The Women of Brewster Place

by Gloria Naylor

  “I don’t have to take this,” Mattie stammered defensively. “Just because we stay in your house don’t give you a right to tell me how to raise my child. I’m a boarder here, or at least I would be if you’d let me pay you. Just tell me how much I owe you, and I’ll pay up and be out before the week’s over.”

  “I ain’t decided yet.”

  “You been saying that for five years!” Mattie was frustrated.

  “And you been movin’ every time I mention anything about that little spoiled nigger of yours. You still saving my rent money in the bank, ain’t you?”

  “Of course.” Mattie had religiously put aside money every month, and her account had grown quite large.

  “Good, you’ll be using it soon enough for new clothes for my funeral. That is, if you plan on coming?”

  Mattie looked at Miss Eva’s stooped back and the wrinkled yellow neck with grizzled wisps of hair lying on it, and small needles of repentance began to stab at her heart. She would be gone soon, and Mattie didn’t want to imagine facing the loss of another mother.

  “You’re a crafty old woman. You always try to win an argument by talkin’ about some funeral. You’re too ornery to die, and you know it.”

  Miss Eva chuckled. “Some folks do say that. To tell you the truth, I had planned on stayin’ till I’m a hundred.”

  Please do, Mattie thought sadly, and then said aloud, “No, I couldn’t bear you that long—maybe till ninety-nine and a half.”

  They smiled at each other and silently agreed to put the argument to rest.

  The children came running into the kitchen, scrubbed and penitent. “Let me check those ears,” Mattie said to Ciel and Basil.

  She was about to send him back upstairs to wash his when he put his arms around her neck and said, “Mama, I forgot to kiss you hello this morning.” Basil knew he would win his reprieve this way. Miss Eva knew it, too, but she said nothing as she slung the oatmeal into their bowls and slowly shook her head.

  Mattie was aware of only the joy that these unsolicited acts of tenderness gave her. She watched him eating his oatmeal, intent on each mouthful that he swallowed because it was keeping her son alive. It was moving through his blood and creating skin cells and hair cells and new muscles that would eventually uncurl and multiply and stretch the skin on his upper arms and thighs, elongate the plump legs that only reached the top rung of his chair. And when they had reached the second rung, Miss Eva would be dead. Her children would have descended upon the beautiful house and stripped it of all that was valuable and sold the rest to Mattie. Her parents would have carried away a screaming Ciel, and as Mattie would look around the gutted house, she’d know why the old yellow woman had made her save her money. She had wanted her spirit to remain in this house through the memory of someone who was capable of loving it as she had. While Basil’s legs pushed down toward the third rung, Mattie would be working two jobs to carry the mortgage on the house. Her son must have room to grow in, a yard to run in, a decent place to bring his friends. Her own spirit must one day have a place to rest because the body could not, as it pushed and struggled to make all around them safe and comfortable. It would all be for him and those to come from the long, muscular thighs of him who sat opposite her at the table.

  Mattie looked at the man who was gulping coffee and shoveling oatmeal into his mouth. “Why you eating so fast? You’ll choke.”

  “I got some place to go.”

  “It’s Sunday, Basil. You been runnin’ all weekend. I thought you were gonna stay home and help me with the yard.”

  “Look, I’m only going out for a few minutes. I told you I’ll cut the grass, and I will, so stop hassling me.”

  Mattie remained silent because she didn’t want to argue with him while he ate. He’d had a nervous stomach all his life, and she didn’t want him to get cramps or run out of the house, refusing to eat at all. She doubted that she would see him anymore that day, and she wanted to be certain he got at least one decent meal.

  “All right, you want more toast or coffee?” she offered, as way of apology.

  He really didn’t, but he let her fix him another cup to show that he was no longer annoyed. He thanked her by remaining to finish his breakfast.

  “Okay, I’ll see you in a while,” he said, and pushed his chair back. “Hey, could you lend me a coupla dollars to get some gas for the car?” He saw that she had opened her mouth to refuse and went on, “I don’t want it for today but tomorrow, I gotta go looking for another job. I don’t pick up my check from the last place until Thursday, and I don’t wanna waste four days sitting around here doing nothing.” He bent down and whispered in her ear, “You know I’m not the kind of guy to hang around and let a woman support him.” Seeing her smile, he straightened up and said, “But I would make a good pimp, wouldn’t I, Mama?” And he pantomimed putting on a cocked hat and strutted in the middle of the floor.

  Mattie laughed and openly scorned his foolish antics while inwardly admitting that he had to be considered attractive by many women. Basil looked exactly like his father, but the clean, naturally curved lines of Butch’s mouth seemed transformed into a mild sullenness when placed on Basil’s face. His clear brown eyes were heavily lashed, and many young women had discovered just one heartbeat too late that his slightly drooping eyelids were not mirrors of boyish seductiveness but hardened apathy.

  Mattie had never met any of Basil’s girlfriends, and he rarely mentioned them. She thought about this as she gave him the money and watched him leave the house. She cleared off the breakfast dishes, and it suddenly came to her that she hadn’t met many of his male friends, either. Where was he going? She truly didn’t know, and it had come to be understood that she was not to ask. How long had it been that way? Surely it had happened within moments. It seemed that only hours ago he had been the child who could hug her neck and talk himself out of a spanking, who had brought home crayoned valentines, and had cried when she went to her second job. So then, who was this stranger who had done away with her little boy and left her with no one and so alone?

  Mattie pondered this as her hands plunged into the soapy dishwater, and she mechanically washed bowls and silverware. She tried to recapture the years and hold them up for inspection, so she could pinpoint the transformation, but they slipped through her fingers and slid down the dishes, hidden under the iridescent bubbles that broke with the slightest movement of her hand. She quickly saw that it was an impossible task and abandoned the effort. He had grown up, that was all. She looked up from the sink and gasped as she caught her reflection in the windowpane—but when had she grown old?

