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1. Dawn
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Women of Brewster Place, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and Poverty
Sexism and Female Relationships
Sexuality
Motherhood
Religion
Summary
Analysis
On a snowy day, Mattie’s moving van trundles up to Brewster Place. The wall blocks sun from reaching the lower apartments, which means that her plants, which flourished in the house where she lived for 30 years, may die. She feels sorry for the plants to avoid feeling sorry for herself. She smells what she thinks is sugar cane, and it reminds her of her life in Tennessee 31 years ago—which led her to Brewster Place.
The wall symbolizes how powerful social interests block Brewster Place’s residents from accessing economic opportunities—just as the wall literally blocks the sunlight that would allow Mattie’s plants to thrive. When Mattie feels sorry for her plants to avoid feeling sorry for herself, it indicates that she knows the structural discrimination that created Brewster Place won’t allow her to thrive just as the wall won’t allow her plants to thrive.
Themes
In a flashback, Mattie is in her yard when Butch Fuller approaches, flirts, and asks for water. Mattie brings him water but tells him to move along when he’s done. As he drinks, she admires his body. Butch tells Mattie that he’s going to collect wild herbs and stop by a sugar cane field. He invites her along. When she hesitates, he asks whether she’s scared of her father. Mattie denies it—and says her father’s in town.
Mattie admires Butch’s body but tries to hurry him away from her yard, suggesting that she is sexually attracted to him but doesn’t want to be. When he asks whether she’s scared of her father, meanwhile, he implies that her father wouldn’t want her talking to him—and that her father might punish her in some way to control her sexuality if he knew about her interaction with Butch.
Themes
As Mattie and Butch walk, his conversation so amuses her that she doesn’t notice a wagon coming. Her church deacon stops the wagon and says hello. Mattie says that she’s just going to cut cane. After the deacon drives on, Butch snaps at Mattie, saying that he knows what people like Mattie’s father say about him but that he wouldn’t keep his 20-year-old daughter from “keeping company.” When Mattie says that she keeps company with Fred Watson, Butch points out that Fred Watson is boring. Mattie struggles not to laugh.
Mattie is clearly nervous that her church deacon might see her with Butch, the man to whom she is unwillingly attracted. Her nervousness suggests that her religious community might shame or punish her for acting on her sexual desires. Butch’s assertion that he wouldn’t prevent his grown daughter from “keeping company”—dating—implies a contrary attitude toward sexuality, one in which sexuality is a natural activity in which adults ought to be able to engage freely. Mattie’s stifled laughter when Butch tells her that her quasi-boyfriend Fred is boring, meanwhile, hints that she agrees with Butch, and that Mattie’s father may have chosen Fred as a suitor for her.
Themes
Mattie and Butch reach the cane. While Butch cuts cane, Mattie again admires his body. Worried by her arousal, she suggests they go home. Butch points out they haven’t picked herbs yet. In the forest to get the herbs, Butch invites Mattie to sit and asks, using the words “Lord, gal,” whether she’s tired. When Mattie sits but criticizes his language, he criticizes Christians for ordering people not to enjoy life. Mattie asks whether chasing women counts as enjoying life. Butch denies that he chases women—he just leaves them “before the good times turn sour.”
Mattie’s sexual arousal disturbs her, which emphasizes that she finds her own sexuality threatening, perhaps due to the social punishments she knows will be inflicted on her for indulging her sexual desires. Mattie and Butch’s exchange about Christianity shows that Butch sees Christianity as a source of oppressive social control that denies people pleasure. Yet Butch’s approach to sexuality is a little sexist in its implications: Butch has the freedom to leave his female sexual partners “before the good times turn sour,” but his partners may have to deal with ongoing repercussions such as pregnancy or punishment from the wider community.
Themes
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Butch asks how Mattie got the last name “Michael.” She explains that everyone yelled her enslaved grandfather’s name twice to get his attention: “Michael-Michael.” At emancipation, a census worker thought his first and last names were both Michael. Her family’s last name has been Michael since. While Mattie talks, Butch fantasizes about her body. He asks whether Mattie knows how to eat sugar cane “the right way.” While peeling some cane, he tells her that, as in life, you must spit the cane out just before it loses its sweetness. He looks into her eyes, holds out the cane, and asks her to try it his way. She does.
