The Women of Brewster Place

by Gloria Naylor

  “Oh, God, Mama! I haven’t done that in years—it’s for kids. When are you going to realize that I’m a woman now?” She sought desperately for some womanly thing to do and settled for throwing herself on the couch and crossing her legs in what she hoped looked like a nonchalant arc.

  “Please, have a seat,” she said, attempting the same tones and gestures she’d seen Bette Davis use on the late movies.

  Mrs. Browne, lowering her eyes to hide her amusement, accepted the invitation and sat at the window, also crossing her legs. Kiswana saw immediately how it should have been done. Her celluloid poise clashed loudly against her mother’s quiet dignity, and she quickly uncrossed her legs. Mrs. Browne turned her head toward the window and pretended not to notice.

  “At least you have a halfway decent view from here. I was wondering what lay beyond that dreadful wall—it’s the boulevard. Honey, did you know that you can see the trees in Linden Hills from here?”

  Kiswana knew that very well, because there were many lonely days that she would sit in her gray apartment and stare at those trees and think of home, but she would rather have choked than admit that to her mother.

  “Oh, really, I never noticed. So how is Daddy and things at home?”

  “Just fine. We’re thinking of redoing one of the extra bedrooms since you children have moved out, but Wilson insists that he can manage all that work alone. I told him that he doesn’t really have the proper time or energy for all that. As it is, when he gets home from the office, he’s so tired he can hardly move. But you know you can’t tell your father anything. Whenever he starts complaining about how stubborn you are, I tell him the child came by it honestly. Oh, and your brother was by yesterday,” she added, as if it had just occurred to her.

  So that’s it, thought Kiswana. That’s why she’s here.

  Kiswana’s brother, Wilson, had been to visit her two days ago, and she had borrowed twenty dollars from him to get her winter coat out of layaway. That son-of-a-bitch probably ran straight to Mama—and after he swore he wouldn’t say anything. I should have known, he was always a snotty-nosed sneak, she thought.

  “Was he?” she said aloud. “He came by to see me, too, earlier this week. And I borrowed some money from him because my unemployment checks hadn’t cleared in the bank, but now they have and everything’s just fine.” There, I’ll beat you to that one.

  “Oh, I didn’t know that,” Mrs. Browne lied. “He never mentioned you. He had just heard that Beverly was expecting again, and he rushed over to tell us.”

  Damn. Kiswana could have strangled herself.

  “So she’s knocked up again, huh?” she said irritably.

  Her mother started. “Why do you always have to be so crude?”

  “Personally, I don’t see how she can sleep with Willie. He’s such a dishrag.”

  Kiswana still resented the stance her brother had taken in college. When everyone at school was discovering their blackness and protesting on campus, Wilson never took part; he had even refused to wear an Afro. This had outraged Kiswana because, unlike her, he was dark-skinned and had the type of hair that was thick and kinky enough for a good “Fro.” Kiswana had still insisted on cutting her own hair, but it was so thin and fine-textured, it refused to thicken even after she washed it. So she had to brush it up and spray it with lacquer to keep it from lying flat. She never forgave Wilson for telling her that she didn’t look African, she looked like an electrocuted chicken.

  “Now that’s some way to talk. I don’t know why you have an attitude against your brother. He never gave me a restless night’s sleep, and now he’s settled with a family and a good job.”

  “He’s an assistant to an assistant junior partner in a law firm. What’s the big deal about that?”

  “The job has a future, Melanie. And at least he finished school and went on for his law degree.”

  “In other words, not like me, huh?”

  “Don’t put words into my mouth, young lady. I’m perfectly capable of saying what I mean.”

  Amen, thought Kiswana.

  “And I don’t know why you’ve been trying to start up with me from the moment I walked in. I didn’t come here to fight with you. This is your first place away from home, and I just wanted to see how you were living and if you’re doing all right. And I must say, you’ve fixed this apartment up very nicely.”

  “Really, Mama?” She found herself softening in the light of her mother’s approval.

