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
A skinny woman (Lorraine) and a voluptuous woman (Theresa) move into Brewster Place earlier in the year Ben dies. One summer evening when many residents are outside, the skinny woman trips going up the steps, the other woman catches her, and they laugh. Their intimacy reminds the Brewster women of the intimacies they’ve shared with male lovers. After the rumor that the two (Lorraine and Theresa) are “that way” spreads, their neighbor Sophie starts spying on them. When she sees Ben leaving their apartment, she demands to know what he saw. After he says they had a “terrible” broken faucet, Sophie tells everyone that Ben saw something terrible in the apartment.
The gossip that Lorraine and Theresa are “that way,” i.e. lesbians, has a malicious edge—as evidenced by the judgmental emphasis in the phrase “that way” and by Sophie’s rumormongering about something “terrible” going on in Lorraine and Theresa’s apartment. Yet heterosexual women in the story, such as Mattie and Etta, have also suffered for violating conservative social mores. It remains to be seen whether they will offer Lorraine and Theresa solidarity for their similar experiences and perpetuate homophobia.
Themes
Lorraine notices that some neighbors who used to return her hellos don’t anymore. One evening, Lorraine asks whether Theresa has noticed that their neighbors are cold and wonders whether “they” have guessed. Theresa blows up at her, saying that she already gave up apartments in Linden Hill and Park Heights because Lorraine thought “they” had guessed.
Up to this point, the novel has focused primarily on ways that racist oppression forces Black people into poverty, including especially into unsafe housing. Yet here the novel suggests that Lorraine and Theresa have moved away from (implicitly nicer) apartments than Brewster Place due to homophobia, which may suggest that conservative sexual policing of gay people can operate in an oppressive way somewhat similar to structural racism.
Themes
Lorraine says she wasn’t suggesting they move and apologizes for making Theresa unhappy. Theresa thinks that the softness she first found attractive in Lorraine turned into a constant demand for babying—babying Theresa doesn’t want to provide. She replies that she would’ve left Lorraine if she were that unhappy. Lorraine reminds Theresa that she lost her teaching job in Detroit when people wrote to the principal about her. Theresa says she knows, but she thinks no one in Brewster Place would bother to write to Lorraine’s school: Lorraine is worried about losing “approval.”
Homophobia has had real, negative economic effects on Lorraine’s life: she lost her teaching job when someone complained to her principal about her sexuality. This detail further supports the parallel the novel is drawing between the negative economic consequences of homophobia and of racism for gay and Black people respectively. Yet Theresa fails to take Lorraine’s experience seriously: she believes Lorraine cares only about “approval” in an emotional way—not about the real, material repercussions of losing social approval.
Themes
Theresa asks why Lorraine bought cottage cheese. They joke about diets. Theresa says that her large butt causes trouble: when her grandmother found out young Theresa let boys pat her butt in exchange for candy, she said Theresa could get pregnant—but Theresa’s cousin Willa had already assured her she’d be fine if she stayed standing. Lorraine doesn’t laugh. Annoyed, Theresa tells Lorraine that she later learned that men can do it standing up. When Lorraine snaps, “Must you!”, Theresa asks why she’s uptight about sex and reminds her that Theresa has been with men even if Lorraine hasn’t.
Theresa seems to be baiting Lorraine. While Lorraine may simply be uptight about sex, it seems equally reasonable to suppose that Lorraine is jealous of and insecure about her girlfriend’s former male lovers—in which case, Theresa reminding Lorraine explicitly that she’s had male lovers seems both to be cruel and to miss the point.
Themes
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Lorraine, tearing up, demands to know why Theresa stays with her if some men are fine. Theresa replies that you can wear cookies as earrings if you want, but they’re still cookies. And she, Theresa, is a lesbian.
Lorraine’s question about why Theresa stays with her bolsters the interpretation that Lorraine is insecure, not merely uptight about sex talk. Theresa responds by strongly asserting her lesbianism, showing that she identifies deeply with her sexual orientation.
