Walk-in Closets and Blood-Red Buicks: Urban Space and Personal Development in Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush

In Memory of Virginia Hamilton, 1936-2002

In Virginia Hamilton's masterful and award-winning novel Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, fourteen-year-old Teresa ("Tree") lives in a small apartment. Her private refuge within the apartment is no bigger than a walk-in closet, but it offers Tree safety and room in which to fantasize about a different kind of life. There, she grows not only her imaginative side but also gains insight, through the ghost of her mother's brother, Rush, into her family's past. However, the closet alone is not enough to ensure her full development: Tree also needs a car. Cars figure as images of freedom and self-determination, and most of all, of movement. Closet and car: these contrasting images of containment and expansion provide a challenging, unexpected picture of a poor, urban, black teenager's struggle to develop a viable sense of self. Although the first full-length critical treatment of Sweet Whispers decries its conclusion as alienating and infantilizing, Hamilton's acute perception that growth must happen within the structure of confined spaces, within both light and darkness, stands.¹ Hamilton's imagery blends opposites into surprising syntheses, bearing witness to the dynamism and resilience of her protagonists.

Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush articulates the great responsibilities and overwhelming pressures young African-American girls often face. Sweet Teresa Pratt is functionally imprisoned in her apartment caring for her retarded seventeen-year-old brother, Dab. Their mother, Viola Sweet Rush Pratt ("M'Vy"), works as a practical nurse and, therefore, lives not with her children but with her patients. Tree is responsible for her brother and the apartment while their mother is gone, a responsibility in which she takes pride, but one that also weighs upon her. She has no memory of things being any other way: "Tree must have said to M'Vy when she was younger, 'Whyn't you home?' And probably cried about that. But she didn't really remember. She didn't cry now because she was used to the way things were and knew they were the way they had to be" (17).

At the beginning of the book Tree falls in love at first sight with a beautiful young man standing on the street corner dressed in a suit "good enough for a funeral or a wedding" (10). When he appears to Tree in the same posture standing through a table in her private refuge, the walk-in closet, she realizes he is a ghost. Later, she discovers he is the ghost of her uncle, Brother Rush, her mother's favorite youngest brother. Over the course of the narrative, Brother "takes her out" into the past to let Tree see, feel, and remember her own beginnings (156, 215). The closet provides a safe space for Tree to rediscover her lost identity. Meanwhile, in the present, Dab falls seriously ill and Tree, her mother, and her mother's man-friend, Silversmith, take him to the hospital where Dab dies and Tree must imagine a new life without him. Crucial in imagining this new life is reorienting herself in a new, more spacious world than the one her apartment offers; in this portion of the book, the automobile becomes an important image of safety and progress as Tree develops new ideas about her own future.

Set in Ohio, Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush breaks down what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has termed the "great divide" in African-American literature between the rural and the urban, the South and the North, the "primitive" and the "modern" represented by Zora Neale Hurston's Florida and Richard Wright's Chicago respectively.² The first tradition, in its adherence to a separatist African-American identity offering consolation and connection, allows for little or no integration into the mainstream of American culture and economics. The second, while accurately depicting the alienation of black urban existence, offers no hope. Virginia Hamilton's border-state, Ohio, synthesizes this geographical and ideological divide by combining rural and urban, South and North; Ohio combines both urban industrialism and rural folk-rootedness...