  “Well, considering what you had to work with.” This time she scanned the apartment openly.

  “Look, I know it’s not Linden Hills, but a lot can be done with it. As soon as they come and paint, I’m going to hang my Ashanti print over the couch. And I thought a big Boston Fern would go well in that corner, what do you think?”

  “That would be fine, baby. You always had a good eye for balance.”

  Kiswana was beginning to relax. There was little she did that attracted her mother’s approval. It was like a rare bird, and she had to tread carefully around it lest it fly away.

  “Are you going to leave that statue out like that?”

  “Why, what’s wrong with it? Would it look better somewhere else?”

  There was a small wooden reproduction of a Yoruba goddess with large protruding breasts on the coffee table.

  “Well,” Mrs. Browne was beginning to blush, “it’s just that it’s a bit suggestive, don’t you think? Since you live alone now, and I know you’ll be having male friends stop by, you wouldn’t want to be giving them any ideas. I mean, uh, you know, there’s no point in putting yourself in any unpleasant situations because they may get the wrong impressions and uh, you know, I mean, well…” Mrs. Browne stammered on miserably.

  Kiswana loved it when her mother tried to talk about sex. It was the only time she was at a loss for words.

  “Don’t worry, Mama.” Kiswana smiled. “That wouldn’t bother the type of men I date. Now maybe if it had big feet…” And she got hysterical, thinking of Abshu.

  Her mother looked at her sharply. “What sort of gibberish is that about feet? I’m being serious, Melanie.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama.” She sobered up. “I’ll put it away in the closet,” she said, knowing that she wouldn’t.

  “Good,” Mrs. Browne said, knowing that she wouldn’t either. “I guess you think I’m too picky, but we worry about you over here. And you refuse to put in a phone so we can call and see about you.”

  “I haven’t refused, Mama. They want seventy-five dollars for a deposit, and I can’t swing that right now.”

  “Melanie, I can give you the money.”

  “I don’t want you to be giving me money—I’ve told you that before. Please, let me make it by myself.”

  “Well, let me lend it to you, then.”

  “No!”

  “Oh, so you can borrow money from your brother, but not from me.”

  Kiswana turned her head from the hurt in her mother’s eyes. “Mama, when I borrow from Willie, he makes me pay him back. You never let me pay you back,” she said into her hands.

  “I don’t care. I still think it’s downright selfish of you to be sitting over here with no phone, and sometimes we don’t hear from you in two weeks—anything could happen—especially living among these people.”

  Kiswana snapped her head up. “What do you mean, these people. They’re my people and yours, too, Mama—we’re all black. But maybe you’ve forgotten that over in Linden Hills.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it. These streets—this building—it’s so shabby and rundown. Honey, you don’t have to live like this.”

  “Well, this is how poor people live.”

  “Melanie, you’re not poor.”

  “No, Mama, you’re not poor. And what you have and I have are two totally different things. I don’t have a husband in real estate with a five-figure income and a home in Linden Hills—you do. What I have is a weekly unemployment check and an overdrawn checking account at
United Federal. So this studio on Brewster is all I can afford.”

  “Well, you could afford a lot better,” Mrs. Browne snapped, “if you hadn’t dropped out of college and had to resort to these dead-end clerical jobs.”

  “Uh-huh, I knew you’d get around to that before long.” Kiswana could feel the rings of anger begin to tighten around her lower backbone, and they sent her forward onto the couch. “You’ll never understand, will you? Those bourgie schools were counterrevolutionary. My place was in the streets with my people, fighting for equality and a better community.”

  “Counterrevolutionary!” Mrs. Browne was raising her voice. “Where’s your revolution now, Melanie? Where are all those black revolutionaries who were shouting and demonstrating and kicking up a lot of dust with you on that campus? Huh? They’re sitting in wood-paneled offices with their degrees in mahogany frames, and they won’t even drive their cars past this street because the city doesn’t fix potholes in this part of town.”