Themes
Kiswana holds a meeting of the Brewster Place Block Association in her apartment. Kiswana says they should discuss taking their landlord to court—but Sophie insists that they should discuss the “bad element” that’s moved in. When Mattie says she’s already called the police on C.C. Baker, Sophie clarifies that she means the two in 312. Etta—eyeing Sophie—says they’re two girls who mind their own business and don’t badmouth people.
Mattie, though not usually judgmental, believes that C.C. Baker is a “bad element,” which may be another piece of foreshadowing that C.C. is genuinely dangerous. Meanwhile, Sophie is intensifying her persecution of Theresa and Lorraine for their lesbianism—but Etta, who knows what it is like to be judged for her sexuality, steps up to defend them.
Themes
Sophie says that Lorraine and Theresa are sinning. Mattie points out that the Bible says to mind your own business. When Sophie insists that the two women are sinning, Etta tells Sophie to let God take care of it. When Sophie insinuates that Etta’s opinion derives from her own promiscuity, Etta murmurs to Mattie that Sophie should be glad the two are lesbians—she won’t have to pull her husband Jess out of their beds.
Mattie, who also knows what it’s like to be judged for her sexuality, defends Lorraine and Theresa against Sophie’s religious bigotry—in religious terms. When Sophie uses religion to condemn her lesbian neighbors and Mattie uses it to defend them, the novel seems to suggest that whether religion is bigoted or generous depends more on the individual worshiper than anything else.
Themes
Mattie admits to Etta that lesbianism makes her uncomfortable and asks whether women are lesbians from birth. Etta says she doesn’t know, but she’s met a lot of gay people and “they just say they love each other.” When Mattie points out that she’s loved Eva, Ciel, and Etta herself, Etta says it’s different: lesbians love each other like Mattie would love a man. Yet Mattie says she’s loved other women more than men—and other women have treated her better than men have. She wonders whether women get uncomfortable about lesbianism because they realize their own love for women isn’t that different. Etta, uncomfortable, can’t look Mattie in the eye.
When Mattie muses that she has loved and been loved more truly by other women than by men, it emphasizes how central relationships between women are to the novel as a whole and to its oppressed female characters’ survival. After all, Mattie in a sense “saved” Ciel and Etta from death or despair, while Eva saved Mattie from homelessness. Yet Mattie and Etta’s discomfort with lesbianism—even as Etta weakly explains that gay people “just say they love each other”—shows that having experienced social persecution for their own sexuality doesn’t necessarily make Mattie and Etta perfect allies.
Themes
Lorraine has decided to attend the tenants’ meeting without Theresa. She believes that if you keep to yourself too much, people gossip about you—and she can’t afford gossip. When she met Theresa, she thought she could tell Theresa about losing her job in Detroit and Theresa would understand. Theresa had, but that understanding is gone. People don’t care about Theresa being a lesbian at her office the way they care about Lorraine being a lesbian teacher. It makes Lorraine miserable to know people believe she “threaten[s]” their children. Besides, Lorraine doesn’t like Theresa’s club friends, who are so insistent on being different. Lorraine doesn’t think she’s different: “Black people [are] all in the same boat.”
Lorraine’s thoughts reveal that she cares both about the economic and the interpersonal repercussions of homophobia. She’s scared of losing her job, but she also finds it emotionally and psychologically crushing that people thinks she “threaten[s]” their children. Both the material and the immaterial effects of prejudice harm her. Yet additionally, Lorraine doesn’t strongly identify as a lesbian the way Theresa does: she believes she’s the same as her neighbors because they’re all Black and Black people are “in the same boat,” i.e. all affected by structural racism.
Themes
Lorraine enters Kiswana’s, and Kiswana says they need someone to take the minutes. When Lorraine volunteers, Sophie demands to vote on it. A confused Kiswana asks whether Sophie wants to take the minutes. Etta jokes that Sophie can’t—unless the meeting is “reciting the ABC’s.” Sophie demands to know why the group is siding with “the likes of” Lorraine and Etta. Etta lunges at Sophie, but Mattie holds her back. Sophie yells that everyone knows Lorraine is doing “unnatural things,” and if Etta defends her, she probably is too. Etta doesn’t speak. Women in the room move away from each other.