In the U.S. context, emancipation may refer either to the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 executive order freeing enslaved people in the Confederacy, or to the Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution, which illegalized slavery throughout the U.S. in 1865. Mattie’s family derives its last name from a census worker failing to understand her enslaved grandfather, showing the ongoing effects of slavery on Black Americans even after slavery’s abolition. Meanwhile, when Butch encourages Mattie to try the sugar cane his way, he is implicitly inviting her to try his life philosophy of seizing the good times. In other words, he is seducing her for casual sex. Her acceptance of the sugar cane implies that she has sex with him.
Themes
Months later, Mattie tells her father Sam that she’s pregnant. For two days, Sam won’t speak to Mattie—which hurts Mattie worse than an argument. Though Sam has always been a demanding, Bible-focused father, he also nursed Mattie through scarlet fever and even convinced a white doctor to come help her.
The narrator associates Sam’s silent treatment of his pregnant daughter with his religiosity, emphasizing a link between conservative Christianity and disapproval of premarital sexuality. Yet the narration also makes clear that Sam loves his daughter: despite the probable difficulties involved in getting a white doctor to attend to a Black patient in the U.S. South in the early 20th century, Sam did it for Mattie.
Themes
One evening, Mattie tells her mother she’s ashamed. Her mother retorts that she shouldn’t be: according to the Bible, babies are good—it’s fornication that’s bad, and Mattie has already repented. Mattie asks whether her mother told Sam that the father is Butch. Her mother says she didn’t want Sam in jail for murder.
Sam deeply disapproves of Mattie’s premarital pregnancy, implicitly due to his conservative Christianity. Yet Mattie’s mother, also Christian, distinguishes between premarital sex, which she judges to be bad, from Mattie’s pregnancy, which she thinks is an occasion for happiness. Mattie’s mother’s viewpoint shows how religious people can come to different conclusions about the same issues—and how women can support one another through difficult situations like the social policing of their sexuality.
Themes
Sam calls Mattie out onto the porch and says that he thinks Fred Watson is a decent man despite the pregnancy and that he plans to visit Fred to press for a marriage. Mattie, shocked, blurts that Fred isn’t the father. Sam demands to know who is. When Mattie won’t say, Sam beats her until her mother gets the family shotgun and demands he stop. Sam stops, looks at Mattie’s bruised body, and cries.
When Sam violently beats Mattie for refusing to name the father of her child, it shows that Mattie was rational to fear her own sexuality—not because her sexuality is bad or unnatural, but because conservative social forces in her community punish sexually active women with shame and violence. When Mattie’s mother holds Sam at gunpoint to stop him from hurting Mattie, meanwhile, it shows the importance of female solidarity to protecting women and girls from sexist violence.
Themes
The next week, Mattie takes a bus to a northern city where her old friend Etta meets her. She wants to forget her past, but when her baby moves, she knows it connects her to the past. Five months later, remembering the smell of herbs, she names her son Basil.
Just as Mattie’s mother saved her from her father’s violence, so Mattie’s friend Etta supports her during her move north. Both relationships show the importance of female friendships to oppressed women’s survival. Mattie’s desire to forget her past suggests that she has internalized the social shame inflicted on her for her unmarried pregnancy, yet her decision to name her son Basil after the smell of the herbs she and Butch were collecting hints that she does not entirely regret having sex and becoming a mother.
Themes
Etta, examining baby Basil, tells Mattie that they’ve “come a long way from the time the old folks [said] babies were mailed from heaven.” Mattie replies that they still do that. Basil cries, and Etta says she can’t bother with a baby—if she wants trouble, she finds a man. She tells Mattie she plans to leave her boyfriend and the city for New York. She suggests that Mattie come and marry rich in Harlem. Mattie declines, saying that she has what she needs and is content.
Etta’s casual reference to “the old folks [saying] babies were mailed from heaven” emphasizes that Etta and Mattie grew up in a conservative religious environment in which older people concealed the truths about sexuality from girls. When Etta invites Mattie to move to New York with her, it suggests the strength of their friendship, while Mattie’s claim that she has what she needs already suggests that she isn’t interested in marrying rich—she is focused on mothering Basil rather than seeking sexual fulfillment.
Themes
Six weeks later, Etta departs. Lonely, Mattie writes her mother asking her to come watch Basil while Mattie works. Her mother writes back that she can’t leave Sam, who is ill, but that Mattie should send Basil to Tennessee. Mattie imagines what life would be like for Basil, who looks like Butch, in her parents’ house, and decides it’s better to keep him with his mother who loves and accepts him.
