[In the following essay, Montgomery discusses Naylor's use of the descent motif in The Women of Brewster Place.]

The Women of Brewster Place is an experimental novel that functions as a rare, incisive work of social criticism. Gloria Naylor's clever choice of Langston Hughes' poem “Harlem” as an epigraph directs the reader's focus of attention to the lives of those for whom the American dream, whether it entails socioeconomic advancement or stability and fulfillment in the nuclear family, is all too often indefinitely deferred. No doubt the community of Brewster Place is a microcosm for black America, and it is comprised of marginal people who are excluded from the social, economic, and political mainstream. Each quest for linear progress ultimately fails on the community's rather foreboding dead-end street. That a series of reversals precede the eventual condemnation of the community comes as no surprise, given its questionable origins and the assembly of residents who are forced to live there.

Significantly, however, with the creation of the fictive world that is Brewster Place, Naylor not only documents the failure of the American dream, but she challenges its validity in terms that point to the formation of an intensely private reality suspended above time and space in which dreams are fulfilled. The novel conforms to the romantic mode, as Northrup Frye defines it, for its action takes place on multiple levels, none of which correspond with objective reality.¹ The descent motif that is so popular in African-American fiction figures prominently in the establishment of this romantic world, and the motif entails a protagonist's physical or psychological journey to a place where he or she attains self-knowledge.² Of necessity, this place is outside the boundaries of the social mainstream and demands an abandonment of money, property, and title—in short, all of the outward trappings that signal middle-class success. What the protagonist gains as a result of this often tortured, circuitous journey is the sense of wholeness that life in the social mainstream inhibits. It is this journey that constitutes the structural and thematic center of the novel.

Brewster Place is itself an inverted world whose reality is determined by the rich and powerful. Nothing is quite what it should be. The community is a world apart, the product of an unscrupulous political bargain. It is designed to fail. The omniscient narrator's description of the community's ironic beginnings as “a bastard child” whose “true parentage was hidden” calls attention to the particular experiences of individuals across time and space who are dispossessed from history.³ Bastardy serves as an apt metaphor for the exclusion owing to race that the residents of the community experience. From their perspective, linear history is an oppressive cycle that perpetuates their exclusion in a world that is characteristically white and therefore off-limits.

Animal imagery is pervasive in the novel, not in description of the rural South, but in description of the decaying urban community environs and its residents. Mattie Michael arrives on Brewster Place in a van that creeps “like a huge green slug” (7). The appropriately named Reverend Moreland Woods, a wolf in sheep's clothing, has “jungle-sharpened instincts” (66). C. C. Baker and his gang of social misfits travel in a pack, like wolves. Canaan Baptist Church is “a brooding ashen giant” with organ chords “barreling out of its mouth” (62). Perhaps more revealing, though, is the description of the community from Etta Mae Johnson's point of view following her disappointing one-night stand with the local minister. Her return to the community is indeed a descent of sorts, an admission of failure, for she is the victim in the primitive mating game between herself and Reverend Woods. Woods assumes the role of Satan in a topsy-turvy Eden, and Etta Mae is a fallen Eve, forever banished from the Eden of marriage and social status that would be hers as the pastor's wife. Free of all illusions of a life of respectability, security, and identity with Woods, Etta Mae sees the dark world of Brewster Place realistically: “Now it crouched there in the thin predawn light, like a pulsating mouth awaiting her arrival” (73). As she returns to the community, she is downcast and broken in spirit. Much like the wayward biblical prophet of doom Jonah, who finds himself secluded for three days in the belly of a fish, she reluctantly prepares to enter into a night world of darkness and confusion from which she, too, may never escape.

For each of the characters, a series of reversals resulting in the loss of something of value—identity or social status, for instance—precedes entry onto Brewster Place. Linden Hills, a neighboring middle-class community whose reality suggests light, ascent, and possibilities, places no such demands on its residents. Ben, the kindly janitor and resident alcoholic, typifies the dilemma that the men on Brewster Place face because the tokens of manhood—wealth, prestige, and political power—are reserved for whites and the well-to-do. Naylor uses the account of Ben's Southern sharecropper experiences as a historic frame accounting for the anonymity that the men in the community endure in the welfare system. Ben is subject to the whims of Mr. Clyde, the wealthy white landowner for whom Ben and his family work, and is powerless to protect his daughter from the landowner's sexual advances. As spokesperson for a capitalist system in which manhood is synonymous with social, economic, and political power, Ben's wife, Elvira, voices the emasculating sentiments that consign not only Ben but all the men on Brewster Place to a state of perpetual boyhood:

“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 quarter a man, we wouldn't be a bunch of miserable sharecroppers on someone else's land—but we is, Ben.”