Etta clearly dislikes Sophie’s prejudiced attitude toward Lorraine—when Sophie contests Lorraine serving as secretary, Etta makes a cruel joke about Sophie’s literacy. Yet Etta is also afraid to be classed with “the likes of” Lorraine: she stops verbally defending Lorraine or attacking Sophie when Sophie claims that Etta too might be doing “unnatural things.” The accusation of homosexuality destroys solidarity among the women—all of them move away from each other—because they fear that their closeness to or defense of one another will be interpreted as homosexual desire and used to attack them. Readers shouldn’t assume that women like Etta fear being mistaken as gay only out of homophobia: Lorraine’s experiences make clear that being a target of homophobia has real, negative material consequences for women.
Themes
Sophie yells that they don’t want Lorraine here. When Lorraine asks what she’s ever done except go to work like everyone else, people shift guiltily. Sophie says that the previous night, Lorraine and Theresa left their shades open—and she saw Lorraine naked in the bathroom door asking Theresa to fetch her a towel. Ben asks whether Sophie wears clothes to bathe and speculates that makes things “easy” on Jess’s eyes. Everyone laughs over Sophie’s yells.
Lorraine tries to shame her neighbors out of their homophobia by pointing out the similarity of her economic life to theirs: she too, her comment implies, is a Black American suffering under structural racism who needs to work hard to keep even a dilapidated apartment with a neglectful landlord. Notably, when Sophie continues to salaciously shame Lorraine for her lesbianism, Ben makes a joke about Sophie’s own sexual unattractiveness—showing both that Ben sympathizes with Lorraine and that even prejudiced women like Sophie are also vulnerable to sexual humiliation.
Themes
Lorraine flees the apartment. Ben follows, asks whether she’s okay, and offers to take her home. She shakes her head, imagining that if Theresa speaks sarcastically to her now she’ll kill Theresa and herself. When she whispers that she can’t go home, Ben leads her to his basement, where he makes her tea. He tells her she reminds him of his daughter, who had a congenital limp: Lorraine seems to “limp[] along inside” in the face of her neighbors’ cruelty.
Given Lorraine’s shy, kind demeanor, her thoughts of murder-suicide are unexpectedly violent—and may foreshadow that she has a heretofore unrevealed capacity for violence. Her refusal to go home underscores that while Theresa may sexually desire Lorraine, she doesn’t offer Lorraine the kind of solidarity and support other female pairs offer one another elsewhere in the novel. Ben’s observation that Lorraine psychologically “limps along inside” in response to homophobic cruelty, meanwhile, shows that he is observant and sensitive.
Themes
Lorraine begins to cry. Staring at her tea, she says her father kicked her out of the house when she was 17 because he found a letter from her girlfriend, and she refused to lie about her sexuality. She moved in with her cousin, put herself through college, and sent her father a birthday card every year—which he returned unopened. Eventually, she stopped writing down her return address so he couldn’t return them. She likes to imagine that one day he’ll open one.
Lorraine’s backstory further emphasizes that homophobia, like racism, can have severe, material negative effects on people’s lives: Lorraine lost her home, her family’s economic support for college, and her relationship with her father due to homophobia.
Themes
Lorraine asks where Ben’s daughter is now. He says she’s “livin’ in a world with no address.” After they finish their tea, Ben invites Lorraine back anytime. She says, “Good night, Mr. Ben” and leaves. Her voice rings in his mind until he imagines she said, “Mornin’ Daddy Ben.” Terrified, he grabs his wine and chugs it as he begins to hallucinate someone whistling “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” He’s desperate to get drunk before the song penetrates his brain.
