's dream of destruction postpones the end of the novel, the narrator's last words identify dream as that which affirms and perpetuates the life of the street.

If the epilogue recalls the prologue, so the final emphasis on dreams postponed yet persistent recalls the poem by Langston Hughes with which Naylor begins the book: “What happens to a dream deferred?” In a catalog of similes, Hughes evokes the fate of dreams unfulfilled: They dry up like raisins in the sun, fester like sores, stink like rotten meat, crust over like syrupy sweets. They become burdensome, or possibly explosive. The poem suggests that to defer one's dreams, desires, hopes is life-denying. Images of shriveling, putrefaction, and hardening dominate the poem. Despair and destruction are the alternatives to decay. My interest here is to look at the way in which Naylor rethinks the poem in her novel's attention to dreams and desires and deferral, and then to consider the implications of her vision in terms of the novel's sensitivity to history and social context.

Naylor's desire to write the experience of black American women was born from an impatience with the critical establishment's assumptions that black writers should provide “definitive” reflections of black experience. The emphasis on the definitive, she argues, denies the vast complexity of Afro-American experience. In a conversation with Toni Morrison, she speaks of her struggle to realize the dream of writing the lives of black women without falsification and sentimentality, making visible those whom society keeps invisible (Naylor “Conversation”). She dedicates the novel to those who “gave me the dream, believed in it … nurtured it … applauded it.”

Naylor talks also of how she came to see the bound copy of her completed book as a tombstone. She experienced a sense of loss in taking leave of the characters and making an end, which is the reason that the published book seems to her a marker of death. A book unwritten is desire unbounded, yet the very drive to write the experience eventually produces a tombstone. Desire fulfilled, which is the satisfaction of seeing the book in print, is the death of desire, since, in Lacanian terms, desire depends on lack, want, and propulsion toward the object of satisfaction. What Naylor says sustains her is the birth of a new book, a new desire. But one could argue that this desire is not new. It is rather a continuation, since the focus of her next book (Linden Hills) is bequeathed by Brewster Place itself; you can see Linden Hills from Kiswana's window. Similarly, Naylor's recent novel Mama Day focuses on a minor, off-stage character in Linden Hills. In this sense, then, the bound copy of The Women of Brewster Place is a false grave, for it has demonstrated powers of generation and perpetuation that defy its definition as a finished work. The poles of dream (the wish to write the lives of black women) and death (the finished novel as tombstone) apply to Naylor's experience as a writer as much as they inform the focus and technique of her writing.

The dream of the last chapter is a way of deferring closure, but this deferral is not evidence of the author's self-indulgent reluctance to make an end. Rather, it is an enactment of the novel's revision of Hughes's poem. Yet the substance of the dream itself and the significance of the dreamer raise some further questions. Why is the anger and frustration that the women feel after the rape of Lorraine displaced into dream? There are many readers who feel cheated and betrayed to discover that the apocalyptic destruction of Brewster's wall never takes place. Are we to take it that Ciel never really returns from San Francisco and Cora is not taking an interest in the community effort to raise funds for tenants' rights? All that the dream has promised is undercut, it seems. And yet, the placement of explosion and destruction in the realm of fantasy or dream that is a “false” ending marks Naylor's suggestion that there are many ways to dream and alternative interpretations of what happens to the dream deferred.

If there is a central character in a novel that so avoids definition and homogeneity, she is Mattie. Mattie's is the first story, and from it we understand that she knows what it is to love and to suffer loss, paternal abuse, betrayal, and dispossession. Although men like Eugene do not like her—she speaks the truth as she sees it—, she is received and respected by most others. Cora singles her out as the only one around who doesn't feel it necessary to do jury duty on other people's lives. She refuses to join in the community condemnation of Lorraine and Theresa's lesbian relationship, preferring to mind her own business and open her mind to the kinds of love that women can bear for other women. After the catastrophic death of Ciel's daughter, she is mentor and nurturer. Mattie's moving ritual of bathing and cleansing Ciel draws on commonsensical folkloric wisdom and links her to the tradition of black women who have nursed their sisters through grief and suffering. As the community's best voice and sharpest eye, she is well-qualified to express the unconscious urgings of the community and dream the collective dream.