(153)

Ben is a tragi-comic figure, a permanent fixture in the community, and even as he intones “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” during his many drunken binges, he is an ever-present reminder of the failure of America's economic system as a means to achieving upward socioeconomic mobility. It is appropriate, then, that Naylor places Ben in a setting that confirms his status as a social outcast: a damp, dingy basement apartment that is nearest to the wall on Brewster Place.

The women suffer losses that are no less dehumanizing than those which the men experience. Cora Lee, the typical welfare mother, is Case number 6348, without a valid identity. College-educated, articulate, the lesbians Theresa and Lorraine forfeit jobs and apartments in search of a secure place free of homophobia. Once on Brewster Place, however, they are still social misfits, living in a world without an address, labelled simply “The Two.” Mattie Michael, who is forced to leave a supportive family in her familiar rural South after an unplanned pregnancy, loses a comfortable, spacious home. Kiswana Browne, who shuns her middle-class background and her great-grandmother's name, is the community's radical but one who lacks a genuine understanding of her ancestral past. Her mother's brief history lesson, revealing the strength of Kiswana's great-grandmother, serves as a powerful reminder of the vibrant past which Kiswana willingly suppresses. And finally, Cora Lee's disorderly, single-parent home replaces the secure nuclear family of which she was once a part. Naylor's use of Shakespeare's classic romance A Midsummer Night's Dream as a thematic and structural focal point for Cora Lee's narrative is effective in calling attention to the uniqueness of the subterranean world that the characters in the novel inhabit. The actors and actresses who participate in the play enter a dark forest, where there is confusion and chaos, but even after the drama ends, they are still unable to regain identity and unhindered spatial movement. Naylor's characters continue in a somber world without release. After the play ends, Cora Lee returns to Brewster Place, having entertained and then abandoned her dreams of middle-class success for her seven children. At the close of her narrative, with a great deal of hesitancy, she enters the dark and is soon surrounded by the nameless, faceless men, the mysterious shadows who frequent her home, robbing her of her self-esteem.

Thus, the reality that those in the community face on a day-to-day basis contradicts notions of upward socioeconomic progress implicit in the novel's temporal dawn-to-dusk narrative time frame. Because of the conflict between what society prescribes as being attainable for all of its citizens, regardless of race or gender, and what the characters actually experience, they are forced to develop what W. E. B. Du Bois refers to as double-consciousness, a sense of psychic two-ness resulting from the ongoing tensions between the black and American identities.⁴ The ultimate descent which the characters enact is one that is psychological in nature, for Naylor's novel explores the characters' collective unconscious. Her use of oral tradition is, then, a signal narrative strategy popular in black women's fiction. By donning the mask of storyteller, the women in the novel find themselves rooted in a specific history and culture and thus recreate the unity and self-hood that temporality destroys. Naylor invests the spoken voice with matchless authority, as the women use the spoken voice to establish a new cosmology, an underground world in which they are agents of their own destiny while others—whites and men—are marginalized.

This underground world is constructed around Mattie Michael, the community's larger-than-life central mother figure. Mattie is the community's stabilizing force whose community influence is boundless, and one of the distinguishing features of African-American fiction is the presence of characters like Mattie who are “sort of timeless people whose relationship to the characters is benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom.”⁵ Mattie's is an ancient wisdom borne out of the hardships she has faced by virtue of being both black and a woman in a world that is white and male. The important role that she plays as guide in the symbolic descent that the women in the community undergo is especially evident in Etta Mae's narrative. The blues originating from Etta Mae's down-home rural past pervade her narrative and suggest not only the presence of a vibrant, underground folk culture but also the women's ability to transform, and creatively so, an oppressive reality. Her narrative, like the novel itself, is what Ralph Ellison refers to as “an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”⁶ After her tryst with Reverend Woods in a seedy motel room and her return to the night world of Brewster Place, she finds Mattie, an avid gospel music fan, listening to Etta Mae's blues records. Mattie offers the warmth and support which Etta Mae needs at this crucial moment, and they share an important common bond based on the disappointments which each has faced in romantic relationships. The omniscient narrator describes their bond thusly:

