The Men of Brewster Place

Brother Jerome is a teenager with an intellectual disability living in Brewster Place. A piano prodigy, he is the only child of Mildred, a woman who loves to party. When she gave birth to a child with a disability, she thought it was “punishment” for skipping church and having a baby out of wedlock. However, she figured that “the damage was done” (33), so she kept on partying. She loved Jerome, but “as much as she did anything else: with a lot of attention at one moment and none at the other” (33). The Board of Education suggested that she send him to a special school, but the “downright unhappy” atmosphere in the institutions she visited alarmed Mildred, and she decided to keep the boy at home. The doctors didn’t expect Jerome to live past three years old, and Mildred wanted his short life to be happy. However, by the time Jerome turned five, he still wasn’t potty-trained and was becoming difficult to care for. Mildred decided to put him in an institution after all.

At Jerome’s “big blowout” going-away party, the boy sat at the piano and began “sending out a boogie-woogie that could have put even the likes of Jelly Roll Morton or Count Basie to shame” (35). The partygoers quickly discovered that a bright light kept the boy playing, and they danced to his music all night long. Jerome “got saved from the institution” and instead stayed at the piano all day while Mildred went to work (34). She began charging admission for folks to hear him play at her house parties. Mildred reveled in “being the mother of a special child” and used the money from Jerome’s playing to upgrade her television and living room furniture (36).

Now, Jerome is a teenager who can’t “write his own name, […] count money, or go to the store” (32). However, he still garners respect, and the community values him, unlike many of the other male characters. Although he does it inadvertently, his music generates an income that allows him to provide for his mother, illustrating the link between manhood and capital. His music also creates a sense of community among the Black men who live in Brewster Place. The songs “[fill] the street with the sound of a black man’s blues” (37), resonating with men across the block and highlighting their shared struggles.

Basil is the son of Mattie Michael, one of the most central characters in The Women of Brewster Place. In Women, Basil is involved in a bar fight and charged with involuntary manslaughter. His mother used the house she had spent her life paying off as collateral to bail Basil out of jail, but he ran instead of appearing for his court date, causing his mother to lose everything and move to Brewster Place. After violating his bail, Basil worked three jobs for three years, hoping to pay his mother back and dreaming of the day when he “would truly become a man” (44). However, Mattie died before Basil could give her the money, so he set a new goal: to “find some woman, somewhere, and make her life happy” (46).

Basil grew up without a father and is obsessed with becoming “a solid family man” (50). To him, being a man and being a father are one and the same. When he met Keisha, a young single mother, he saw his chance to “[break] the cycle” and save the two little boys who were part of the “lost generation” of young Black men. He grew close to the boys and convinced Keisha to marry him, even though he didn’t love her. Eventually, Basil’s single-minded focus on fatherhood caused him to neglect his duties as a husband. Keisha complained that he wasn’t “man enough to have any kids” because he “hardly ever touched [her]” and called the police (61). Basil was sent to jail, where he served six years for involuntary manslaughter. He broke his promise to Keisha’s boys, to whom he swore never to leave, and inadvertently continued the cycle he set out to undermine. By the time he got out of jail, the older boy had already spent time in juvenile detention, and the younger lived in a “hard and permanent” shell (64).

Basil’s story is a key example of how Naylor subverts the depiction of Black masculinity from The Women of Brewster Place. In Women, men like Basil are portrayed as selfish and lazy. They abuse, oppress, and take advantage of the women in their lives. However, The Men of Brewster Place illustrates how Black men are also victims of a racist, sexist society. Basil violated his bail not because he didn’t respect the sacrifice his mother made but rather because he didn’t trust that the legal system would treat him fairly as a Black man. Later, he failed to satisfy Keisha’s expectation of manhood in terms of sexuality, and he again became caught up in the cycle he tried to break. Even when trying to do what he believed was right, Basil was thwarted by systemic disadvantage and strict, gendered expectations.