It is a dream that draws heavily on what Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, calls demonic imagery (150). The chapter begins with a description of the continuous rain that follows the death of Ben. Stultifying and confining, the rain prevents the inhabitants of Brewster's community from meeting to talk about the tragedy; instead they are faced with clogged gutters, debris, trapped odors in their apartments, and listless children. Men stay away from home, become aggressive, and drink too much. In their separate spaces the women dream of a tall yellow woman in a bloody green and black dress—Lorraine. Mattie's dream expresses the communal guilt, complicity, and anger that the women of Brewster Place feel about Lorraine. Ciel is present in Mattie's dream because she herself has dreamed about the ghastly rape and mutilation with such identification and urgency that she obeys the impulse to return to Brewster Place: “‘And she had on a green dress with like black trimming, and there were red designs or red flowers or something on the front.’ Ciel's eyes began to cloud. ‘And something bad had happened to me by the wall—I mean her—something bad had happened to her’” (179). The presence of Ciel in Mattie's dream expresses the elder woman's wish that Ciel be returned to her and the desire that Ciel's wounds and flight be redeemed. Mattie's son Basil, who has also fled from Brewster Place, is contrastingly absent. He is beyond hope, and Mattie does not dream of his return. For many of the women who have lived there, Brewster Place is an anchor as well as a confinement and a burden; it is the social network that, like a web, both sustains and entraps. Mattie's dream scripts important changes for Ciel: She works for an insurance company (good pay, independence, and status above the domestic), is ready to start another family, and is now connected to a good man. Ciel hesitantly acknowledges that he is not black. Middle-class status and a white husband offer one alternative in the vision of escape from Brewster Place; the novel does not criticize Ciel's choices so much as suggest, by implication, the difficulty of envisioning alternatives to Brewster's black world of poverty, insecurity, and male inadequacy. Yet Ciel's dream identifies her with Lorraine, whom she has never met and of whose rape she knows nothing. It is a sign that she is tied to Brewster Place, carries it within her, and shares its tragedies.

Every woman and small girl there has had disturbing dreams about Lorraine. Cora attributes her weird dreams to the fact that she is pregnant, and Ciel dismisses the dream that has summoned her back as “crazy.” Beyond what the women know cognitively, the dreams unite them and provide a context of sharing and connection. It is interesting that Mattie and Etta conceal from Ciel the significance of her dream. Mattie becomes intent on basting her ribs, and Etta responds that she is trying to figure out what number she can play off the dream. “Now I know snakes is 436 and a blue Cadillac is 224, but I gotta look in my book to see what a wall is” (180). Rather than explore the eerie significance of Ciel's link to Brewster, Etta clouds the felt truth with the hocus pocus of superstition. Freud's remarks on the abuse of dream interpretation are apposite here: “The final abuse of dream interpretation was reached in our days with attempts to discover from dreams the numbers fated to be drawn in the game of lotto” (115). Within Mattie's dream, which the reader initially assumes to be part of the progressive narrative temporality, Etta is “interpreting” Ciel's dream in a way which the reader is implicitly counseled to avoid. How then are we to interpret Mattie's dream?

Everyone in the community knows that this block party is significant and important because it is a way of moving forward after the terrible tragedy of Lorraine and Ben. As it begins to rain, the women continue desperately to solicit community involvement. A man who is going to buy a sandwich turns away; it is more important that he stay and eat the sandwich than that he pay for it. As the rain comes down, hopes for a community effort are scotched and frustration reaches an intolerable level. The dream of the collective party explodes in nightmarish destruction. Poking at a blood-stained brick with a popsicle stick, Cora says, “‘Blood ain't got no right still being here’” (185). Like the blood that runs down the palace walls in Blake's “London,” this reminder of Ben and Lorraine blights the block party. Tearing at the very bricks of Brewster's walls is an act of resistance against the conditions that prevail within it. The more strongly each woman feels about her past in Brewster Place, the more determinedly the bricks are hurled. Ciel, for example, is not unwilling to cast the first brick and urges the rational Kiswana to join this “destruction of the temple.” Kiswana cannot see the blood; there is only rain. “Does it matter?” asks Ciel. “Does it really matter?” Frustrated with perpetual pregnancy and the burdens of poverty and single parenting, Cora joins in readily, and Theresa, about to quit Brewster Place in a cab, vents her pain at the fate of her lover and her fury with the submissiveness that breeds victimization. The women have different reasons, each her own story, but they unite in hurling bricks and breaking down boundaries. The dismal, incessant rain becomes cleansing, and the water is described as beating down in unison with the beating of the women's hearts. Despite the inclination toward overwriting here, Naylor captures the cathartic and purgative aspects of resistance and aggression. Demonic imagery, which accompanies the venting of desire that exceeds known limits, becomes apocalyptic. As the dream ends, we are left to wonder what sort of register the “actual” block party would occupy. The sun is shining when Mattie gets up: It is as if she has done the work of collective destruction in her dream, and now a sunny party can take place. But perhaps the mode of the party about to take place will be neither demonic nor apocalyptic. The close of the novel turns away from the intensity of the dream, and the satisfaction of violent protest, insisting rather on prolonged yearning and dreaming amid conditions which do not magically transform. The collective dream of the last chapter constitutes a “symbolic act” which, as Frederic Jameson puts it, enables “real social contradictions, insurmountable in their own terms, [to] find a purely formal resolution in the aesthetic realm” (79).

