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4. Kiswana Browne
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
One dawn, Ben is drinking outside when Eugene walks up, tells him the funeral is today, and asks whether he’ll go. Ben says no: a baby’s funeral is too sad. Eugene complains that, as the father, he planned to attend, but when he tried to visit Ciel at the hospital, Mattie saw him in the hall and asked what he wanted. Eugene comments: “how you gonna be a man with them ball-busters tellin’ everybody it was my fault”?
Eugene decides not to attend his baby’s funeral because he feels that Mattie, an older woman, showed him insufficient respect at the hospital. He refers to her and women like her as “ball-busters,” a derogatory sexist term. His odd reasoning—why should Mattie’s supposed disrespect prevent him from attending his own baby’s funeral—suggests his fragile masculinity, his misogyny, and his disordered priorities (judging his ego more important than his child’s funeral).
Themes
In a flashback, Eugene lets himself back into Ciel’s apartment after abandoning her with their baby Serena for 11 months of humiliation and sexual frustration. She welcomes him back with “relief.” Later, when Mattie comments to Ciel that Eugene is “back,” Ciel says that he’s changed and has a job. Mattie says Ciel doesn’t have to convince her. Ciel knows that she’s trying to convince herself she let him back because he’s improved, not because she wants him.
The previous scene has characterized Eugene as a sexist man with disordered priorities. This scene, in which Eugene returns after abandoning Ciel and their baby for months, reveals that his sexism and selfishness are a pattern of behavior. Ciel’s self-justifications for taking him back, meanwhile, indicate that she is ashamed for continuing to desire Eugene sexually despite his poor treatment of her.
Themes
Months later, Ciel asks herself when her relationship with Eugene turned sour again. She tries to convince herself it wasn’t because of her second pregnancy. Eugene comes home and turns up the stereo even though baby Serena is asleep. Realizing he wants a fight, Ciel just closes the door to Serena’s room. Eugene shouts that he lost his job. He demands to know what he’ll do with a second “brat” to support. When Ciel offers to get a job, Eugene refuses to let Mattie watch Serena while Ciel works: Mattie hates him. Ciel remembers accusing Mattie of hating Eugene; Mattie replied that she just loved Ciel.
Ciel didn’t get pregnant by herself: Eugene also bears responsibility for Serena’s birth and Ciel’s second pregnancy. Yet he acts as if he blames Serena for their “brat[s],” a highly derogatory way to speak of his own children. Ciel tries to respond reasonably to the content of Eugene’s complaints—his money worries—by offering to get a job, but Eugene petulantly refuses free childcare from Mattie because she disapproves of his treatment of Ciel. Eugene’s unreasonable behavior indicates that he wants the women in his life to respect him—but he refuses to earn their respect.
Themes
Ciel has an abortion. Afterward, she becomes alienated from reality and unwilling to leave Serena alone. Eugene calls her a “moody bitch.” Ciel begins feeling better as Serena grows and begins to talk. One day, she’s watching Serena with Mattie when Eugene enters and demands to talk with Ciel. Mattie leaves. Eugene orders Ciel to come help him pack.
Ciel’s reaction to her abortion clearly implies that she wanted to carry her second pregnancy to term but that she felt coerced into an abortion by Eugene’s sexist anger at her for getting pregnant. Ciel seems to find her unwanted abortion traumatic to her identity as a mother—trauma evidenced by her close watch over Serena, her living baby. Rather than empathize at all with Ciel’s pain, Eugene verbally abuses her, calling her a “moody bitch”: his cruel and immature behavior underscores his sexism.
Themes
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While Eugene and Ciel are in the bedroom, Serena plays with blocks in the living room. She spots a cockroach and chases it around until it hides in an electric wall socket. She pokes the socket. Then, spying a dropped fork, she sticks it in the socket.