When Ben says that his daughter is “livin’ in a world with no address,” it implies that he no longer has a relationship with his daughter due to some action he took—just like Lorraine’s father now receives letters from her with no return address due to his homophobic rejection of her. Yet Ben seems to find his lack of a relationship with his daughter traumatic: he associates the lack with the song “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” but he drinks to forget exactly what the association means.
Themes
In a flashback, a truck parks outside of Ben’s house. Ben’s daughter gets out and limps toward the house while the white man driving whistles “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” She says good morning to Ben and her mother Elvira. Elvira smiles at the white man, Mr. Clyde, and asks how her daughter did cleaning his house. They make small talk. Mr. Clyde says he’ll arrive at the regular time next week to pick up Ben’s daughter. After Mr. Clyde drives away, Elvira snaps at her daughter to go inside and eat her breakfast.
Readers know that Ben has a trauma response to the memory of someone whistling “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Here, readers learn that that person is his now-estranged daughter’s employer, Mr. Clyde—hinting that Mr. Clyde has something to do with Ben’s estrangement from his daughter. Meanwhile, Elvira seems actively hostile toward her daughter, which contrasts with previous loving maternal relationships in the book.
Themes
Elvira snaps at Ben, asking why he stood silent while she and Mr. Clyde were talking. Ben says, “It ain’t right.” Elvira argues that it is right for their daughter to work even if she can’t labor on the farm—and what she said about Mr. Clyde was a “bunch of lies” she made up out of laziness. Ben demands to know why Mr. Clyde always makes her stay the night and says, “If I was half a man I woulda—”. Elvira interrupts, saying that if Ben were a man, they wouldn’t be “miserable sharecroppers.” She refuses to let their income diminish due to their daughter’s “lies” and she demands that Ben be polite to Mr. Clyde.
Readers may not initially understand what Ben is referring to when he says, “It ain’t right.” Yet when he asks why Mr. Clyde makes their daughter stay the night, he strongly implies that Mr. Clyde is sexually abusing their daughter under the guise of employing her, taking advantage of her poverty and his gender and racial privilege to prey on her. Because Elvira resents Ben for not making more money and wants the money Mr. Clyde pays her daughter, she refuses to see the misogyny and structural racism that keeps her family poor and vulnerable, preferring to interpret her daughter’s accusations of Mr. Clyde as “a bunch of lies.”
Themes
Ben fantasizes about murdering Elvira, but his sense that she’s a little bit right about him prevents him from acting. He starts drinking to dull the pain. One day, his daughter runs away, saying that she loves them but that if she has to work “that way,” she’ll do it in Memphis where they pay more. While Elvira boasts to their neighbors that their daughter works for a rich family in Memphis, Ben contemplates the money-filled envelopes she sends home without a return address and drinks more.
Ben believes Elvira is partially right to think he’s less than a man because he can’t make more money or protect his daughter from Mr. Clyde’s racist and misogynistic sexual predation. In other words, Ben blames himself for the structural racism that keeps him poor and dependent on a white landowners and employers. When Ben’s daughter says that she’d rather work “that way” in Memphis where they pay more, it suggests that she sees her employment by sexually abusive Mr. Clyde as tantamount to sex work and that she is running away to be a sex worker elsewhere. Again contrasting with more devoted mothers elsewhere in the novel, Elvira celebrates the money her daughter sends while ignoring her daughter’s obvious pain and trauma.
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Elvira leaves Ben for another man. Ben moves north and gets a janitorial job in Brewster Place, but he continues to drink, especially when he sees the mailman. After tea with Lorraine, he gets drunk and sings “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Yet Lorraine walks home with her chin high and doesn’t greet any of her neighbors.
While Ben drinks to forget the racist and misogynistic sexual abuse from which he didn’t protect his daughter, his acceptance of Lorraine and her sexuality bolsters Lorraine’s confidence, allowing her to walk with pride and ignore her less accepting neighbors.