The final chapter and epilogue mediate between violent disruption and persistent yearning by offering first a cathartic dream of resistance and then an affirmation of quiet, sustaining, personal dreams. Two stories in particular—“The Two” and “Cora Lee”—prepare for the final chapter's mediation. In “The Two” Naylor considers the tragedy of Lorraine's rape and the deadly eruption of her deferred self-assertion, which results in Ben's death. By considering the violent release that follows deferral, the story enacts on a personal level what “The Block Party” attempts to redeem through community action. The story of Lorraine and Theresa, two lesbians who move to Brewster Place, is more than a powerful and disturbing portrayal of prejudice and sexism. It would have been just that if Naylor had concluded with the brutal rape of Lorraine by a vicious teenage gang, but the story is carefully structured around the relationship of Lorraine and Ben, the “harmless old wino” and the first black person to have settled in Brewster Place. Ben is the most fully realized male character in Brewster Place—there because he is old and broken and has nowhere else to run to. He drinks to displace the poisonous melody of his personal song, which tells of his collusion long ago in his lame daughter's prostitution. Ben is the father who has betrayed and lost his daughter; Lorraine is the daughter who has been banished by an unaccepting father.

Rejected because she is a lesbian, Lorraine nevertheless continues to send her father a birthday card every year. Because these have always been returned unopened, she has stopped putting her return address on them so that she can imagine that one day he may open one. Naylor uses the symmetry in the stories of Ben and Lorraine predictably, to develop the bond of sympathy between them. The banished daughter and the bereft and guilty father connect. Ben's daughter is lame, and Lorraine's “inner limp,” which defines her as a victim, is the quality in her that reminds him of his daughter. Although she lives with Theresa, she feels guilty and ashamed of their relationship. Unwilling to confront hostility, Lorraine defers by changing location. The couple has moved from one district to another, giving up Theresa's apartment in Linden Hills because of Lorraine's sensitivity about what “they” will think. Brewster Place, as the end of the line, is no freer of prejudice against lesbians than anywhere else. After Lorraine has been mutilated and assaulted because she is a “dyke,” she crawls toward Ben, who sways drunkenly on an overturned garbage can. We expect that she will ask for and receive help, but Ben becomes her unwitting target, the object of her desire now to fight back. Ironically, Lorraine murders the “father” who has been kind to her. Man and father must pay, and who more fittingly than the father who has failed his own daughter? Although there is something contrived about the ironies with which the story ends, the reader is left feeling the horror and tragedy of the situation. Ben's daughter is not redeemed by Lorraine's submissiveness turned savageness; Ben's death avenges neither the machismo of C. C.'s gang nor Lorraine's repressed anger towards her father. Rather, the text suggests that accumulated hurts and betrayals breed a store of violence which erupts on displaced targets. Deferral and displacement proliferate the tragedies, which is perhaps the reason that “The Block Party” only dreams its desire for violent protest and destruction.

