Vermin Symbol Analysis

In The Women of Brewster Place, vermin symbolize the danger that poverty caused by structural racism poses to Black children. Vermin first appear in the novel when a rat crawls into Mattie Michael’s apartment through a hole in the wall and viciously bites her son Basil in the face. Much of the money Mattie makes at her assembly-line job goes to rent, but she still cannot afford a good apartment with a landlord who makes appropriate repairs. When she leaves her vermin-infested apartment with Basil, she can’t find a place to live: white neighborhoods won’t take a Black tenant, and richer Black neighborhoods won’t take an unmarried mother like Mattie. It is only thanks to the generosity of a homeowner named Eva Turner, who meets Mattie and Basil on the street and takes them in, that they find a safe place to live. The incident with the rat emphasizes both that a working-class Black woman like Mattie has extremely limited options when it comes to housing and that poverty poses a particular danger to children.

The next major appearance of vermin in the novel emphasizes this point: when young mother Ciel and her difficult boyfriend Eugene go into their bedroom to argue, leaving their toddler daughter Serena unattended in the living room for just a moment, she sees a cockroach, which she chases to an electrical wall socket. Trying to reach the cockroach and play with it, Serena sticks a dropped fork into the wall socket and is killed. Thus, in both instances, the vermin represent not only the unsafe conditions in which poor Black Americans are often forced to live but also the particular danger these unsafe conditions pose to children.