Themes
One Friday, Theresa comes home uneasily aware that Lorraine has become more outspoken. Theresa thought she wanted Lorraine to stand up for herself, and it troubles her that she finds herself wanting to provoke a fight. Theresa tells herself that it’s Lorraine’s friendship with drunken Ben that bothers her. How has Ben strengthened Lorraine when Theresa hasn’t in a five-year relationship with her?
Theresa’s discomfort with Lorraine’s new confidence underscores that while Theresa and Lorraine have a long-term relationship and may love each other, Theresa doesn’t offer Lorraine support or solidarity the way other pairs of women in the novel do.
Themes
As Theresa walks toward Brewster Place, a young girl skates past her and falls. When the girl announces that she hurt herself, Theresa pulls a tissue from her purse and cleans the girl’s grazed knee. Suddenly, a woman rushes between Theresa and the girl and demands to know what’s going on. Theresa says the girl scraped her knee—and asks what the woman thought was going on. The woman, embarrassed, thanks Theresa and rushes the girl away. Back in her apartment, Theresa washes her hands but doesn’t feel clean. Then she frantically preps meatloaf ingredients.
Previously, Lorraine has contemplated how shameful and traumatic she finds it that she lost a teaching job for being a lesbian because people assumed she was somehow dangerous to children. While Theresa has scorned and minimized Lorraine’s fears over losing another job, she experiences in this scene what Lorraine has experienced previously: feelings of shame and dirtiness in response to others’ prejudice and fear about gay people interacting with their children.
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Theresa spots Sophie spying on her through a crack in the shades in the window across the airshaft. Furious, Theresa says that she was just making meatloaf—and proves it by throwing ingredients at Sophie’s window. Lorraine walks out of the bathroom. Theresa is about to throw the meat at Sophie’s window, yelling that she wouldn’t want Sophie to think she’s someone who makes meatloaf without meat—“someone you can’t trust your damn children around”—when Lorraine grabs the meat and reminds her it’s expensive. Theresa and Lorraine dissolve into laughter. Then Theresa starts sobbing. As Lorraine comforts her, Sophie spies on them and makes disapproving noises.
When Theresa yells that she wouldn’t want Sophie to infer from her meatloaf recipe that she’s “someone you can’t trust your damn children around,” she is clearly having a traumatized emotional response to her earlier interaction with a mother who didn’t want Theresa, a lesbian, interacting with her daughter. Notably, though Theresa has minimized Lorraine’s pain as a mere craving for approval when Lorraine suffers from their neighbors’ bigotry, Lorraine offers Theresa unconditional support despite not knowing the full context for her outburst.
Themes
The following day, Lorraine runs into Kiswana. Kiswana invites her to the next tenants’ association meeting. Lorraine asks whether Kiswana thinks she’d return after last time. Kiswana blushes, apologizes, and says that Lorraine’s life is her business—and suggests that Theresa could be Lorraine’s “cousin or sister.” Lorraine says that she and Theresa aren’t relatives. When Kiswana apologizes again, Lorraine changes the subject to the books Kiswana is carrying. Kiswana explains that she’s enrolled in community college because her mother (Mrs. Browne) is badgering her about getting a degree—though Kiswana insists on “studying black history.” Lorraine says she’s taken Black history courses.
When Lorraine asks Kiswana point-blank why she would come to another tenants’ association meeting and makes clear that she and Theresa aren’t relatives, it shows how her friendship with Ben, who accepts her sexuality, has made her more assertive and confident. Meanwhile, when Kiswana mentions that her mother has convinced her to go back to college, it shows that Kiswana’s increased empathy for Mrs. Browne after realizing that they’d had similar sexual experiences has led her to compromise with her mother—without compromising her own interest in Black politics and “black history.”
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While Kiswana and Lorraine chat, C.C. Baker and his friends walk up. They recognize Kiswana because her boyfriend Abshu runs the community center and Lorraine because their parents have gossiped about her. Lesbianism threatens C.C., who only knows how to interact with women sexually. He calls Lorraine a slur. Kiswana scolds C.C. He grabs his crotch and suggests he “show her what a real man can do.” Kiswana replies that she doubts she’d “feel it.” C.C.’s friends laugh, showing respect to Kiswana for trouncing him verbally.