An alternative to explosion and destruction is postponement and persistence, sustained by the endurance of dreams. But when are dreams or hopes vain and delusional, and when are they life-affirming? “Cora Lee” is important in exploring the ambiguities of dream and setting up a polarity between dream as vain fantasy and sustaining or transforming power. A quotation from A Midsummer Night's Dream opens the story: “True, I talk of dreams, / Which are the children of an idle brain / Begot of nothing but vain fantasy” (107). Cora, who as a small child desired no other toys than a new baby doll every year, becomes a woman who reproduces her dream and finds herself with a large, demanding family. Unable to cope with the children those babies have become, she nevertheless continues to satisfy her desire for the sweet, soft, vulnerable newborn. Cora is a portrait of obsessive and arrested desire: The inability to absorb the baby as developing, needy child is part of her blocking of realities that are impinging and uncomfortable. As caretaker of a small baby she regresses into a world that reflects a comforted, comforting sense of self. The image of herself as mother—the power, the sensuous pleasure, and the closely circumscribed world of the mother-child dyad—marks the end of her desire. Cora's dream projects a static world in which the mother-infant relationship must never be ruptured—hence the necessity for infinite replacement of the newborn baby. Cora's attentiveness to the infant and disregard for anything outside this circle are strongly contrasted. Her other children exist for her as frozen portraits of their baby days. Concerns about their schooling, rotting teeth, truancy, and slovenliness are easily drowned by the anodyne of soap operas, and it is with a sense of pique and puzzlement that Cora finds herself accountable for a multitude of young, growing lives. Cora's men are now marginalized as shadows. She tried living with one of the fathers, but when a pot of burnt rice translates into a fractured jaw, singleness is preferable, even though it spells abject poverty. Men come and go; once one promised to marry her, but he never returned from a trip to the corner store to buy milk. So Cora lives on welfare and accommodates the shadows in her bed for the brief sensuous pleasure and the sperm they provide. When Cora recalls the fathers of some of her children, her knowledge is vague, a series of generalizations and stereotypes. For example, her child Dorian has a head “like a rock,” which makes him like his father: “‘All those West Indians got hard heads.’ Well, I guess he was West Indian, she thought, he had some kind of accent” (117). The antithesis is Kiswana, who is so concerned about ethnic specificity and the recovery of her African roots that she fails to recognize her commonality with her mother. Cora becomes one of Kiswana's challenges. Kiswana is going to change Cora's life and open her eyes, and starts by inviting her to a black production of Shakespeare's Dream—Kiswana's boyfriend Abshu Ben-Jamal has a grant from the city.

The visit to the play looks like a breakthrough, and in some ways it is. Cora's abdication of responsibility is briefly redressed, and the experience at the theatre puts her in touch with the needs of her older children. She resolves to check their homework every night, join the P.T.A., and see that they get to summer school. She dreams of good jobs for them “in insurance companies and the post office,” homes in Linden Hills—a simple catalog of middle-class aspiration. When her son asks her whether Shakespeare is black, she replies, “Not yet,” remembering guiltily how she has beaten him for writing rhymes on the bathroom walls. No Shakespeare can be nurtured in the environment she provides for her children. The dreams that Dream provokes reflect a simple faith that education will secure for her children a larger piece of the pie than Cora herself has ever been entitled to command.

But one trip to the park to see Shakespeare is not going to resolve magically life's confusing demands. What awes Cora are the fine-sounding words which she doesn't understand and the sparkling splendor of the costumes. Her fantasies for her son and daughter are also clearly untutored by any feminist consciousness: She envisions for her daughter the role of the fairy queen and thinks about her son as a potential black Shakespeare. Even though her dreams show the absorption of cultural and gender stereotypes, the breakthrough, Naylor suggests, is that Cora is sparked to imagine and dream at all. The evening has been a “night of wonders,” but it gets folded like “gold and lavender gauze deep within the creases of her dreams” (127). Cora's story explores the ambiguities of the dream: Is it vain fantasy, escape, and magic; inspirational; delusional? When she appears in Mattie's dream vision in “The Block Party,” she is pregnant again, impatiently cajoling her children, bemoaning the fact that Sonya has passed out of babyhood and started to walk. Yet she is there at the block party and interested in the collection of funds to secure a lawyer for renters' rights. Although slight, changes are detectable. It is also Cora who discovers the bloodied brick and tears it from the wall. Despite her exhaustion, she participates in the symbolic purgation of Brewster Place.

