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5. Lucielia Louise Turner
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
Every Christmas, Cora Lee asks for a baby doll. When she turns 13, her father—disturbed by his pubescent daughter cuddling a baby doll between her breasts—refuses to give her more. Her mother tells her she still has all her old dolls—but Cora Lee says morosely that old dolls don’t smell like new ones. Cora Lee’s mother remembers this conversation later when her other daughter tells her that Cora Lee was “doing nasty” with a boy. When her mother explains that sex can lead to pregnancy and Cora Lee is too young, Cora seems awed that she could have a real baby.
Whereas other characters in the novel, such as Mattie and Kiswana, engage in sex for sexuality’s sake, pubescent Cora Lee seems more interested in sex—“doing nasty,” in childish terms—when she realizes it could provide her with a baby. Cora Lee’s craving for new baby dolls suggests a maternal instinct in her as strong as the sexual instinct in other characters—but her parents’ worries that she is too young to mother a baby may foreshadow tragedy to come.
Themes
Years later, Cora Lee’s neighbor yells up at her to keep her children quiet. While petting her new baby, she wonders what her neighbors expect: when her son Bruce fell off the wall and broke his arm, they acted like she had pushed him. A ball comes flying and hits the baby. Infuriated, Cora Lee asks her children whether they have homework. They mumble no and flee for the door. Cora Lee kisses the baby and wishes all her children could stay cuddly and easy to clean.
Disturbingly, this passage suggests that Cora Lee cares deeply about new babies but neglects her older children: she is very worried when a ball hits the baby she’s holding, but she seems indifferent to her older son Bruce having broken his arm. The juxtaposition between her attitude toward babies and toward older children implies that her “maternal instinct,” such as it is, only applies to very young children.
Themes
Cora Lee cooingly asks the baby whether it will grow up a “dumb-ass” too. She doesn’t understand why her children are difficult and truant: she stayed in school until she had her first baby. She speculates that if they were better behaved, the father of her children Sammy and Maybelline might not have left so fast—though he beat her if she made mistakes in housework. Now she has one-night stands with men who leave before the children get up and sometimes impregnate her.
When Cora Lee asks whether her baby will grow up a “dumb-ass,” it implies that she scorns her older children and may verbally abuse them, calling them hurtful names. She seems not to realize that her neglectful mothering has contributed to her older children’s acting out and truancy. Yet Cora Lee herself is a victim of abuse: the father of her older children used to beat her, emphasizing that despite Cora Lee’s flaws as a mother, she also suffers from a sexist society in which she is expected to take sole responsibility for raising her children, doing housework, etc.
Themes
Cora Lee hears a knock. When she opens the door, a young woman (Kiswana) holds Sammy while her other children watch. The woman tells Cora Lee she found him eating out of the dumpster and is worried he’s hungry. Cora Lee explains that he was looking for candy: the dentist said his teeth were rotten, so she won’t give him sweets, but she’s too busy to prevent him from searching through the trash for them.
Nothing suggests that Cora Lee is too busy to watch Sammy: her older children simply annoyed her by hitting the baby with a ball, so she sent them out of the apartment. Her decision not to supervise Sammy despite knowing that he eats food out of the dumpster underscores her selfishness as a mother. She would rather devote all her maternal energy to her baby, whom she finds cute and easy to handle, than deal with her older children’s problems.
Themes
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Seeing the strange look the woman (Kiswana) is giving her, Cora Lee claims she was about to cook dinner. She yells at the children to get inside. The woman introduces herself as Kiswana and says she’s starting a tenants’ association to pressure the landlord into making repairs. Cora Lee, noting Kiswana’s nice clothes, wonders why she lives in Brewster Place. She tells Kiswana that an association won’t help.
Kiswana, who moved into Brewster Place to get closer to the political problems of Black Americans, focuses her initial organizing efforts on housing conditions. This focus underscores Kiswana’s understanding that structural racism harms Black Americans through poverty, which keeps many living in unsafe, dilapidated apartment buildings owned by neglectful, exploitative landlords.
Themes
Inside the apartment, Cora Lee’s son Dorian swings on the curtains, falls, and hits his head. Kiswana rushes in and checks his head. She tells Cora Lee that his head is growing a lump and maybe they should—Cora Lee cuts her off, saying that she’d spend her life in the ER if she went to the hospital every time one of her children had a minor injury. When Dorian yanks one of Kiswana’s braids out—causing her to swear—and runs off, Cora Lee is almost pleased with him.
Kiswana is trying to offer Cora Lee and her children solidarity and support—albeit in a somewhat condescending way. Yet Cora Lee takes Kiswana’s worry for Dorian as a judgment on her mothering: implicitly, she’s glad when Dorian yanks out one of Kiswana’s braids because it shows Kiswana the kind of behavior that Cora Lee has to deal with.
