The Women of Brewster Place

The Women of Brewster Place is a set of interconnected short stories about the lives of Black women on a single urban block in an unnamed city. Through these stories, Gloria Naylor also narrates the arc of racialized US urban development and decay from the 1910s through the late '70s/early '80s.

Normally I'm really into the style of women's social realist melodrama in which Naylor writes. There are some great sentences, dialogue, and imagery throughout these stories. The best parts are those in which Black women's love and care for each other shine through, as well as the moments where Naylor seems to be offering gentle critique from a loving position. But throughout the book, the overtones are of suffering and punishment, and sometimes Naylor seems to verge into moral condemnation. The stories are harsher on individual Black women (and sometimes men) than on the structures that proscribe their lives. It was hard for me to tell whom this book is for.

In the 1980s which I still sometimes think was only 20 years ago, I watched the made for tv movie, Women Of Brewster Place. At the time, I paid no attention to the credits, had never heard of Gloria Naylor and had no idea the movie was made from a book. The movie was stuck in my mind all these years and a couple of years ago I decided to go ahead and buy it to re-watch. I finally saw the credits and as the movie was still playing I immediately searched out and ordered a copy of the book. This weekend I finally sat down to read it and it has now sent me on a shopping spree to pick up more of Gloria Naylor's work.
This book is the bittersweet tale of seven Black women who all eventually end up in the run down tenement building of Brewster Place, a building on a dead end street where joy and hopelessness share equal time. Crime is rampant in the alley and by the wall that cuts them off from the more upscale neighborhood. Set in the days when being a lesbian could cost you your job, having a baby could keep you from getting housing. It is beautifully written and sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hopeful, but never boring. It claims to be short stories, but to me it's more like chapters on each individual woman, and Ben the janitor/caretaker is an important character as well. It's hard for me to talk about the book without talking about the movie. The book is more graphic in certain scenes that would have been too intense for tv in those days, and yet the movie stuck so close to the book as to even include most of the dialogue word for word. It's only near the ending of the book that the movie went a slightly different way. I guess I have to recommend both to you, I loved them equally.