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Intro
Brewster Place is an apartment complex in a northern U.S. city. Though a commercial district goes up along a boulevard directly north of Brewster Place, the city builds a wall between Brewster Place and the boulevard to control traffic, cutting Brewster Place off from economic opportunity. Over the decades, the population of Brewster Place changes from predominantly Italian American to predominantly African American.
Mattie Michael grows up in Tennessee, but she leaves at age 20 after a sexual encounter with the charming Butch Fuller leaves her pregnant and her strict, religious father beats her for refusing to name the man who impregnated her. After moving north, Mattie gives birth to Basil. All the money Mattie earns goes to rent and other necessities, but her apartment still has vermin. One night, a rat bites Basil’s face. While Mattie searches for safer housing, she meets an elderly, light-skinned Black woman named Eva Turner who invites Mattie to take the spare room in her house, saying that Basil can befriend Eva’s granddaughter Lucielia. Though Mattie wants to pay rent, Eva always demurs. Mattie lives in Eva’s house for years; when Eva dies, Mattie buys the house from Eva’s children. Unfortunately, Basil grows up spoiled and sullen, and as young man, he accidentally kills another man in a bar fight. To free Basil from the rat-infested jail, Mattie puts her house up as bail. Basil becomes afraid that he’ll lose his trial, though witnesses have agreed to testify that the other man started the fight and that the death was accidental. Basil skips town while on bail, and Mattie loses the house she’s lived in for 30 years. Afterward, she moves into Brewster Place.
Etta Mae Johnson, an old friend of Mattie’s, flees Tennessee as a teenager in the 1930s after the relatives of a white man whose sexual advances she rejected threaten to lynch her. She lives off boyfriends in various northern cities. In late middle age, she moves to Brewster Place after leaving her latest boyfriend and stealing his car. Mattie suggests Etta get a job, but Etta decides to marry a respectable man who will support her. Attending church with Mattie, Etta notices Rev. Moreland T. Woods, a charismatic and wealthy preacher. After the service, Etta and Rev. Woods meet, flirt, and agree to go out for coffee to discuss Eva’s soul. Etta is hoping Rev. Woods sees her as marriage material, but after a dispiriting sexual encounter, she realizes he only wanted sex like all her other boyfriends. She returns to Brewster Place feeling defeated—but she revives when she realizes her loving friend Mattie has waited up for her while playing records.
Kiswana Browne drops out of college after deciding that higher education is anti-revolutionary. She moves into Brewster Place hoping to get closer to the problems of other Black Americans. When her rich, more conservative mother Mrs. Browne visits Kiswana’s apartment, Kiswana folds up her sofa bed to hide evidence that her boyfriend Abshu, a foot fetishist, spent the night. Kiswana and Mrs. Browne end up fighting about revolutionary versus incremental political progress. Afterward, Mrs. Browne takes off her shoe to massage her foot, revealing red toenail polish. When Kiswana asks about the polish, Mrs. Browne admits that Kiswana’s father asked her to wear it. Kiswana realizes her father is a foot fetishist like her Abshu and feels suddenly closer to her mother.
Eva’s granddaughter Lucielia—called Ciel—is living in Brewster Place when she has a daughter named Serena with her boyfriend Eugene. Though Eugene abandons Ciel for almost a year, she takes him back when he returns. Yet after he impregnates her again and loses his job, he accuses her of burdening him with babies. Ciel has an abortion against her own preferences. Yet a few months later, Eugene demands that Ciel help him pack: he claims to have a job in Maine—or Newport—from which he’ll visit once he’s established. When Ciel begs to come with him, he refuses. Ciel realizes she’ll hate him soon and wishes she’d hated him earlier so that she wouldn’t have had an abortion for him. While they pack, Serena—playing with blocks in the kitchen—sees a cockroach, chases it to an electrical socket, and sticks a dropped fork in the socket. The electrical charge kills her. After the funeral, an emotionally numb Ciel plans to die by starvation, but Mattie, realizing her plan, visits her, grabs her, and rocks her until she begins to cry, kickstarting her grieving and healing process.
From a young age, Cora Lee is obsessed with new baby dolls, whose smell and feel she loves. She is awestruck when her mother explains that sex could make her pregnant with a real baby. She gets pregnant in high school and drops out. Years later, Cora Lee is living in Brewster Place with seven children. Each time she has a child, she adores the new baby but neglects her older children. One day, Kiswana—trying to start a tenants’ association to pressure Brewster Place’s landlord to make repairs—knocks on Cora Lee’s door. Seeing Cora Lee’s cooped-up, truant children, Kiswana invites the whole family to an all-Black production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream produced by Abshu. Ashamed by Kiswana’s judgment, Cora Lee takes her children to the play. She finds the play unexpectedly moving and resolves to put more energy into her children’s education. Yet after she tucks her children in that night, she has another one-night stand, suggesting that she may try to have another baby rather than spending more time with her older children.
Teacher Lorraine and office-worker Theresa, a lesbian couple, move into Brewster Place together. After a homophobic woman named Sophie verbally attacks Lorraine at a tenants’ association meeting, Brewster Place’s alcoholic janitor Ben stands up for her and comforts her. Shy, kind Lorraine reminds Ben of his crippled daughter, who ran away from home because her mother insisted she keep working for a white man who was sexually abusing her. One day, Lorraine is talking to Kiswana outside when a young man named C.C. Baker yells homophobic things at Lorraine. When Kiswana confronts and humiliates C.C. in front of his friends, C.C. vows revenge on Lorraine. One night when Lorraine is walking down the alley created by the wall north of Brewster Place, C.C. and his friends ambush and rape her. When a drunk Ben finds her the next morning, her confusion and extreme trauma lead her to bash his head in with a brick.
A week after Ben’s death, the tenants’ association throws a block party to raise money for a lawyer to sue their landlord. During the party, it begins to rain. When Cora Lee mistakes a raindrop on the wall for blood, she raises a cry. The women of Brewster Place begin frantically tearing down the wall with their bare hands. Then Mattie wakes up the morning of the block party—rendering it ambiguous whether the story has flashed back in time or whether Mattie only dreamed that the women of Brewster Place tore the wall down. Brewster Place is eventually condemned, but it lives on in the memories and dreams of the women who lived there.
