The Wall Symbol Analysis

In The Women of Brewster Place, the wall represents how racism cuts Black Americans off from physical and economic security. The unnamed northern city where the Brewster Place apartment complex is located builds the wall (which separates Brewster Place from a flourishing commercial district to its north) in order to control traffic—even though city politicians know the wall will cut Brewster Place residents off from the economic opportunities that the commercial district offers. At this time (roughly the mid-20th century), Brewster Place’s residents are Italian immigrants who lack representation in city politics. As such, the wall initially represents how politicians and other socially powerful people will unremorsefully put social groups lacking power at a further disadvantage if it suits them. Yet once the children of Brewster Place’s Italian immigrants assimilate into the U.S.’s majority white culture, they move out of Brewster Place, escaping the boundary represented by the wall, while Black Americans fleeing the South move in. Through this change, the wall comes to represent how white immigrants are allowed to assimilate and succeed economically in the U.S. in a way that Black Americans are not.

Later in the novel, the wall becomes even more sinister. One night, a young Brewster Place resident named C.C. Baker and his friends, who justifiably feel cut off from status and opportunity due to American racism, take out their rage and resentment on their neighbor Lorraine, a shy lesbian schoolteacher, as she is walking down the dark alley created by the wall’s shadow. The young men brutally rape Lorraine to assert their masculinity and then leave her for dead. When Brewster Place’s alcoholic janitor Ben finds Lorraine the next morning, she is so disoriented and traumatized that she grabs a brick and bashes his head in, killing him. The fact that both a rape and a murder occur in the shadow of the wall emphasizes the wall’s symbolic meaning: it comes to represent how the structural racism that forces many Black Americans into poverty also foments violence. At a block party two weeks later, the women of Brewster Place may hallucinate that the wall is splattered with blood, and they tear it down—or the tearing-down of the wall may simply be a dream of one Brewster Place resident, Mattie Michael. By leaving ambiguous whether the wall is ever destroyed, the novel also leaves ambiguous whether it’s realistic to hope that the long-lasting effects of structural racism and violence will ever completely come to an end.