  “Mama,” she said, shaking her head slowly in disbelief, “how can you—a black woman—sit there and tell me that what we fought for during the Movement wasn’t important just because some people sold out?”

  “Melanie, I’m not saying it wasn’t important. It was damned important to stand up and say that you were proud of what you were and to get the vote and other social opportunities for every person in this country who had it due. But you kids thought you were going to turn the world upside down, and it just wasn’t so. When all the smoke had cleared, you found yourself with a fistful of new federal laws and a country still full of obstacles for black people to fight their way over—just because they’re black. There was no revolution, Melanie, and there will be no revolution.”

  “So what am I supposed to do, huh? Just throw up my hands and not care about what happens to my people? I’m not supposed to keep fighting to make things better?”

  “Of course, you can. But you’re going to have to fight within the system, because it and these so-called ‘bourgie’ schools are going to be here for a long time. And that means that you get smart like a lot of your old friends and get an important job where you can have some influence. You don’t have to sell out, as you say, and work for some corporation, but you could become an assemblywoman or a civil liberties lawyer or open a freedom school in this very neighborhood. That way you could really help the community. But what help are you going to be to these people on Brewster while you’re living hand-to-mouth on file-clerk jobs waiting for a revolution? You’re wasting your talents, child.”

  “Well, I don’t think they’re being wasted. At least I’m here in day-to-day contact with the problems of my people. What good would I be after four or five years of a lot of white brainwashing in some phony, prestige institution, huh? I’d be like you and Daddy and those other educated blacks sitting over there in Linden Hills with a terminal case of middle-class amnesia.”

  “You don’t have to live in a slum to be concerned about social conditions, Melanie. Your father and I have been charter members of the NAACP for the last twenty-five years.”

  “Oh, God!” Kiswana threw her head back in exaggerated disgust. “That’s being concerned? That middle-of-the-road, Uncle Tom dumping ground for black Republicans!”

  “You can sneer all you want, young lady, but that organization has been working for black people since the turn of the century, and it’s still working for them. Where are all those radical groups of yours that were going to put a Cadillac in every garage and Dick Gregory in the White House? I’ll tell you where.”

  I knew you would, Kiswana thought angrily.

  “They burned themselves out because they wanted too much too fast. Their goals weren’t grounded in reality. And that’s always been your problem.”

  “What do you mean, my problem? I know exactly what I’m about.”

  “No, you don’t. You constantly live in a fantasy world—always going to extremes—turning butterflies into eagles, and life isn’t about that. It’s accepting what is and working from that. Lord, I remember how worried you had me, putting all that lacquered hair spray on your head. I thought you were going to get lung cancer—trying to be what you’re not.”

  Kiswana jumped up from the couch. “Oh, God, I can’t take this anymore. Trying to be something I’m not—trying to be something I’m not, Mama! Trying to be proud of my heritage and the fact that I was of African descent. If that’s being what I’m not, then I say fine. But I’d rather be dead than be like you—a white man’s nigger who’s ashamed of being black!”

  Kiswana saw streaks of gold and ebony light follow her mother’s flying body out of the chair. She was swung around by the shoulders and made to face the deadly stillness in the angry woman’s eyes. She was too stunned to cry out from the pain of the long fingernails that dug into her shoulders, and she was brought so close to her mother’s face that she saw her reflection, distorted and wavering, in the tears that stood in the older woman’s eyes. And she listened in that stillness to a story she had heard from a child.

  “My grandmother,” Mrs. Browne began slowly in a whisper, “was a full-bloodied Iroquois, and my grandfather a free black from a long line of journeymen who had lived in Connecticut since the establishment of the colonies. And my father was a Bajan who came to this country as a cabin boy on a merchant mariner.”

  “I know all that,” Kiswana said, trying to keep her lips from trembling.