Twice already in the novel, Mattie has mentioned calling the police on C.C. Baker, indicating that he is a disruptive and perhaps dangerous presence for many Brewster Place residents. His homophobic verbal abuse of Lorraine and sexual threatening of Kiswana underscore that he sees sex as a way to dominate women and fears any women he can’t dominate—clear signs of his misogyny and fragile masculinity.
Themes
When Lorraine smiles at Kiswana’s victory, C.C. decides to reestablish his dominance by threatening to hit her. Kiswana gets between Lorraine and C.C., whose friends remind him that Abshu is large and willing to fight. C.C. mimes reluctance as his friends pull him away from the confrontation. He threatens Lorraine as he goes.
Though Kiswana is the one who verbally humiliated him, C.C. decides to threaten Lorraine. This decision shows his cowardice—he’s afraid of Kiswana’s boyfriend Abshu—as well as his homophobia. His parting threat to Lorraine may foreshadow further conflict between them.
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Theresa has watched the confrontation from the window in case Kiswana needed help with C.C. She scorns Lorraine for letting Kiswana protect her, but she hopes C.C. has taught Lorraine that she’ll never win the approval of “ignorant nothings” in Brewster Place. When Lorraine enters the apartment, Theresa asks why Lorraine is pale. Lorraine blames the heat. Theresa mentions that they’ve been invited to the club, and Lorraine says she won’t go—she hates the club. When Theresa asks when that started, Lorraine says that she’s always hated the club and that the men who run it are “fags.” Theresa retorts that she and Lorraine are “dykes.” Lorraine yells that Theresa can identify with a filthy slur, but Lorraine doesn’t.
While Kiswana immediately offered Lorraine solidarity, support, and protection in the face of C.C.’s homophobic and misogynistic verbal abuse, Theresa holds Lorraine in contempt for accepting solidarity and support. This contemptuous reaction suggests that she fails to offer Lorraine appropriate support because she thinks that Lorraine shouldn’t need it—ignoring that Lorraine, just like Theresa herself, is facing down serious structural oppression from homophobia and misogyny. Meanwhile, when Lorraine refers to Theresa’s gay male friends as “fags,” it shows her own internalized homophobia—which Theresa implicitly points out when she defines herself and Lorraine as “dykes” by the same token.
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Theresa says that she supposes Lorraine will spend the evening with Ben and asks what they even do together. Lorraine snaps that they “really talk.” Hurt, Theresa asks whether Lorraine thinks they can’t talk better than that after five years. Lorraine replies that she and Theresa don’t talk: Theresa lectures. Sometimes, Theresa yells, and Lorraine cries.
Here Lorraine makes explicit that, in her opinion, Theresa offers her neither solidarity, support, nor friendship. Instead, Theresa merely bullies her. By contrast, Ben offers Lorraine support and acceptance—an unusual male-female friendship in a book where women mostly receive social support from one another, not men.
Themes
Theresa argues that Lorraine is being unfair: Theresa has always wanted Lorraine to be more independent. Lorraine retorts that Theresa wants Lorraine to be independent of other people but dependent on her, accepting her “crazy idea about being different.” Theresa snaps that Lorraine is different and needs to learn it. Lorraine points out that Theresa is lecturing and yells that she accepts her lesbianism—but that doesn’t make her different from the rest of humanity.
Here Lorraine and Theresa identify the source of their disagreement: while they both identify as lesbians, Lorraine thinks it’s “crazy” to assume that lesbianism makes her fundamentally “different” from her neighbors or other people in general. By contrast, Theresa does think lesbianism makes her and Lorraine fundamentally different.