Further reasons for Naylor's negotiation between persistent yearning and violent protest are to be found in the novel's reflection of history and moment. Despite its heavy dependency on general images of birth and arrested development, the prologue provides markers that locate Brewster temporally and geographically. Its conception was a political act around the time of “The Great War”:

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. … the alderman wanted the realty company to build their new shopping center on his cousin's property. …

(1)

Years later, after the Second World War, Irish and Italian immigrant mothers hope that their sons will settle there when they return from combat. Then one year before the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (1954), the first “brown-skinned” man comes to live in Brewster. In the fifties, we learn, Brewster's inhabitants are largely Mediterranean immigrants. Reflecting demographic trends, the neighborhood becomes increasingly black through the sixties and seventies.¹ In casual details about the characters, Naylor's novel mirrors the social transformation of Afro-America. Naylor chooses a slum neighborhood—possibly an area of Boston, since there is mention of the Irish immigrant community, Eugene has a job at the docks, and Newport is close by. Mattie chides Etta Mae about having run from St. Louis and Chicago; now Etta Mae wants leave “here” and go to New York. Naylor apparently wants to contrast the big Northern city and the South, from which many of the older characters (Mattie, Etta Mae, and Ben) have fled. Although Brewster Place is a hair's breadth from poverty, it is still clearly preferable to the starving South.²

Not only does Langston Hughes's poem speak generally about the nature of deferral and dreams unsatisfied, but in the historical context that Naylor evokes it also calls attention implicitly to the sixties' dream of racial equality and the “I have a dream” speech of Martin Luther King, Jr. In her historical account of the impact of black women on race and sex in America, Paula Giddings writes about the hopes generated by King's dream in the context of a growing despair:

If hopes were buoyed when 250,000 people marched on Washington to dream Martin Luther King's eloquent dream, they were dashed by the Birmingham bombing less than a month later. … The dream of racial harmony, the belief that America had a genuine moral conscience that just needed awakening, was cracking around the edges. It would turn to dust by the end of the summer of '64.

(292–93)

Dashed, cracking, and dust link Giddings's history rhetorically to Hughes's poem. In both cases the failure of the dream is foregrounded. Giddings, however, is preceded by King himself in acknowledging the nightmare of disappointment during the years that followed his “I have a dream” speech. In a sermon preached on Christmas Eve of 1967, Dr. King spoke of the nightmare his earlier dream had become:

In 1963, on a sweltering August afternoon, we stood in Washington, D.C., and talked to the nation about many things. Toward the end of that afternoon, I tried to talk to the nation about a dream that I had had, and I must confess to you today that not long after talking about that dream I started seeing it turn into a nightmare. … It was when four beautiful, unoffending, innocent Negro girls were murdered in a church in Birmingham, Alabama. I watched that dream turn to a nightmare as I moved through the ghettos of the nation and saw my black brothers and sisters perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of prosperity, and saw the nation doing nothing to grapple with the Negroes' problem of poverty. I saw that dream turn into a nightmare as I watched my black brothers and sisters in the midst of anger and understandable outrage, in the midst of their hurt, in the midst of their disappointment, turn to misguided riots to try to solve that problem.

(King 75–76)

But King's sermon goes further: After acknowledging the nightmare and invoking (like Giddings and Hughes) the rhetoric of disappointment and disaster, he finds (like Naylor) sustenance in deferral and persistence and then proceeds to a rousing vision of arrival. The sermon's movement is thus from disappointment, through a recognition of deferral and persistence, to a reiteration of vision and hope:

Yes, I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes, but in spite of that I close today by saying I still have a dream, because, you know, you can't give up in life. If you lose hope, somehow you lose that vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you to go on in spite of all. And so today I still have a dream.

(76)

The remainder of the sermon goes on to celebrate the resurrection of the dream—“I still have a dream” is repeated some eight times in the next paragraph. Naylor's novel is not exhortatory or rousing in the same way; her response to the fracture of the collective dream is an affirmation of persistence rather than a song of culmination and apocalypse. King's sermon culminates in the language of apocalypse, a register which, as I have already suggested, Naylor's epilogue avoids: “I still have a dream today that one day every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill will be made low …, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed …” (77–78). Hughes's poem and King's sermon can thus be seen as two poles between which Naylor steers. The novel recognizes the precise political and social consequences of the cracked dream in the community it deals with, but asserts the vitality and life that persist even when faith in a particular dream has been disrupted. Although remarkably similar to Dr. King's sermon in the recognition of blasted hopes and dreams deferred, The Women of Brewster Place does not reassert its faith in the dream of harmony and equality: It stops short of apocalypse in its affirmation of persistence. Further, Naylor suggests that the shape and content of the dream should be capable of flexibility and may change in response to changing needs and times. What the women of Brewster Place dream is not so important as that they dream.