Implicitly, Mattie fears that her parents would treat Basil badly because he resembles a man of whose sexual behavior they disapprove. Her decision to keep Basil with her—though keeping him will require her to pay for childcare—shows her protective love for him.
Themes
Mattie gets a job on an assembly line and pays her neighbor to babysit Basil. All her money goes to childcare, rent, food, and medical care for Basil. One night, a rat creeps into her apartment through a hole in the wall and bites Basil. When Basil screams, Mattie turns on the lights and sees his bloody cheek. After she cleans his wound, she stays up all night—and moves out of her apartment the next morning.
Mattie works a full-time job and spends all her money on necessities, but her apartment still has vermin that threaten her child’s safety. In this context, the rat symbolizes the poverty and dangerous conditions into which racial and economic discrimination force families like Mattie’s. Mattie’s decision to leave her dangerous apartment immediately, meanwhile, reveals her panic at potential further danger to Basil and her intense protectiveness of him.
Themes
All day, Mattie looks for apartments while carrying a fussy Basil. White neighborhoods won’t take Black renters, and middle-class Black neighborhoods won’t take unmarried mothers. Toward evening, Mattie is wandering, trying to decide what to do, when a blue-eyed “white” woman asks in “a black voice” whether she’s lost. Realizing the woman is a light-skinned Black person, Mattie explains about the rat. The woman asks why Mattie didn’t just plug up the hole—and tells her she can’t teach her son to run away from hard situations. Annoyed, Mattie asks the woman (Eva Turner) for directions to the bus depot.
Here the narrator further emphasizes that structural racism and sexism have kept Mattie in an unsafe, vermin-infested apartment: white neighborhoods and middle-class Black neighborhoods won’t rent to her either due to her race or due to her perceived violation of sexual morality (her child outside of marriage). Meanwhile, the light-skinned Black woman that Mattie encounters implies that Mattie overreacted in leaving her apartment right away: she could have plugged the rat-hole instead of moving. If the woman is right, then the narration may be suggesting that Mattie is overprotective of Basil and that her overprotectiveness may be counterproductive.
Themes
The woman tells Mattie not to get annoyed—old people give advice. She asks where Mattie’s husband is. When Mattie says she doesn’t have one, the woman says she’s had five and Mattie isn’t “missing much.” She invites Mattie to stay with her, saying Basil can befriend her granddaughter Lucielia. Mattie follows the woman into a grand house but protests that she doesn’t know the woman’s name. The woman introduces herself as Eva Turner and explains that her son, Lucielia’s father, abandoned the baby: he takes after his father, whom Eva shouldn’t have married—but she’s “partial to dark-skinned men.”
Other middle-class Black landlords rejected Mattie for being an unmarried mother, but Eva Turner’s own extensive experience with marriage has evidently made her skeptical of the institution—she says Mattie isn’t “missing much” by lacking a husband—and so less judgmental. Eva’s understanding attitude and her offer of a room suggests that female solidarity may help protect Mattie from the conservative social punishment that follows her unmarried motherhood.
Themes
Eva and Mattie talk for hours about their lives. Eva tells Mattie that her own father was like Sam—when Eva ran away with her first husband, Virgil, her father kidnapped her and locked her in her room. Yet as soon as her father released her, she ran off with Virgil again because she’s “partial to brown-skinned men.” When Mattie is confused, Eva grins and admits she’s partial to all men, but they don’t “agree with” her.
Mattie is confused when Eva says she’s “partial to dark-skinned men” because Eva has already claimed to be “partial to brown-skinned men.” When a grinning Eva admits she’s partial to all men, it shows that Eva is not ashamed of her own sexuality despite a surrounding culture that wants her to be. By sharing her own story of a father who wanted to control her sexuality, Eva offers Mattie solidarity, affirmation, and comfort.
Themes
Mattie asks how much it costs to stay at Eva’s. Eva says Mattie can have the spare room for free. When Mattie insists on paying, Eva says she’ll decide on rent later. She shows Mattie the upstairs room. When Mattie dies, she’ll remember that room (where she’ll live for 30 years) and its “lemon oil” smell.
Eva wants to help unhoused single mother Mattie free of charge. Her empathetic generosity shows how female solidarity can help oppressed women like Mattie survive under conditions of structural racism and sexism. The narrator here reveals that Mattie will live in the house for 30 years and remember its “lemon oil” smell until her death, suggesting that Mattie’s experiences of the house (and Eva) are overwhelmingly positive.
