The Women of Brewster Place

Etta Mae Johnson is Mattie’s childhood friend from Tennessee. When Mattie first leaves home, she lives with Etta briefly, but Etta is always restless and soon moves on to the next chapter of her own life. Mattie and Etta have embodied opposite personalities since childhood. While the young Mattie lived with her parents and did what was expected of her, Etta was constantly getting into trouble, particularly as she had no desire to “play by the rules” (59) of white society. She left Rock Vale, Tennessee, in the middle of the night after an unspecified incident with a salacious white man whose “furious” relatives pursued her over the county line.

Unfortunately, Etta found that, in 1937, her spirited nature was not welcome in the rest of the United States either. Disillusioned, she made her way by attaching “herself to any promising rising black star” (60) and letting the man support her until the relationship fizzled out. Etta’s free-spirited, improvisational lifestyle is reflected in the jazz music she loves, and her chapter is interspersed with snippets of song lyrics that are designed to reflect the fragmented nature of her life.

Although she is aging, her body has “finished a close second in its race with time” (56), and she remains attractive as well as proud and spirited. However, deep down, Etta’s life has worn on her. She feels judged by the more gossip-prone residents of Brewster Place and craves the stability and respectability that come with marriage and partnership. She quickly constructs a fantasy around Reverend Woods, but, like other men have done in the past, he simply objectifies Etta, seeing her as “a worldly woman” who “can have a good time without pawing and hanging all onto a man” (73). For the first time after returning to Brewster Place, Etta feels that she has “a broken spirit” (73). However, upon seeing that Mattie has waited up for her, Etta realizes that her dream is not dead, for she can always count on the love and support of her lifelong friendship with Mattie.

While most residents of Brewster Place move to the apartment block as a last resort, Kiswana Browne is a young woman who comes more or less voluntarily. After growing up in an upper-middle-class Black neighborhood, Kiswana drops out of her college to engage in more direct action and “fighting for equality and a better community” (83). On a mission to connect with her Black heritage, she changes her name from Melanie to Kiswana, attempts to brush and spray her thin hair into an afro, and decorates her apartment with figurines of African goddesses.

Although Kiswana is passionate and idealistic, she is also naive, for by criticizing her parents’ comfortable middle-class life, she overlooks the generations of courage and resistance in her own African American heritage. She moves to Brewster Place in order to be “in day-to-day contact with the problems of [her] people” (84), but ironically, the residents of Brewster Place note her designer jeans and silk blouses and see her as an outsider. Likewise, Kiswana’s mother accuses her of living in a “fantasy world” and encourages her to be more realistic, working within the system instead of counting on a nebulous “revolution” to transform society. Despite her inexperience with the realities of life, however, Kiswana is genuinely committed to improving the tenants’ lives at Brewster Place. To this end, she starts a tenants’ association, and this endeavor is implied to be evidence that she accepts the wisdom of her mother’s advice. 

Even if she doesn’t want to admit it, Kiswana is different from the other residents of Brewster Place. Her education and wealthy upbringing arguably makes her the most privileged character in the novel, and the position of her apartment symbolically reflects this key social difference, for Kiswana is the only one who can see over the wall that separates Brewster Place from the main avenue. From her studio apartment on the sixth floor, she can see the trees of the more affluent Linden Hills, and this view represents a level of social mobility that the other residents cannot access. However, the fact that Kiswana sees only another Black neighborhood suggests that her mobility remains finite. 

Lucielia Louise Turner, who is often referred to as Ciel, is Miss Eva Turner’s granddaughter. Ciel and Mattie’s son Basil grew up together until Miss Eva died, after which Ciel’s parents took her away. As an adult, Ciel lives in Brewster Place with her occasional boyfriend, Eugene, and their baby daughter, Serena. Ciel remains close with Mattie, seeing the older woman as a mother figure. More than anything, Ciel wants a family. However, after the birth of her daughter, Eugene leaves her. Eleven months later, he returns, and although Ciel is initially sure that he has changed, things slowly start to “go wrong again” (92).

Even as Eugene becomes angrier and more aggressive, Ciel does everything she can to keep her family together. Now pregnant again, she gets an abortion to please Eugene, sacrificing the dream of a new baby in order to hold onto the illusory dream of romantic love. However, going through the procedure proves to be incredibly difficult for her, and she must actively dissociate from the experience in order to survive it. For a time, Ciel feels that she has succeeded in saving her romantic relationship and her dream of a family, and “the peacefulness of her household” (96) strengthens her. However, when Serena dies and Eugene leaves her, Ciel becomes deeply infected by “the poison of reality” (100). These tragic circumstances mark her as the character with the deepest trauma, with the exception of Lorraine. Shattered by these back-to-back losses, she finds herself destroyed by her “murdered dreams” and gives up utterly, wanting only to die. With by the inescapable knowledge that she has sacrificed her unborn baby for the sake of a man who didn’t love her and has now lost everything that she loves, she only finds a fragment of redemption in the love of a fellow resident of Brewster Place. As Mattie recognizes the woman’s pain, she performs a kind of exorcism on Ciel, rocking her and bathing her in a symbolic enactment of the healing power of female friendship. At the end of the novel, Ciel appears in Mattie’s dream, visiting from San Francisco with news of a new lover and talking about starting a family, and this detail, while essentially imaginary, also suggests that somewhere in the world, the real Ciel has begun to heal.