Naylor's emphasis on persistence and continuity as important in themselves recalls Alice Walker's concerns in Meridian, a novel which also opens with an epigraph that addresses itself to dreams and their destruction. In the course of the novel the character Meridian deals specifically with the aims of the Civil Rights Movement and how she will live them in the aftermath of revolutionary hopefulness. Meridian's commitment to living among the people, registering voters of the South is not so much an indication of the Movement's lost dreams as an enactment at a personal level of the continuity of struggle. Interestingly, Meridian's quarrel with Christianity is that it is a religion of martyrs. Walker explains Meridian's thinking in an interview with Claudia Tate: “Just before the crucifixion, according to Meridian, Jesus should have just left town” (Tate 180). Instead of dying, sacrificing themselves, Christ (and King) should have taken off to continue elsewhere. Meridian's recurrent nightmare is that she is a character in a novel whose ending depends on her death. In fact, she persists and “survives” the narrative's closing; this is one protagonist who escapes the traditional formula's equivalence of ending and death. In a similar way, The Women of Brewster Place turns from the grand and explosive ending to affirm endurance and persistence in the face of unfulfilled dreams.

Brewster's women live within the failure of the sixties' dreams, and there is no doubt a dimension of the novel that reflects on the shortfall. But its reflection is subtle, achieved through the novel's concern with specific women and an individualized neighborhood and the way in which fiction, with its attention focused on the particular, can be made to reveal the play of large historical determinants and forces. There is an attempt on Naylor's part to invoke the wide context of Brewster's particular moment in time and to blend this with her focus on the individual dreams and psychologies of the women in the stories. Perhaps because her emphasis is on the timeless nature of dreams and the private mythology of each “ebony phoenix,” the specifics of history are not foregrounded. Even though the link between this neighborhood and the particular social, economic, and political realities of the sixties is muted rather than emphatic, defining characteristics are discernible. In Brewster Place there is no upward mobility; and by conventional evaluation there are no stable family structures. Brewster is a place for women who have no realistic expectations of revising their marginality, most of whom have “come down” in the world. The exception is Kiswana, from Linden Hills, who is deliberately downwardly mobile. Naylor's next work, Linden Hills, is an extended treatment of this black neighborhood, infernal and purgatorial, whose inhabitants have sold their souls for a piece of the American pie. Similarly, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow exposes the self-betrayal that takes place in the pursuit of the black bourgeois dream: Avey Johnson's nausea in response to the peach parfait on her world cruise tells us that she can no longer swallow her comfortable middle-class self. The Women of Brewster Place, however, focuses on the women and neighborhood that never get to taste the disappointment of having “made it.”

As presented, Brewster Place is largely a community of women; men are mostly absent or itinerant, drifting in and out of their women's lives, and leaving behind them pregnancies and unpaid bills. It would be simple to make a case for the unflattering portrayal of men in this novel; in fact Naylor was concerned that her work would be seen as deliberately slighting of men:

… there was something that I was very self-conscious about with my first novel; I bent over backwards not to have a negative message come through about the men. My emotional energy was spent in creating a woman's world, telling her side of it because I knew it hadn't been done enough in literature. But I worried about whether or not the problems that were being caused by the men in the women's lives would be interpreted as some bitter statement I had to make about black men.

(“Conversation” 579)

Bearing in mind the kind of hostile criticism that Alice Walker's The Color Purple evoked, one can understand Naylor's concern, since male sins in her novel are not insignificant. Mattie is a resident of Brewster partly because of the failings of the men in her life: the shiftless Butch, who is sexually irresistible; her father, whose outraged assault on her prompts his wife to pull a gun on him; and her son, whom she has spoiled to the extent that he one day jumps bail on her money, costing her her home and sending her to Brewster Place. There is also the damning portrait of a minister on the make in Etta Mae's story, the abandonment of Ciel by Eugene, and the scathing presentation of the young male rapists in “The Two.”