  “Then, know this.” And the nails dug deeper into her flesh. “I am alive because of the blood of proud people who never scraped or begged or apologized for what they were. They lived asking only one thing of this world—to be allowed to be. And I learned through the blood of these people that black isn’t beautiful and it isn’t ugly—black is! It’s not kinky hair and it’s not straight hair—it just is.

  “It broke my heart when you changed your name. I gave you my grandmother’s name, a woman who bore nine children and educated them all, who held off six white men with a shotgun when they tried to drag one of her sons to jail for ‘not knowing his place.’ Yet you needed to reach into an African dictionary to find a name to make you proud.

  “When I brought my babies home from the hospital, my ebony son and my golden daughter, I swore before whatever gods would listen—those of my mother’s people or those of my father’s people—that I would use everything I had and could ever get to see that my children were prepared to meet this world on its own terms, so that no one could sell them short and make them ashamed of what they were or how they looked—whatever they were or however they looked. And Melanie, that’s not being white or red or black—that’s being a mother.”

  Kiswana followed her reflection in the two single tears that moved down her mother’s cheeks until it blended with them into the woman’s copper skin. There was nothing and then so much that she wanted to say, but her throat kept closing up every time she tried to speak. She kept her head down and her eyes closed, and thought, Oh, God, just let me die. How can I face her now?

  Mrs. Browne lifted Kiswana’s chin gently. “And the one lesson I wanted you to learn is not to be afraid to face anyone, not even a crafty old lady like me who can outtalk you.” And she smiled and winked.

  “Oh, Mama, I…” and she hugged the woman tightly.

  “Yeah, baby.” Mrs. Browne patted her back. “I know.”

  She kissed Kiswana on the forehead and cleared her throat. “Well, now, I better be moving on. It’s getting late, there’s dinner to be made, and I have to get off my feet—these new shoes are killing me.”

  Kiswana looked down at the beige leather pumps. “Those are really classy. They’re English, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, but, Lord, do they cut me right across the instep.” She removed the shoe and sat on the couch to massage her foot.

  Bright red nail polish glared at Kiswana through the stockings. “Since when do you polish your toenails?” she gasped. “You never did that before.”

  “Well…” Mrs. Browne shrugged her shou
lders, “your father sort of talked me into it, and, uh, you know, he likes it and all, so I thought, uh, you know, why not, so…” And she gave Kiswana an embarrassed smile.

  I’ll be damned, the young woman thought, feeling her whole face tingle. Daddy’s into feet! And she looked at the blushing woman on her couch and suddenly realized that her mother had trod through the same universe that she herself was now traveling. Kiswana was breaking no new trails and would eventually end up just two feet away on that couch. She stared at the woman she had been and was to become.

  “But I’ll never be a Republican,” she caught herself saying aloud.

  “What are you mumbling about, Melanie?” Mrs. Browne slipped on her shoe and got up from the couch.

  She went to get her mother’s coat. “Nothing, Mama. It’s really nice of you to come by. You should do it more often.”

  “Well, since it’s not Sunday, I guess you’re allowed at least one lie.”

  They both laughed.

  After Kiswana had closed the door and turned around, she spotted an envelope sticking between the cushions of her couch. She went over and opened it up; there was seventy-five dollars in it.

  “Oh, Mama, darn it!” She rushed to the window and started to call to the woman, who had just emerged from the building, but she suddenly changed her mind and sat down in the chair with a long sigh that caught in the upward draft of the autumn wind and disappeared over the top of the building.

  LUCIELIA LOUISE

  TURNER

  The sunlight was still watery as Ben trudged into Brewster Place, and the street had just begun to yawn and stretch itself. He eased himself onto his garbage can, which was pushed against the sagging brick wall that turned Brewster into a dead-end street. The metallic cold of the can’s lid seeped into the bottom of his thin trousers. Sucking on a piece of breakfast sausage caught in his back teeth, he began to muse. Mighty cold, these spring mornings. The old days you could build a good trash fire in one of them barrels to keep warm. Well, don’t want no summons now, and can’t freeze to death. Yup, can’t freeze to death.