Eugene and Ciel leave Serena unsupervised for just a moment while they go to another room—but in the poor, vermin-infested apartment complex where they live, that brief unsupervised moment is enough for Serena to get into a fatal accident due to the coincidence of the cockroach crawling into the electrical wall socket. The cockroach—like the rat that bit Basil earlier in the novel—thus symbolizes the dangers to which Black children are exposed due to structural racism that keeps many Black families in poverty.
Themes
Packing, Eugene tells Ciel that once he’s settled in his new job in Maine—or Newport—he’ll visit. When Ciel begs to come too, he refuses. When she asks how he got the job, he says “a friend.” Ciel accuses him of lying about having a job. When he tries to storm out, she tells him not to go. He asks why. She thinks of the abortion, for which she’ll have to take sole responsibility, but she says that she loves him. He tells her that’s “not good enough.” Ciel realizes she’s going to hate him—and wishes she’d hated him earlier so she wouldn’t have had the abortion. Wanting to be near someone who loves her, Ciel plans to take Serena to Mattie’s. Then a scream sounds from the kitchen.
Ciel worries about having to take sole responsibility for her abortion if Eugene leaves. By implication, Ciel believes her abortion was morally wrong; while readers may or may not agree with her view, her uneasiness with abortion and desire to keep her pregnancy emphasize the cruel sexism inherent in Eugene’s emotional coercion of her to abort her pregnancy. Interestingly, Ciel thinks of Mattie when she wants to take refuge with someone who loves her, which suggests both the importance of female solidarity and Mattie’s status as a mother-figure to Ciel. Meanwhile, the scream from the kitchen horribly suggests that poverty and structural racism, in the form of the cockroach infesting Ciel’s apartment, have led to Serena’s death.
Themes
In the present, Ciel feels numb and abandoned by God. In the aftermath of Serena’s death, she has stopped eating to end “the life that God had refused to take from her.” After the funeral, people bring food to Ciel’s apartment, but their condolences fail to touch her. Then Mattie walks in, sees Ciel as if dead on the bed, and blasphemously yells, “Merciful father, no!”
Ciel wants to die after her child dies, which shows the vital importance of motherhood to Ciel’s emotional life and sense of self. Ciel’s love for Serena and her grief make her want to defy God, ending her life, which she believes “God [has] refused to take from her” despite her wishes. Interestingly, when Mattie yells, “Merciful father, no!”, the narrator characterizes her exclamation as not prayerful but blasphemous. In other words, Mattie is not praying to God to save Ciel but asserting her own intention to save Ciel even if God does not will it—revealing that Mattie’s maternal love for Ciel is stronger than her religious commitments.
Themes
Mattie grabs Ciel and rocks her like a baby until she begins to moan. Mattie’s rocking carries Ciel past Jewish mothers whose children died at Dachau and Senegalese mothers who killed their babies on slave ships until they reach the “nadir of her hurt” and pull it out. Ciel gags. Mattie hurries her to the toilet, where she vomits. Then Mattie bathes Ciel “as if handling a newborn.” She walks Ciel to the bedroom. As Ciel weeps, Mattie makes her bed and tucks her in, knowing that “morning [will] come.”
Dachau was a Nazi German concentration camp; researchers estimate the camp killed more than 41,000 of the people imprisoned there, including especially ethnically Jewish people against whom the Nazis were committing genocide. Senegal, meanwhile, was a major hub in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. When Mattie and Ciel metaphorically travel past grieving mothers to reach “the nadir of [Ciel’s] hurt”—Serena’s death—it suggests a comparison between structural oppressions like Nazi antisemitism and trans-Atlantic slavery, and the structural oppression Black Americans face. Mattie handles the grieving Ciel “like a newborn,” showing both Mattie’s healing maternal love for Ciel and Ciel’s “rebirth” now that she is allowing herself to feel her grief. Mattie’s assurance that “morning [will] come” likewise suggests that Ciel will now heal from her grief rather than attempting to die.
Themes
