The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance

Of Housewives and Revolutionaries

12 Navigating a Blues Landscape | The Women of Brewster Place otherwise painful situation into a place where self-definition can occur. The stairway leading to Mattie’s residence signals the presence of an interstitial space between fixed polarities where Etta is able to forge a fluid identity existing apart from a white male society and its valuations. Etta thus exchanges her status as victim for that of survivor. Brewster Place, with all of its poverty, loss, and disappointment , loses its insistent stranglehold on her while the margins , once figured as a space of enclosure, limitation, and finality, become a dynamic site of transformation. Mattie is the reliable sister-friend who stays up in anticipation of Etta’s inevitable return. The illuminated lamp in Mattie’s living room is what Gaston Bachelard describes as a “symbol of perpetual waiting” (46). Yet the room assumes such positive associations because of the persistent bond uniting the two southern sisters—a bond solidified by the blues lyrics wafting from Mattie’s living room. The apartment becomes a welcoming, maternal setting, not of itself but as a result of the women’s emotional response to life’s inevitable contradictions. Like a single yet triumphant Janie at the close of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Etta thus ascends toward “the light and the love and the comfort that awaited her” (74). The restless woman will likely leave again because it is her nature to wander and search. At her story’s end, however, she is at peace, anchored amid a community of indomitable women. Of Housewives and Revolutionaries Naylor presents a portrait of an urban community poised on the brink of sociopolitical change, and in her rendering of Brewster’s evolutionary move into the late twentieth century, she foregrounds the acts of insurgence on the part of the slumbering masses—the nameless, faceless denizens of the city—who possess the latent potential to alter themselves and their everyday reality. At the forefront of Brewster’s political awakening are the women who play an important, albeit unacknowledged, role in bringing about the radi- 13 Navigating a Blues Landscape | The Women of Brewster Place cally transformed future heralded by the block party, Mattie’s dream of a unified community engaged in a struggle for freedom and selfdetermination . It is in the account of the women’s communal efforts to tear down the brick wall that the reader glimpses Naylor’s gendered reinscription of the story involving the black quest for independence . Kiswana Browne’s commitment to grass-roots activism prompts her to align herself with the poor and the daily challenges they face. Although her organizational efforts are frustrated at every turn, she joins the group of women assembled in the novel’s climactic story as they dismantle the imposing brick wall. Kiswana may find that her dream of a unified, empowered community is at least temporarily deferred, but it is the persistence of her dream of a better future that both solidifies her bond with Brewster’s colored daughters and prompts her to persevere. “The Block Party,” the culminating narrative and most problematic of the seven stories that comprise Naylor’s debut work of fiction, is indeed what Jill Matus refers to as “everyone’s story.”8 Each woman therefore dreams of Lorraine so as to convey the oneness between Brewster’s colored daughters that belies notions of sexual difference. Even though residents attempt to exclude the lesbian couple from the nurturing bond of friendship uniting the women as one collective body, Theresa and Lorraine’s frustrating efforts at inclusion suggest that the lesbian couple has more in common with Brewster’s colored daughters than the community realizes. That the novel climaxes with a utopian portrait of a group effort to tear down the brick wall points to a revolutionary emphasis grounded in the twentieth-century American fight for selfdetermination . Such an effort on the part of Naylor’s fictional characters is cultured and gendered, with black women figuring as powerful agents of sociopolitical change. In this regard, the novel directs attention to not only the role of everyday individuals in the quest for freedom but also the place of mothers and motherhood as instruments of empowerment and community uplift. Naylor’s female characters have much in common with historical figures such as 14 Navigating a Blues Landscape | The Women of Brewster Place Fannie Lou Hamer and Mary McLeod Bethune, activist...