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Content Warning: This section discusses racism, suicide, and addiction.
The housing block where The Men of Brewster Place takes place symbolizes its residents’ oppression and disadvantage. Positioned in a forgotten corner of town, Brewster Place’s dead-end street suggests the residents’ lack of mobility and isolation from more affluent sectors of society. However, the street also “breathes through the hope or despair of its tenants” (171). It is still a place full of life, and its residents continue to hope for a better future and work hard, even if they are “just working at despair” (8). Ben argues that “a street is a street is a street” made of “cement and sand and water mixed up to dry” (7); it is a blank slate in which each character can cast his own experiences. By the novel’s end, Brewster Place is slated for demolition, and the street is quiet and abandoned. However, Abshu is the “tired warrior” walking into the dawn, suggesting the continued resilience of the block’s residents.
Brewster Place’s symbolic associations in this novel build on its function in The Women of Brewster Place. There, the women physically disassemble part of the block to transform it from a dead-end to a through street. Their action underscores the block’s potential as a site of unity and power. However, The Men of Brewster Place ends with another act of destruction, this time a demolition at the hands of the city, complicating a vision of unity as a one-time task and suggesting that community building must be an intentional, ongoing process.
Throughout the novel, Brother Jerome fills Brewster Place with blues music. This “sound of a black man’s blues” symbolizes the men’s shared grief and loss (37). The music resonates with all of the men who live in Brewster Place, from the “overworked and underpaid” resident living in apartment 314 to the man in 312 whose “bitter” wife tells him “that whatever he’s doing is not enough” (37). Hearing Jerome’s music, “every brick […] every piece of concrete and iron railing on Brewster Place” responds with a chorus of “Amen brothers” (37). The music connects all of the men’s struggles, indicating how their seemingly unrelated problems and sorrows stem from their shared experiences of oppression and marginalization.
That this music is played by Brother Jerome, whose intellectual disability marks him as an outsider in his community, highlights the transformative power of artistic connection. Through music, Brother Jerome not only unifies his community but also becomes integral to it, despite his differences. Blues also provides Brother Jerome a way to financially support his mother, serving as a tool for him to achieve a normative marker of masculine success in a non-traditional manner. In this way, Brother Jerome’s blues music mirrors Abshu’s passion for theater, which allows Abshu to support his community and demonstrate his own strength while engaging in an activity that does not embody a traditional paradigm of masculinity. In both cases, artistic expression becomes a tool for connection and community strength that both complicates and reinforces the Brewster Place men’s pursuit of masculinity.
Max’s barbershop is a symbol of both community and isolation among the men who live in Brewster Place. It is the “heartbeat” of the apartment block, a place where Black men can gather and be together, free from the pressures of the outside world and affirm the fact that they “thrive and are alive” (167). The chairs hold “the imprint of […] hundreds of men over the years” and have heard innumerable sad stories (157). The barber, Max, will give any man the dignity of a shave and haircut, including men like Greasy who have lost everything due to drug addiction. The shop is the only place where the men can be themselves and connect.
However, Max’s barbershop is also the site of Greasy’s death by suicide, an event that ultimately highlights the men’s isolation from each other. Ben suggests that the men forgot that Greasy was their brother, indicating that even in this community hub, many of the men fail to connect with each other on a human level or recognize their shared struggles. Though the men were initially unified after his death by the physical marker of his blood, they never discussed Greasy after the barbershop reopened. Greasy’s suicide at the barbershop underscores that surface-level interactions are not enough to overcome deeper interpersonal divides; while the men are “barbershop politicians” who are comfortable discussing societal issues, they stay silent about their own grief and trauma, reinforcing their own isolation even amid a physically present community.
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By Gloria Naylor
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