Eugene is another prominent character in The Women of Brewster Place whose story in Men subverts Women’s abusive and oppressive depiction of Black masculinity. Naylor writes Eugene’s chapter as a confession to his wife, Ceil. The two met in Tennessee as teenagers, got married at 18, and moved north, where Eugene “proceeded slowly […] to ruin [Ceil’s] life” (71). Eugene is a closeted gay man, and his life began to change when the dock foreman he worked for took him to a gay bar. The experience “opened up that part of [him]self [he’d] been running from most of [his] life” (82), and he could no longer imagine a future with his wife. However, he also could not confess that he is gay, worrying that she “would no longer see [him] as a man […] but as some sort of freak” (82). He began lying to her, picking fights, and repeatedly trying to break off the relationship. Eugene has a specific definition of masculinity, believing that Black men “should be” “big, dark, and mean” (72). Although he doesn’t explicitly add straight to this definition, he implies that his sexuality undermines his identity as a man. He worries that Ceil would “no longer see him as a man” if he confessed and often cries “like a goddamned baby” (82, 83).

The taboo nature of Eugene’s sexuality and his attempt to adhere to inflexible definitions of masculinity ultimately hurt him, Ceil, and their daughter. Tragedy struck during Eugene and Ceil’s final argument when their daughter, Serena, electrocuted herself while playing in the next room. Eugene blames himself, claiming to have “murdered” the little girl. However, his commitment to performing heterosexual masculinity and his inability to express the truth of his experience continues even as he grieves. Eugene hides behind a “strong-black-man mask” or a “fuck-you-all-who-gives-a-shit mask” (91), determined not to feel “anything at all” (91).

Moreland T. Woods is the reverend at Sinai Baptist Church near Brewster Place. Growing up in Jamaica, he cultivated a “fairly casual” relationship with God. When he heard the call to serve, he immediately set about “bargaining with God” to see what he could get out of the deal (102). Woods is a man with “his faith […] in himself” (102). He considers himself “a magnificent specimen of a man” (100) and imagines that “with enough work” (103), he could become “as great as Martin Luther King” (103). Woods is a successful preacher with a “silver tongue,” but he is focused entirely on his accumulation of wealth and power. He enjoys “his fancy clothes, his fancy car, and his brick home” and pursues numerous affairs as “a fringe benefit of the job” (104, 110). He wants to build a bigger church purely to feed his ego and establish support for running for mayor; he doesn’t actually care about bringing religious salvation to the people of Brewster Place.

Although Woods is well loved by much of the community, some people see through his facade. Ben notes that “something about” Woods “seems too smart” and wonders if “the man is making a game out of religion” (98). He worries that Woods’s soul is “so smooth” that he cannot “understand what the common man is going through” (98). Deacon Bennett is also suspicious of Woods’s “smooth-talking,” and sure enough, Woods betrays the people of Brewster Place as soon as he is elected to the city council.

Woods’s story illustrates poverty and classism’s role in the disadvantage many of the men face. Even though Woods is also Black, he doesn’t hesitate to take advantage of the poor residents of Brewster Place. Abshu notes that even though “the hand that circles [their] throat” isn’t white (153), the result is the same: The poor Black residents of Brewster Place are exploited and abandoned.

C.C. Baker is a young man who took to the streets searching for the “money, power, and respect” he saw missing from his father’s life (123). His story illustrates the limited resources that young, poor Black men have to achieve these pillars of hegemonic masculinity. C.C. grew up in Brewster Place and has never left his city. The narrator claims that he has a 50-word vocabulary in which “fuck” becomes “noun, adjective, adverb, and verb” (122). In C.C.’s small world, his options are to live bitter, impoverished, and emasculated like his father or exude elegance and “good taste” like “The Man,” Beetle Royal, the neighborhood’s top dealer. With his limited education, it doesn’t “occur to him that there might be a better way” (122). When Royal offers C.C. a position as his new junior lieutenant, he kills his brother, Hakim, to prove his loyalty and is subsequently arrested.