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Ben is Brewster Place’s alcoholic janitor. As a younger man, he works as a poor sharecropper on a small farm with his wife Elvira. His and Elvira’s one child, a daughter, has a lifelong limp because her foot was broken by the midwife attending Elvira’s labor. Elvira insists that since their daughter can’t work on the farm due to her limp, she must clean the house of a neighboring white man—even after their daughter tells Elvira and Ben that the white man is sexually abusing her. Eventually their daughter runs away to become a sex worker in Memphis, from which she sends home envelopes of money with no return address. Ben drinks heavily to deal with his estrangement from his daughter. After Elvira leaves him, he moves north and becomes Brewster Place’s janitor and is the development’s first Black resident while it is still an Italian immigrant enclave. Ben befriends Lorraine, a shy lesbian schoolteacher who moves into Brewster Place, but Lorraine murders Ben in a moment of confusion and trauma when he discovers her in an alley after she has been brutally raped by C.C. Baker and his friends.
Ben Quotes in The Women of Brewster Place
The The Women of Brewster Place quotes below are all either spoken by Ben or refer to Ben. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
5. Lucielia Louise Turner
Quotes
“It was my kid, too, ya know. But Mattie, that fat, black bitch, just standin’ in the hospital hall sayin’ to me—to me, now, ‘Whatcha what?’ Like I was a fuckin’ germ or something. Man, I just turned and left. You gotta be treated with respect, ya know?”
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7. The Two
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So Lorraine found herself, on her knees, surrounded by the most dangerous species in existence—human males with an erection to validate in a world that was only six feet wide.
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8. The Block Party
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“Oh, I don’t know, one of those crazy things that get all mixed up in your head. Something about that wall and Ben. And there was a woman who was supposed to be me, I guess. She didn’t look exactly like me, but inside I felt it was me. You know how silly dreams are.”
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“Woman, you still in bed? Don’t you know what day it is? We’re gonna have a party.”
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Get the entire The Women of Brewster Place LitChart as a printable PDF.
Ben Quotes in The Women of Brewster Place
The The Women of Brewster Place quotes below are all either spoken by Ben or refer to Ben. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
5. Lucielia Louise Turner
Quotes
“It was my kid, too, ya know. But Mattie, that fat, black bitch, just standin’ in the hospital hall sayin’ to me—to me, now, ‘Whatcha what?’ Like I was a fuckin’ germ or something. Man, I just turned and left. You gotta be treated with respect, ya know?”
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7. The Two
Quotes
So Lorraine found herself, on her knees, surrounded by the most dangerous species in existence—human males with an erection to validate in a world that was only six feet wide.
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8. The Block Party
Quotes
“Oh, I don’t know, one of those crazy things that get all mixed up in your head. Something about that wall and Ben. And there was a woman who was supposed to be me, I guess. She didn’t look exactly like me, but inside I felt it was me. You know how silly dreams are.”
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“Woman, you still in bed? Don’t you know what day it is? We’re gonna have a party.”
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