Themes
When Theresa insists that lesbianism does make Lorraine different, Lorraine tells her that the day before she first fell in love with a woman, she put on a beige bra and ate oatmeal for breakfast—and the day after, she did the same. Theresa demands to know whether she told any of her friends about falling in love. Lorraine admits she didn’t: “they wouldn’t have understood.” Theresa insists that makes Lorraine different, especially since “they” have all the power.
Lorraine argues that being a lesbian doesn’t make her fundamentally different from straight people because her habits, likes, and dislikes are fundamentally ordinary, even if her friends “wouldn’t have understood” her falling in love with a woman. When Theresa retorts that other people’s lack of understanding makes lesbians different, she is arguing that difference comes from how society treats lesbians. That is, even if Lorraine is totally ordinary, people treat her as abnormal.
Themes
Lorraine cries. Theresa wants to comfort her but forces herself not to. Later, Lorraine changes into a green-and-black dress and says she’s ready to go to the club. Guiltily, Theresa says she doesn’t feel like it. Lorraine says she’ll go alone. Theresa tells her not to, but Lorraine says she has to go without Theresa or “there’ll be nothing left in me to love you.” Later, Theresa will desperately wish she’d persuaded Lorraine to stay. Now, she just turns to the window.
Lorraine agrees to go to the gay club run by Theresa’s friends, an agreement that implicitly concedes Theresa’s point that she has more in common with Theresa’s gay male friends than with Ben. Theresa’s guilt and refusal to go suggest that she somewhat regrets browbeating Lorraine into agreement. When Lorraine says that “there’ll be nothing left in [her] to love” Theresa unless she can socialize without Theresa, meanwhile, it indicates that Theresa’s lack of support for—and bullying of—Lorraine have diminished Lorraine’s sense of self and her ability to care for Theresa to the point that their relationship is in serious jeopardy.
Themes
Lorraine stays at the club for an hour but can’t bear it longer. She doesn’t want to go home early, so she decides to cut through the alley behind Brewster Place—invisible from her apartment—and visit Ben. In the dark alley, Lorraine hears thumps behind her. Then C.C. grabs her, calling her a homophobic slur. She realizes that the thumps were C.C. and his friends, who had been watching her from the wall, jumping into the alley. Cut off from other high-status masculine activities, C.C. and his friends rule this alley. They gang-rape Lorraine as she says “please.”
Lorraine decides to use the alley because it’s invisible from her apartment: she doesn’t want Theresa to see her visiting Ben, a choice that shows how Theresa’s lack of support for or solidarity with Lorraine has cut Lorraine off from the protection that female relationships offers oppressed women in the novel. C.C. Baker and his friends attack Lorraine from the wall; as the wall has previously symbolized the dangers that poverty caused by structural racism pose to Black Americans, the wall’s presence in this scene suggests that C.C. and his friends’ brutal assault on Lorraine derives in part from her inability to live in a safer apartment complex and in part from poverty’s tendency to breed extreme discontent and violence. In addition, the gang-rape has an obvious homophobic motivation: C.C. and his friends are sexually punishing Lorraine for being uninterested in them as men.
Themes
After the rapes, C.C. and his friends laugh and flee. Lorraine, bloody, lies in the alley until the sun rises and Ben emerges from his basement, singing and drinking. Lorraine sees him moving “side to side” in rhythmic unity with the pain inside her. She crawls toward him, grabbing a brick. Mattie spies her from her window and runs outside. When Lorraine reaches Ben, he is asking her what happened when she repeatedly smashes his head with the brick. Mattie screams, reaches Lorraine, and tugs her from Ben as Lorraine yells “Please, please.”
Ben’s drunken swaying “side to side” syncs with the pain Lorraine feels in the aftermath of her gang-rape, which subtly implies a link between Ben’s drunkenness—caused by his own daughter’s sexual abuse, which he failed to stop—and the sexual violence that Lorraine has just suffered. On a deep level, the scene mysteriously suggests that Lorraine is taking revenge on Ben for failing to protect his daughter, another victim of sexual violence, even as—on a more literal level—Lorraine is simply lashing out due to her confusion, disorientation, and extreme trauma.
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