Racism and Poverty  Theme Analysis

The neighborhood was now filled with people who had no political influence; people who were dark haired and mellow-skinned—Mediterraneans—who spoke to each other in rounded guttural sounds and who bought strange foods to the neighborhood stores [. . .] So the wall came up and Brewster Place became a dead-end street.

Mattie saw that the wall reached just above the second-floor apartments, which meant the northern light would be blocked from her plants. All the beautiful plants that once had an entire sun porch for themselves in the home she had exchanged thirty years of her life to pay for would now have to fight for light on a crowded windowsill. The sigh turned into a knot of pity for the ones she knew would die. She pitied them because she refused to pity herself and to think that she, too, would have to die here on this crowded street because there just wasn’t enough life left for her to do it all again.

It licked around the baby’s chin and lips, and when there was nothing left, it sought more and sank its fangs into the soft flesh.

“Ya know, ya can’t keep him runnin’ away from things that hurt him. Sometimes, you just gotta stay there and teach him how to go through the bad and good of whatever comes.”

Canaan’s congregation, the poor who lived in a thirty-block area around Brewster Place, still worshiped God loudly. They could not afford the refined, muted benediction of the more prosperous blacks who went to Sinai Baptist on the northern end of the city, and because each of their requests for comfort was so pressing, they took no chances that He did not hear them.

Now it crouched there in the thin predawn light, like a pulsating mouth awaiting her arrival. She shook her head sharply to rid herself of the illusion, but an uncanny fear gripped her, and her legs felt like lead. If I walk into this street, she thought, I’ll never come back. I’ll never get out.

When Etta got to the stoop, she noticed there was a light under the shade at Mattie’s window […] Etta laughed softly to herself as she climbed the steps toward the light and the love and the comfort that awaited her.

“At least I’m here in day-to-day contact with the problems of my people. What good would I be after four or five years of a lot of white brainwashing in some phony, prestige institution, huh? I’d be like you and Daddy and those other educated blacks sitting over there in Linden Hills with a terminal case of middle-class amnesia.”

I’ll be damned, the young woman thought, feeling her whole face tingle. Daddy’s into feet! And she looked at the blushing woman on her couch and suddenly realized that her mother had trod through the same universe that she herself was now traveling.

“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?”

Serena gave a cry of delight and attempted to catch her lost playmate, but it was too quick and darted back into the wall. She tried once again to poke her finger into the slit. Then a bright slender object, lying dropped and forgotten, came into her view. Picking up the fork, Serena finally managed to fit the thin flattened prongs into the electric socket.

She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children’s entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on.

“Mama,” Sammy pulled on her arm, “Shakespeare’s black?”

“Not yet,” she said softly, remembering she had beaten him for writing the rhymes on her bathroom walls.

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.

“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.”

“Woman, you still in bed? Don’t you know what day it is? We’re gonna have a party.”