Etta and Mattie had taken totally different roads that with all of their deceptive winding had both ended up on Brewster Place. Their laughter now drew them into a conspiratorial circle against all the Simeons outside of that dead-end street, and it didn't stop until they were both weak from the tears that flowed down their faces.

(60–61)

Etta Mae, like the indomitable, classic blues singer she epitomizes, is, with Mattie's assistance, able to transcend the near-tragic night world of Brewster Place. Indeed, at the end of her narrative, her psychology is hardly one that is suggestive of the depth of gloom: “Etta laughed softly to herself as she climbed the steps toward the light and the love and the comfort that awaited her” (74).

Not only is the bond of friendship among the women in the community liberating and redemptive, but the mother-daughter bond is rejuvenating as well, for Mattie plays a pivotal role in the personal transformation that Lucielia Turner undergoes. Ciel is a grieving mother who has lost two children abruptly—one, through an abortion; the other, through an accidental electrocution. Following the funeral for her daughter Serena, Ciel is traumatized in a death-in-life state. In what is perhaps the most moving scene in the novel, Mattie bathes Ciel carefully and tenderly, as a mother would. She then rocks her backward in time, symbolically, back into the womb, thereby negating the psychologically destructive effects of temporality, the oppressive cycle that has led to the almost overwhelming calamity which Ciel now faces:

She rocked her into her childhood and let her see murdered dreams. And she rocked her back, back into the womb, to the nadir of her hurt, and they found it—a slight silver splinter, embedded just below the surface of the skin. And Mattie rocked and pulled—and the splinter gave way, but its roots were deep, gigantic, ragged, and they tore up flesh with bits of fat and muscle tissue clinging to them. They left a huge hole, which was already starting to pus over, but Mattie was satisfied. It would heal.

(104)

Ciel undergoes a mystical rebirth, not a repetition of the first, physical birth, but one that is spiritual in nature. Significantly, that rebirth takes place in private, outside the watchful gaze of a white, male society, and is oriented toward allowing her access to a new mode of existence in which she is no longer subject to the limitations imposed by time and space. The scene's reference to other bereaved mothers—those in Greek mythology, Jewish mothers during the holocaust and Senegalese mothers—unites Mattie and Ciel with a broad community of dispossessed women who are denied the luxury of grief. In the patently unique community of women that is Brewster Place, Ciel grieves freely, however, and hers is a catharsis that is similar to the laughter that unites Mattie and Etta Mae. As if to reveal Ciel's new mode of existence, her narrative points toward new beginnings, concluding with a violation of the novel's rigid temporal time frame: “And Ciel lay down and cried. But Mattie knew the tears would end. And she would sleep. And morning would come” (105).

By bonding together in relationships among themselves—becoming families of choice—in which the mother figure is central, the women descend on a physical plane but enact, paradoxically, an ascent which is spiritual, not physical, and which is oriented toward recovering a prelapsarian, childlike innocence. They form not only a separate and distinct community but also constitute an alternative world far removed from both white and male spheres. Theirs is the creation of a mythic, timeless realm much like an Edenic, matrilineal West African past that exists outside of, indeed, prior to, the Fall, the chaotic beginnings of Brewster Place. Early in the novel, the omniscient narrator prepares the reader for this important break with temporality by drawing an analogy between the mythical phoenix, believed to be able to recreate itself from its own ashes, and the seven women who tell their tales, thereby immortalizing their own histories. The mythical bird contrasts sharply with the frail pigeon in Kiswana Browne's narrative, whose flight is arrested by the overpowering winds. Collectively, by relying upon survival strategies emanating from the black folk past, the women annul the psychologically destructive effects of linear time.