Themes
One Sunday morning, Mattie gets up and hears Eva disciplining the squabbling Basil and Lucielia. Eva chases the children from the kitchen. They pass Mattie, and Mattie tells them to wash up for breakfast. When Eva and Mattie are alone, Eva tells Mattie it isn’t “natural” for her to spend weekends with the children and never date men. She asks whether Mattie doesn’t have needs. Mattie, blushing, retorts that no man would put up with how Basil kicks in his sleep. Eva says that Basil should sleep in his own bed. When Mattie protests that he’s scared of the dark, Eva points out that he’s five years old already.
Eva and Mattie disagree about the role of sexuality in a mother’s life. Eva thinks it isn’t “natural” for a young woman like Mattie to eschew sexuality even if she has a child, whereas Mattie thinks it’s entirely reasonable to prioritize Basil even to the point of having no sex life at all. When Eva points out that Basil is five, it reveals both that several years have passed since Mattie moved into Eva’s and that Eva believes Mattie is babying Basil too much.
Themes
Eva asks whether it’s Basil who can’t sleep alone. Mattie, seeing Eva’s pity, realizes that she has been sublimating her sexual needs into closeness with her son. Humiliated, she says that her landlord can’t tell her how to live and that she’ll pay up her rent and go. When Eva says she hasn’t decided what the rent is, Mattie yells that Eva’s been saying that for years. Eva snaps back that Mattie claims she’ll move every time Eva mentions how “spoiled” Basil is. She tells Mattie to spend the rent money she’s been saving on clothes for Eva’s funeral. The thought of Eva’s death deflates Mattie. She jokes that Eva’s too stubborn to die.
As Mattie realizes, Eva is implicitly arguing that Mattie is harming both herself and Basil by repressing her sexual energy and refocusing it on mothering Basil: in so doing, she ignores her own needs and “spoil[s]” her son, keeping him more immature than he ought to be at his age. Eva demonstrates real friendship and solidarity with Mattie by telling her this painful truth, but Mattie isn’t ready to accept it as true.
Themes
Basil and Lucielia run back into the kitchen. Mattie is about to check behind Basil’s ears when Basil says he forgot to kiss her that morning and offers her a kiss. Eva knows that Basil is distracting Mattie from his ears, but Mattie feels joy at his affection.
Eva perceives that Basil uses Mattie’s maternal love and overprotectiveness to manipulate her—a perception that may foreshadow Basil’s further manipulations of Mattie in the future.
Themes
Several years later, Eva dies. Her children sell the house to Mattie, who realizes why Eva made her save her “rent money.” Lucielia’s parents take her away. By the time Basil is a young adult, Mattie works two jobs to afford her mortgage. One morning, Mattie and Basil are eating breakfast when Basil insists he has somewhere to go and asks to borrow gas money from Mattie, claiming he wants to go looking for a job the next day.
After Eva’s death, Mattie realizes that Eva wanted Mattie to save her “rent money”—the money Eva never collected—so that Mattie would have enough money for a down payment on the house. In other words, Eva’s friendship secures housing for Mattie even after Eva’s death, which shows the central importance of female friendship to women’s thriving. Meanwhile, Basil has grown up into a demanding young adult, finagling money from his affectionate mother despite her tight finances under possibly false pretenses.
Themes
After Basil leaves, Mattie realizes that she’s never met his girlfriends or male friends, she doesn’t know where he goes during the day, and he expects her not to ask. As Mattie washes the dishes, she wonders how that became the status quo. As she cleans the rest of the house, she finds comfort in it as her prized possession. Eventually, she rests in the sun porch, where she often prays to God—and Eva’s spirit.
Despite Mattie’s affection for and overprotectiveness of Basil, they have grown estranged as he’s gotten older—suggesting that Eva was right that Mattie’s spoiling of Basil would backfire. When Mattie prays to Eva’s spirit, meanwhile, it shows both the centrality of Eva’s love and friendship to Mattie’s life and Mattie’s shifting religious beliefs despite her nominal conservative Christianity.
Themes
Hours pass. Basil doesn’t return. As Mattie climbs up to bed, she thinks how she always encouraged Basil to run to her in adversity, though his high school counselors said he was “irresponsible.” That night, she is dreaming that a blue-eyed Butch attacks her to keep her from swallowing sugar cane when the phone rings: it’s Basil, talking about a bar fight and manslaughter. Mattie rushes to the precinct, but an officer tells her she can see Basil the next morning after his arraignment, not before.