Cora Lee lives in Brewster Place with her band of seven unruly children. As a girl, Cora was“well-behaved and did well in school. Every year, she asked for just one thing: a new baby doll. On Christmas morning, Cora would perform an “annual ritual” of hugging and kissing her new doll while her parents looked on in amusement. However, as Cora began to grow up, her obsession with baby dolls did not diminish, and as she became sexually active, her continuing obsession with babies began to have real consequences.

Cora now has seven children, only two of whom share a father. At first, she stayed with men who beat her or made promises they didn’t keep, but now she settles for “shadows,” men who come in the dark, leave before the children wake up, and sometimes leave her pregnant with a new baby, which is “all she cared to know” (113). Despite her intense love of babies, Cora is a careless and indifferent mother once her children have grown “beyond the world of her lap” (112). While she meticulously cleans her baby’s crib to avoid germs and baths and oils the infant’s tiny body twice a day, her older children run “filthy” in streets, skip school, and display a distinct lack of socialization.

However, despite Cora’s blatant dislike of her older children, her obsession for having babies remains undiminished. Naive and childlike herself, Cora lives in a fantasy world that prevents her from fully realizing that babies must inevitably grow up. Instead of admitting that her dream of perpetual babies is impossible, Cora denies the reality of her children aging and subjects them to inexcusable neglect. This dynamic suggests a level of emotional immaturity in Cora that is also reflected in her lack of adult relationships and her inability to connect with her older children. When Cora takes her children to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she briefly realizes that “none of [her children] stayed little forever” (126), and she resolves to be a more responsible mother by helping her children to achieve a better future. However, this moment of clarity turns out to be Cora’s own temporary midsummer night’s dream, for as she returns home and quickly slips into bed with one of the “shadows,” the chapter’s conclusion suggests that her old cycle has not been broken.

Theresa and Lorraine are a lesbian couple who share a chapter that is simply titled “The Two.” They are the only major female characters that share a chapter and are the only two women of Brewster Place whose last names remain a mystery. This deliberate omission is the author’s way of emphasizing the fact that the couple’s sexuality supersedes every other aspect of their identity in the eyes of their neighbors. Theresa and Lorraine have been together for five years. During that time, they have moved from apartment to apartment to escape the anti-gay biases of various neighbors. This repetitive cycle has mostly been Lorraine’s doing, for because of her position as a first-grade teacher, she worries about losing her job if a colleague were to discover the nature of her romantic relationship with Theresa. Yet despite her fears, Lorraine also has an intense desire for community and belonging. She wants her neighbors to like her and is hurt by the repeated rejection that she experiences. 

Theresa, who is more thick-skinned and confrontational than her partner, is worn down by the constant moves and Lorraine’s paranoia about the neighbors’ gossip. She wants a partner with whom she can “turn back to back and beat the hell out of the world for trying to invade their territory” (136), and she often loses patience with Lorraine’s passivity. The couple could afford to live somewhere nicer than Brewster Place, and Theresa blames Lorraine for the fact that they now live “in some dump of a building in this God-forsaken part of town” (134). However, the couple’s presence in the dead-end that is Brewster Place illustrates how powerfully society’s negative perception of their sexual orientation overshadows their more privileged socioeconomic status, stripping away many of their opportunities. 

As the residents of Brewster Place become more deeply suspicious of Theresa and Lorraine’s relationship, their hostility toward the couple intensifies. After a confrontation at the tenants’ association meeting where Sophie accuses Lorraine of creating a “disturbance with [her] nasty ways” (145), Ben comes to Lorraine’s rescue, and the two build an unlikely relationship. In Ben, Lorraine finds what she has always wanted: someone who doesn’t treat her as though she is inherently different. Although Theresa often wishes for Lorraine to be stronger and more independent, she grows resentful when Lorraine finds newfound strength in her friendship with Ben. The two women have an argument, after which Lorraine decides to exercise her new independence and go to a party by herself. 

As Black women who are in a committed romantic relationship to one another, Lorraine and Theresa are the most marginalized characters in the novel and are excluded even from the already-marginalized community of Brewster Place. Lacking essential community support, Lorraine is deeply damaged by losing her dream of acceptance and belonging. As she is gang-raped in the alley, Lorraine loses everything, even her “ability to love—or hate” (170). In the end, she is left only with her pain.