“The enemy wasn't Black men,” Joyce Ladner contends, “‘but oppressive forces in the larger society’” (Giddings 309), and Naylor's presentation of men implies agreement. But while she is aware that there is nothing enviable about the pressures, incapacities, and frustrations men absorb in a system they can neither beat nor truly join, her interest lies in evoking the lives of women, not men. Their aggression, part-time presence, avoidance of commitment, and sense of dislocation renders them alien and other in the community of Brewster Place. Basil and Eugene are forever on the run; other men in the stories (Kiswana's boyfriend Abshu, Cora Lee's shadowy lovers) are narrative ciphers. Mostly marginal and spectral in Brewster Place, the men reflect the nightmarish world they inhabit by appearing as if they were characters in a dream.

Although Brewster Place is a novel about women and concentrates on exploring the experiences of women, it does not enlist a dogmatic feminist ideology. There is little of The Color Purple's celebration and rejoicing in the discovery of self, sexuality, and creativity in the face of male abuse and repression. Celie is encouraged to trade her razor—she wants to slit Albert's throat—for a needle, the implement of her autonomy and creativity. If The Color Purple mediates a feminist solution to the problems of the oppressed Celie, Naylor's novel is far more tentative about celebrating the efficacy of female friendship, lesbian relationships, and self-affirmation through sisterhood. There are important moments of friendship and supportive connection, but there are no radical transformations; Naylor does not, as Walker does, draw on feminist ideology as an agent of transcendence. Naylor calls attention to the particular problems of black women without suggesting that such problems are gender issues alone. When she says that she hopes the novel does not make a bitter statement about the men, she is, I think, voicing a concern that the problems she addresses will be oversimplified if they are seen only in terms of male-female relationships.

“The Block Party” is a crucial chapter of the book because it explores the attempts to experience a version of community and neighborhood. People know each other in Brewster Place, and as imperfect and damaging as their involvement with each other may be, they still represent a community. As the title suggests, this is a novel about women and place. Brewster Place names the women, houses them, and defines their underprivileged status. Although they come to it by very different routes, Brewster is a reality that they are “obliged to share” (Smith 32). Obliged comes from the political, social, and economic realities of post-sixties' America—a world in which the women are largely disentitled. Share directs emphasis to what they have in common: They are women, they are black, and they are almost invariably poor. Among the women there is both commonality and difference: “Like an ebony phoenix, each in her own time and with her own season had a story” (5).

Naylor's novel does not offer itself as a definitive treatment of black women or community, but it reflects a reality that a great many black women share; it is at the same time an indictment of oppressive social forces and a celebration of courage and persistence. By considering the nature of personal and collective dreams within a context of specific social, political, and economic determinants, Naylor inscribes an ideology that affirms deferral; the capacity to defer and to dream is endorsed as life-availing. Like Martin Luther King, Naylor resists a history that seeks to impose closure on black American dreams, recording also in her deferred ending a reluctance to see “community” as a static or finished work. There are countless slum streets like Brewster; streets will continue to be condemned and to die, but there will be other streets to whose decay the women of Brewster will cling. The image of the ebony phoenix developed in the introduction to the novel is instructive: The women rise, as from the ashes, and continue to live. Although the idea of miraculous transformation associated with the phoenix is undercut by the starkness of slum and the perpetuation of poverty, the notion of regeneration also associated with the phoenix is supported by the quiet persistence of women who continue to dream on. While acknowledging the shriveling, death-bound images of Hughes's poem, Naylor invests with value the essence of deferral—it resists finality.

Notes

1. As W. Lawrence Hogue points out, “After 1950 a new phenomenon of Afro-American social reality appeared: large urban black populations” (49). Until the 1950s the majority of blacks lived in the South, but industrial expansion in the North caused a shift in the labor force and mass migration out of the rural areas.

2. The novel here endorses statistics showing that, on average, the bottom of the urban-industrial ladder is higher than the bottom of the Southern agricultural ladder, despite the fact that black unemployment rates doubled those of whites in the early 1960s (Hogue 50).

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———. Linden Hills. New York: Ticknor, 1985.

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Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” Conditions: Two Oct. 1977: 25–44.

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