The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance

Inner-City Blues

1 Navigating a Blues Landscape: The Women of Brewster Place Inner-City Blues In The Women of Brewster Place Gloria Naylor situates the experiences of the folk within a sociopolitical frame involving the struggle for self-determination on the part of blacks in late-twentiethcentury America. Organizational efforts by Abshu Ben-Jamal and Kiswana Browne recall the grass-roots activism of the Civil Rights and Black Revolution Movements as African Americans attempt to achieve dignity, equal rights, and freedom in a society polarized along race and class lines. What unites Brewster’s residents is therefore not only an entrapment within the strictures of a hostile urban bureaucracy but also a dogged determination to defy the limitations of white, patriarchal control. It is largely a consequence of acts of insurgence on the part of the displaced masses that an otherwise dismal city landscape becomes a sanctuary holding out the possibility of fulfilled dreams. ModeledafterNaylor’sgrandmother’sHarlemapartmentbuilding , Brewster Place is a recapitulation of a southern home with an extended family network, bustling activity, and creature comforts. The inner-city housing project is a way station attracting a diverse group of rural migrants whose arrival in the North brings into sharp focus the harsh living conditions in the crowded tenement, kitchenette , storefront, or boardinghouse. Not surprisingly, Naylor turns to Langston Hughes in the selection of “Harlem” as an epigraph for her debut work of fiction with a focus on the lives of those for whom the materialist American Dream is indefinitely deferred. 2 Navigating a Blues Landscape | The Women of Brewster Place That Brewster is created as part of a clandestine arrangement between the alderman of the Sixth District and the managing director of Unico Realty Company underscores the oppressive political reality the community inherits. Formed in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the inner-city neighborhood has its genesis in the machinationsoftherichandinfluential—powerbrokerswhohavea vested interest in maintaining authority over the masses. An amorphous power structure initiates Brewster’s creation, just as it relegates residents to homelessness once Brewster is condemned. The revelation Abshu Ben-Jamal makes in The Men of Brewster Place that the community is razed in order to make room for middle-income housing lends emphasis to Naylor’s continuing focus on governmental indifference to the plight of the working poor. Without the relative stability and safety that the neighborhood offers, Brewster’s impoverished citizens are displaced and forced to take up residence elsewhere. Destruction of the brick wall, a reminder of imposed restraint , is a highly ambiguous albeit symbolic act paving the way for either a loss of solidarity on the part of the urban masses or freedom from the strictures of bureaucratic control.1 But Naylor is not so much concerned with the restrictions associated with life in the city as she is with the creative ways that the folk mount a challenge to authoritarian rule. Consider, for instance , the flight undertaken when fictional characters travel from one locale to the next, whether that trek involves the move from South to North or the passage away from Brewster in an attempt to find fulfillment in another locale. Following in the tradition of the blues persona who takes to the road amid tragedy and misfortune , Naylor’s characters search and seek, engaging in the migratory journeys that encourage a critique of colonialist inscriptions of home. Residents of the failing community find that home is an elusive construct, and like the fictional neighborhood itself, it exists both everywhere and nowhere.2 Much of the novel involves efforts to refigure Brewster’s boundaries so that the neighborhood comes to represent the space associated with familial beginnings. 3 Navigating a Blues Landscape | The Women of Brewster Place Mattie Michael’s story, which chronicles her sojourn from Rock Vale, Tennessee, to the city, is instructive in understanding the role an urban landscape plays in Naylor’s reinscription of places of origin. Brewster’s central mother figure falls prey to the worldly, smooth-talking Butch Fuller when he entices her into a sexual encounter one spring afternoon. Understandably enraged as a result of his only daughter’s pregnancy, Samuel Michael beats Mattie becausesherefusestodivulgetheidentityofherchild ’sfather.Margaret Early Whitt is accurate in her observation that Mattie’s father is “an ambiguous character, stagnating in an Old Testament view of life” (20). He is every bit an authoritarian parent whose misguided attempts to control his only child result in her decision to strike out...