In the latter section of the novel, the dichotomy between Mattie Michael as central mother figure and Lorraine, the black-woman-as-victim, exemplifies the unresolved conflict which the women in the community experience in the search for selfhood. Lorraine, one of the community's lesbians, functions as the women's alter ego, a second self. She is the more passive in her tensed relationship with Theresa. The two are polar opposites:

Theresa was growing tired of being clung to—of being the one who was leaned on. She didn't want a child—she wanted someone who could stand toe to toe with her and be willing to slug it out at times. If they practiced that way with each other, then they could turn back to back and beat the hell out of the world for trying to invade their territory. But she had found no such sparring partner in Lorraine, and the strain of fighting alone was beginning to show on her.

(136)

Lorraine undergoes a rather sudden and dramatic rebirth as a result of conversations with Ben in his secluded basement apartment. She assumes a more forceful, aggressive posture in her relationship with Theresa. Even so, their relationship is subject to external and internal strife. The implication is, of course, that they can never find complete, unconditional acceptance in a context where heterosexual relationships are considered to be the norm. Miss Sophie, the community gossiper, serves as the clarion voice of morality, labelling the couple's lifestyle as sinful and unnatural, and the community bands together against what they consider to be the evil in their midst. C. C. Baker and his gang viciously and brutally rape Lorraine, who is a threat to their masculinity. Her resulting retreat into madness is commentary on an insane world of unresolved tensions, a world that is hopelessly polarized along race and gender lines.

Mattie Michael's ambiguous, surreal nightmare prior to the long-awaited block party is the culminating event in the novel, the ultimate expression of a night world of horror, frustration, and chaos. The nightmare reveals the suppressed conflicts underlying the women's troubled lives. Each of the women dreams that she is Lorraine, the final victim who is impossibly separated from the community. Although the women's indefinitely deferred dreams explode into social chaos and natural discord, localized in the Brewster Place community, the slogan “Today, Brewster Place, Tomorrow, America” is a veiled promise of a continuing universal dilemma not limited to the community's decaying environs. Mattie's dream is unreal, but its truth cannot be ignored, even as the dream gives way to the actual block party, heralded by morning and sunshine.

Naylor's use of the descent motif is thus revealing of the bottomless night world that is Brewster Place. The novel itself lacks closure, thereby indicating that the dilemma which the women face continues without a resolution. Unlike in the Shakespearean drama, there are not happy endings, no reassuring reunions between the opposing worlds of reality and romance. Instead, the community is condemned as casually as it is created. But the spirits of the seven women whose lives are so vividly chronicled remain inviolate, transcending the community's decaying walls. Each draws upon ancient, transforming rituals from the black folk past and, like the ebony phoenix, finds a rare kind of survival power, thereby violating the decrees of those who are in positions of power and authority.

Still, the tension between women who dare to defy prescribed roles and the society in which they must live remains constant. The moral world of light, values, and respectability to which Naylor as novelist is subject reasserts its ascendancy at the novel's end, not only aiding in the destruction of the lesbian relationship between Theresa and Lorraine but also cancelling the entire community as well. What remains is Naylor's ground-breaking fictional exploration of the difficulties involved in nontraditional lifestyles for women and the highly ambivalent, unresolved conclusion with which the novel closes: “So Brewster Place still waits to die” (192).

Notes

1. Northrup Frye discusses themes of descent within the larger context of the romantic mode in The Secular Scripture (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1976), pp. 97–126.

2. The Women of Brewster Place is among the many African-American novels that make use of this recurring motif. In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the nameless hero's discovery of his ethnic past precedes his retreat into an underground coal cellar; in Toni Morrison's Sula, the community of the Bottom exudes the vibrant black folk culture that is essential in both Nel and Sula's quest for self-hood; in LeRoi Jones' The System of Dante's Hell, the urban hero's journey to a Southern community called the Bottom signals the beginnings of his symbolic rebirth. For a discussion of the nuances of this popular motif, see Jerome Thornton, “Goin' on de Muck: The Paradoxical Journey of the Black American Hero,” CLA Journal, 21, No. 3 (March 1988), 261–80.

3. Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place (New York: Penguin, 1983). Subsequent references to the Penguin edition are included parenthetically in the text.

4. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1969), p. 45.

5. Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” Black Women Writers, ed. Mari Evans (New York: Anchor, 1984), p. 343.

6. Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright's Blues,” Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 78–79.