Themes
Kiswana suggests that Cora Lee’s children are badly behaved because they’re cooped up in an apartment. Cora Lee is explaining that the children won’t go to school and can’t go to the park, where people sell drugs, when she realizes her next soap opera is about to start. She tells Kiswana she’ll look at the association flyers—but she’s busy. Looking sadly around the apartment, Kiswana tells Cora Lee that her boyfriend Abshu is producing A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a Black cast in the park the next night—maybe Cora should bring her kids. She promises to come by before the play and help wrangle them.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595 or 1596) is a play by famous English playwright William Shakespeare (c. 1564–1616). As Shakespeare is associated with high literary culture in English, Abshu is asserting Black Americans’ cultural sophistication and subversively appropriating “white” culture by staging a Shakespeare play with an all-Black cast. Thus, when Kiswana invites Cora Lee and her children to the play, she is trying to help Cora Lee and her children both by getting them out of their small apartment and by exposing them to art that self-consciously asserts Black pride.
Themes
Cora Lee’s soap opera starts. To get rid of Kiswana, she agrees that Kiswana can come by tomorrow and help bring the children to the play. Kiswana coos at Cora Lee’s baby. When Cora Lee says Kiswana should have babies—she’s good with kids—Kiswana says she has no husband and no room. Cora Lee says she doesn’t have a husband, and babies don’t take up much room. Kiswana replies that “babies grow up.”
Kiswana’s observation that “babies grow up” reveals the selfishness of Cora Lee’s maternal urges. Cora Lee only wants to mother babies because she enjoys mothering babies, but all her babies grow into older children who still need Cora Lee’s love and nurturing.
Themes
After Kiswana leaves, Cora Lee can’t concentrate on her soap opera. She looks at her photo albums of all her older children as babies—Dorian, Bruce, Sammy, Maybelline, and the twins Dierdre and Daphane. The words “babies grow up” echo in her mind as she looks around her dirty apartment. She resolves to take her children to the play, make them go back to school, and prove something to fancy Kiswana.
Cora Lee clearly understands that Kiswana’s claim, “babies grow up,” is an implicit judgment on Cora Lee’s selfish preference for mothering babies over nurturing her older children. She seems to decide to take her children to the play from mixed motives. On the one hand, she interprets Kiswana’s offer of help as judgmental and condescending and wants to prove her own worth. On the other, her glance around her dirty apartment suggests she feels guilty for neglecting her older children, whom she doted on as babies, and wants to mother better for their sake.
Themes
The next day, Cora Lee bathes her children and mends their torn clothes. When Kiswana arrives, she notices the effort that Cora Lee has taken. As the women leave with the children, neighbors give Cora Lee surprised stares, wondering where the whole family could be going outside of welfare office hours. Mattie—whom Cora Lee likes for her nonjudgmental attitude—tells the family they look nice and praises the baby. She also complains that the police won’t investigate her reports of C.C. Baker and his friends smoking “dope” in the alley.
While the novel may represent Cora Lee’s mothering as somewhat selfish and harmful, the judgment that many in Brewster Place pass on her reproductive choices and her reliance on welfare is clearly cruel, recalling earlier moments in the book when Mattie and Etta were judged for their sexuality. Perhaps due to her painful experiences with social judgment, Mattie offers Cora Lee kindness rather than judgment. Mattie’s complaint that the police won’t take her reports suggests that the police don’t adequately investigate crime in poor Black neighborhoods—another potential structural barrier to Black safety—and may foreshadow that C.C. Baker is a danger to others in the apartment complex.
Themes
Cora Lee, Kiswana, and the children reach the park. Cora Lee silently disciplines her children, making sure they don’t embarrass her. The play starts. The Black actors do an excellent job, and the sets are beautiful. She notices the actress playing the “fairy queen” looks like Maybelline. She wonders whether the actress went to college. Bruce, indicating Bottom on stage, asks whether he’s going to look like that, a “dumb-ass,” when he grows up. Cora Lee guiltily tells him no. Beginning to cry, she resolves to make her children go back to school and to get involved in the PTA.
Seeing Black actors do an excellent job with Shakespeare implicitly makes Cora Lee realize that her own children, whom she has been neglecting, could be actors or artists with the right kind of support—a realization that suggests the importance of racial representation. When Bruce asks whether he’s going to look like that “dumb-ass” when he grows up, he is referring to the character Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who is literally cursed with the head of an “ass” or donkey. Yet the question also confirms that Cora Lee has called her older children “dumb-asses” before, putting them down and teaching them that they’re stupid. Her tears, guilt, and resolutions to do better indicate her awareness than she has selfishly ignored her older children in favor of new babies.
Themes
When the play ends, Cora Lee applauds hard and thanks Kiswana. While Cora Lee walks her children home, Sammy asks whether Shakespeare is Black, and Cora Lee softly replies, “Not yet.” She remembers how she hit him for writing poetry on their bathroom walls. When they get home, she tucks each child into bed. Then she goes to her bedroom. Her one-night stand approaches, and she removes her clothes.
When Cora Lee tells Sammy that Shakespeare is “not yet” Black, she is acknowledging her son’s potential to become a new Shakespeare and regretting her neglectful and sometimes abusive mothering of him. Yet after tucking her children into bed, Cora Lee has another one-night stand. While she could simply be indulging sexual desire, she could also be trying to get pregnant again—hinting that despite her resolution to mother her older children better, she still has an inherent preference for babies and will continue privileging newborns over her older children’s needs.
Themes
