Los Angeles Celebration Theater, “Women of Brewster Place”
Friday
The largest city in my state just got a harsh but well deserved reprimand from the Justice Department. As an article in Vox sums up their report, “The Baltimore Police Department is a complete and utter disaster.” In today’s post I look at a work, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (1982), that touches on the problem and then offers up, through a character’s dream, a vision that we can aspire to.
Let’s look first at the situation in Baltimore. It appears that Freddy Gray, who was picked up for no reason and who then died as the result of a “rough ride” in a police van, is only the tip of the iceberg. Here’s a summation of the Justice Department’s report:
Baltimore police stop people for essentially no reason, particularly black residents. They are far too quick to use force. Charges are often dropped due to a lack of merit for any prosecution. Cops regularly violate people’s rights, including those protected by the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment. And virtually everyone is aware of these types of problems — officials within and outside the police department, members of the community, and even police union representatives acknowledge the desperate need for reform.
The Justice Department is also clear in where the blame lies: This is not the story of a few bad apples in the police department; these are systemic issues propagated by leadership, poor guidance, shoddy training, and essentially no accountability to speak of — and these issues go back to at least the 1990s, when city leaders in Baltimore stated “zero tolerance” anti-crime policies.
The article adds that the Justice Department is also investigating more than two dozen other police departments. This in addition to the scathing reports it has already issued regarding Cleveland and Ferguson, Missouri.
My personal acquaintance with Baltimore brings the situation home to me. The tension between the police and Baltimore’s black inhabitants goes back to the days of segregation and segregated neighborhoods. Today you can still see the divides. Rev. William Boyd, a former St. Mary’s student who lived with us and helped us raise our children, is now a pastor at the New Elizabeth Baptist Church in an African American neighborhood near the Pimlico Race Track. To visit him, we travel through an upscale Jewish neighborhood with neatly manicured loans and beautiful synagogues. Then, after crossing a single street, it’s as though we have left Technicolor Oz and entered black and white Kansas. There are old row houses, bars on the windows of the businesses, and trash on the sidewalks.
Looking at these racially separated neighborhoods, I’ve wanted to say, as Ronald Reagan did in another context, “tear down this wall.” Naylor’s novel is about an actual wall.
The Women of Brewster Place takes place in an urban neighborhood fronting a street that, years before, has been closed off from the main thoroughfare years thanks to some shady deals. It is occupied first by Italian immigrants and then by African Americans.
While Brewster Place has its own vibrant culture and features several strong African American women, it is also beset by black-on-black crime. The wall seems to trap both criminals and victims. In a horrific finale, a gentle lesbian is gang raped by boys raised in the neighborhood. Her blood splatters on the wall.
The novel manages to end on a hopeful note, however. Mattie, who is essentially the matriarch of Brewster Place, has a dream of a block party erupting into an attack on the wall.
I’ll quote from that powerful passage in a moment, but first, to help explain Baltimore’s continuing problems, it’s worth quoting from a Vox article that appeared a year ago about the findings of Johns Hopkins sociologist Karl Alexander:
Alexander and his colleagues found a terrible trap that affected the lives of Baltimore’s poor black people, but not its poor white people. According to their study, poor black kids and poor white kids used drugs and committed crimes at roughly similar rates — if anything, there was a bit more drug use among the white children in the sample. But poor black kids were much more likely than poor white kids to be arrested. And once they were arrested, a criminal record was a much bigger hindrance to a poor black man getting a job than it was for a poor white man.
At the same time, due to their income composition, demographics, location, and so on, black neighborhoods had a lot more crime than white neighborhoods. And so, even putting aside any issues of racially biased policing, they were policed more intensely.
This created, in essence, a trap that closed in on poor black kids. Their neighborhoods had more crime, and so they were policed more heavily. That meant that even though they didn’t commit any more crime than poor white kids, they were arrested more often. And when they got arrested, it was harder for them to get a job after prison than it was for a white kid who got arrested, so it became that much more likely they would turn to illegal ways of making money, which meant more crime in the neighborhoods, which meant more aggressive policing, which meant more black kids getting arrested, which meant more young black men held back by criminal records, and so on.
Now for Mattie’s dream, which occurs the night before a block party designed to raise funds to pay for lawyers that will pressure the landlords to undertake basic improvements. When the residents see the blood on the wall, they attack it with everything they have:
Women flung themselves against the wall, chipping away at it with knives, plastic forks, spiked shoe heels, and even bare hands, the water pouring under their chins, plastering their blouses and dresses against their breasts and into the cracks of their hips. The bricks piled up behind them and were matched and relayed out of Brewster Place past overturned tables, scattered coins, and crushed wads of dollar bills. They came back with chairs and barbecue grills and smashed them into the wall. The “Today Brewster—Tomorrow America” banner had been beaten into long strands of red and gold that clung to the wet arms and faces of the women.
And further on:
The blunt-edged whoop of the police sirens could be heard ramming through the traffic on its way to Brewster Place. Theresa flung her umbrella away so she could have both hands free to help the other women who were now bringing her bricks. Suddenly, the rain exploded around their feet in a fresh downpour, and the cold waters beat on the top of their heads—almost in perfect unison with the beating of their hearts.
The chapter doesn’t end with the dreamed attack, however, but with a party, indicating that it’s better to be positive than negative. Mattie wakes up and, although the wall is still there, she is greeted by the first sunshine in a week. Although Naylor’s book appeared two years before Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” campaign, Naylor’s vision is very much in that spirit:
“It’s just like a miracle,” Mattie opened her window, “to think it stopped raining today of all days.”
The sun was shining on everything. Kiswana’s gold earrings, the broken glass out on the avenue, the municipal buildings downtown—even on the stormy clouds that had formed on the horizon and were silently moving toward Brewster Place.
Etta came out on the stop and looked up at Mattie in the window.
“Woman, you still in bed? Don’t you know what day it is? We’re gonna have a party.”
With the Justice Department’s reports, is there a chance that some day we’ll be partying? As the Vox article reports, “To remedy these issues, federal officials plan to set up a ‘consent decree’ in which they would oversee reforms at the Baltimore Police Department with the cooperation of local officials.”
Pray that it stops raining.