The Women of Brewster Place

Dawn



Brewster Place was the bastard child of several clandestine meetings between the alderman of the sixth district and the managing director of Unico Realty Company. The latter needed to remove the police chief of the sixth district because he was too honest to take bribes and so had persisted in harassing the gambling houses the director owned. In turn, the alderman wanted the realty company to build their new shopping center on his cousin's property in the northern section of town. They came together, propositioned, bargained, and slowly worked out the consummation of their respective desires. As an afterthought, they agreed to erect four double-housing units on some worthless land in the badly crowded district. This would help to abate the expected protests from the Irish community over the police chief's dismissal; and since the city would underwrite the costs, and the alderman could use the construction to support his bid for mayor in the next election, it would importune neither man. And so in a damp, smoke-filled room, Brewster Place was conceived.



It was born three months later in the city legislature, and since its true parentage was hidden, half the community turned out for its baptism two years later. They applauded wildly as the smiling alderman smashed a bottle of champagne against the edge of one of the buildings. He could hardly be heard over the deafening cheers as he told them, with a tear in the corner of his eye, it was the least he could do to help make space for all their patriotic boys who were on the way home from the Great War.



The gray bricks of the buildings were the color of dull silver during Brewster Place's youth. Although the street wasn't paved-after a heavy rain it was necessary to wade in ankledeep to get home-there was a sense of promise in the street and in the times. The city was growing and prospering; there were plans for a new boulevard just north of the street, and it

Gloria Naylor (1950 2016) grew up in New York City. She received her BA in English from Brooklyn College and her MA in Afro-American Studies from Yale University. Her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, won the National Book Award for first fiction in 1983. She is also the author of Linden Hills, Mama Day, Bailey's Cafe, and The Men of Brewster Place.

Tayari Jones (foreword) is the New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage, which was an Oprah's Book Club Selection and a favorite of Barack Obama, as well as Silver Sparrow, The Untelling, and Leaving Atlanta. She is a professor-at-large at Cornell University and a professor of creative writing at Emory University.

"[Naylor's] ardent inventiveness as a storyteller and the complex individuality she gives to each of her seven main characters make the novel so much more than a contrived literary assembly line. . . . Deftly, Naylor gathers all these individual stories into one climactic narrative that works through the reader via a word-by-word sense of horror and outrage. . . . The Women of Brewster Place, born of the details of a particular time and community, also turns out to be one of those, yes, universal stories depicting how we, the fallen, seek grace.
Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air

The most refreshing voice in the black idiom since readers first discovered Toni Morrison.
Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land

Naylor creates a completely believable, and very frightening, world of degradation, violence and human very human courage and sturdiness.  
Chicago Sun-Times

Vibrating with undisguised emotion, The Women of Brewster Place springs from the same roots that produces the blues. Like them, [Naylor s] book sings of sorrow proudly borne by black women in America.
The Washington Post