Mattie’s thoughts before bed suggest that she is slowly realizing that she made Basil “irresponsible” by fostering his dependence on her past the age it was appropriate him to depend entirely on his mother. Yet when Basil is involved in a barfight that ends in an accidental death, Mattie immediately drops everything to visit him, even though she won’t be able to see him. In other words, Mattie continues to do everything she can for Basil even though she knows doing too much for him is counterproductive. Meanwhile, Mattie’s dream about a blue-eyed Butch suggests that she is ruminating both on Butch and on Eva (who had blue eyes)—two figures who encouraged her to explore her sexuality but whose advice she mostly ignored.
Themes
Mattie hires a lawyer, who tells her that witnesses will attest that the other man started the fight and hit his head on the bar by accident. After Mattie leaves, the lawyer thinks that she should have let the public defender handle the easy case rather than paying him: “Thank God for ignorance of the law and frantic mothers.” Mattie visits Basil, who demands to know when he’s getting out. He complains about rats in the jail—nauseating Mattie. When she tells Basil the earliest she can get him out is the next day after the bail hearing, he says he has nothing to say to her.
When the lawyer Mattie hires thanks God “for ignorance of the law and frantic mothers,” it suggests that Mattie, due to her overwhelming maternal love for Basil, is once again going overboard to protect him: a public defender would have been perfectly adequate to handle the case. When Basil complains about rats in the jail, meanwhile, Mattie’s nausea suggests that Basil has triggered her memories of his childhood injuries by rat, which represented the special danger that structural racism in the form of poverty posed to him as a Black child. Recalling that structural racism threatens Basil may strengthen Mattie’s resolve to get him out of jail and beat his manslaughter charge, no matter the cost to her personally.
Themes
After the judge sets bail, Basil’s lawyer advises Mattie not to pay it: the trial has been set for only two weeks later. Mattie insists that she’ll put up her house as bail. The lawyer asks whether she understands that she’ll lose her house if Basil doesn’t show up for his trial. She asks whether he’d leave his child in jail. He blushes and agrees to get the bail paperwork.
When the lawyer asks whether Mattie understands that she could lose her house if Basil skips town before his trial, he implies that Basil is untrustworthy. Mattie may have reason to believe that Basil is not dependable—he seems to have lied to her about why he wanted money from her, for example—yet she correctly points out to the (implicitly white) lawyer that he wouldn’t leave his child in jail even so: she loves her Black son no less than he loves his white children.
Themes
Mattie leaves the police precinct with Basil. It’s snowing. Basil talks about how beautiful the snow is and how much he loves Mattie. Mattie enjoys his happiness just as she vicariously shares all his emotions. For the next two weeks, they live happily together at home, Basil helping Mattie with chores.
Basil refused to speak to Mattie when she told him she couldn’t get him out of jail until his bail hearing, yet he showers her with affection after she pays his bail. Whereas Mattie loves Basil with an unconditional mother’s love, her “spoiling” of Basil has led him to love her conditionally: he loves her according to what she can do for him.
Themes
The lawyer calls to remind them of the trial date. Basil becomes paranoid, worrying that the witnesses will change their stories. When Mattie reminds him that the lawyer says it’s a simple case, Basil accuses the lawyer of saying anything for money. Mattie realizes that there is something lacking in Basil’s character that makes him weak and needy. When she goes to work, Basil says goodbye tenderly—and when she gets home, he’s gone with her car.
Basil is correct that the lawyer only took his case for the money, but his paranoia about the witnesses nevertheless betrays his cowardice. Mattie realizes that Basil is a flawed person—implicitly due to the way she raised him to be spoiled and dependent—but she realizes it too late, after he has selfishly skipped town while out on bail, an action that will lead Mattie to lose her house.
Themes
In the present, one of the men moving Mattie’s things into Brewster Place asks her to unlock her apartment door. As she does, a snowflake melts on her collar and rolls down her back “like a frozen tear.”
When Mattie paid Basil’s bail, they appreciated the beauty of the snow. Now that Basil has skipped town while on bail and caused Mattie to lose her house, she experiences the snowflake on her collar as a “frozen tear,” an image that suggests Mattie’s grief over her son’s selfish betrayal and her loss of her long-time home.
Themes