  Any possible answer had disappeared down the drain with the used dishwater, and she watched it go without regret and scoured the porcelain until it shone. She changed the freshly starched kitchen curtains and rewaxed the tiles. She went through the house vacuuming clean carpets and dusting spotless tables—these were the testimony to her lost years. There was a need to touch and smell and see that it was all in place. It would always be there to comfort and affirm when she would have nothing else.

  She could not find the little boy whom this had all been for, but she found an old cut-glass bowl that she washed and polished and filled with autumn flowers from her yard. She put the bowl on a windowsill in her sun porch, and, exhausted, sat among the huge vines and plants, watching the fading sun dissolve into the prismed edges of the bowl. She loved this room above all the others—a place to see things grow. And she had watched and coaxed and nurtured the greenery about her. Miss Eva’s presence was there in the few pieces of china bric-a-brac that Mattie had saved over the years. And it was here that she would come and sit when there was a problem or some complex decision to be made. She felt guilty about missing church that day, but if God were everywhere, surely He was here among so much natural beauty and peace. So Mattie sat there and prayed, but sometimes her supplications for comfort were to the wisdom of a yellow, blue-eyed spirit who had foreseen this day and had tried to warn her.

>   Mattie sat there for hours, and still Basil did not come. She looked through the windows at the long grass and decided to cut it the next day after work, if her back didn’t bother her too much. It was becoming more difficult each year to keep up the house alone. She got up from the couch stiffly and climbed the steps toward her bedroom.

  Her house slippers scraped the edges of the steps. Irresponsible, his counselors had said in school. High-natured, she had replied in her heart. Hadn’t he said that they were always picking on him; everyone had been against him, except her. She had been the refuge when he ran from school to school, job to job. They wanted too much. She had been so proud that he always turned to her—fled to her when he accused them of demanding the impossible. “Irresponsible”—the word whispered on the soft carpet as her feet dragged up the dark stairs. She had demanded nothing all these years, never doubting that he would be there when needed. She had carefully pruned his spirit to rest only in the enclaves of her will, and she had willed so little that he had been tempted to return again and again over the last thirty years because his just being had been enough to satisfy her needs. But now her back was tightening in the mornings, and her grass was growing wild and ragged over the walkway while she pulled herself painfully up the stairs, alone.

  V

  Mattie slept lightly that night, and she dreamed that she was running and hiding from something among tall bamboo stalks and monstrously tangled weeds. She was terribly hungry and mysteriously frightened of the invisible thing that was searching for her. She had a piece of sugar cane in her hand, and she wedged it into her mouth and chewed, trying to stop the burning hunger in her stomach. She was desperately trying to chew the cane before this stalking thing found her. She sensed it coming closer through the tall grass, its heavy footsteps pounding in her ears, timed with the beating of her heart. She screamed as it parted the grass that was covering her. It was Butch. He was smiling and glowing, and his eyes were blue and spinning crazily in their sockets. He tried to pry open her mouth and scrape out the mashed wad of sugar cane. He grabbed her by the throat to keep the saliva from being swallowed, and she opened her mouth and screamed and screamed—shrill notes that vibrated in her ears and sent terrible pains shooting into her head.

  Mattie woke up trembling and lay dazed among the tangled bedcovers. She covered her ears to block out the shrill screams that continued to echo through her head. After a moment she realized that the noise was coming from the telephone on her nightstand. Her heart was still pounding as she blindly groped for the phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Mama, it’s me.”

  She held the hard plastic receiver to her ear and tried to make sense out of the electrical impulses that were forming words—strange words that could have no possible association with the voice on the other end.

  A bar. A woman. A fight. A booking.

  “Basil?” Surely this voice was Basil’s.

  Fingerprints. Manslaughter. Lawyer.

  Mattie sat up in bed, gripped the receiver, and tried to follow these new words as they came flying out of the receiver and spun bizarre patterns in her head. She was frantically trying to link them into sentences, phrases—anything that she could place within her world—but it all made no sense.

  “What are you talking about?” she yelled into the phone.

  “…And the son-of-a-bitches beat me up! They beat me up, Mama!” And the voice began to cry.

  This she understood. Conditioned by years of instinctual response to his tears, Mattie’s head cleared immediately, and she jumped out of bed.

  “Who beat you up? Where are you?”

  As the late November winds cut across her legs and blew under her coat, Mattie shivered violently and realized that she had rushed from the house without any slip or stockings. She pulled her tweed coat closer to her neck to cut off the wind and stop her body from trembling with cold, and moved on toward the police precinct. The brick and glass building threw out a ghostly light against the thin morning air. She paused a moment to catch her breath before the iron lettering engraved over the door and then pushed the slanted metal bar and went in.

  The warm air in the room smelled like stale ink and dried saliva. There was nothing in it but a few scarred wooden benches and rows of closed smoked-glass doors. She had expected to see Basil, and his absence terrified her. She angrily approached the policeman at the desk.

  They had her son. Where was her son?

  Who was her son? the tired face queried.

  Basil Michael. He had just called her from here. They had beat him up and hidden him away behind one of those doors. He was hurt, and she demanded to know why. She had come to take him home.

  The tired face sighed, flipped slowly through a clipboard of papers, and read one of them to her. No one had beat up her son; he had resisted arrest, and the officers involved had used due force to restrain the suspect. He was being held for involuntary manslaughter and assaulting a peace officer. He would be arraigned in Penal Court IVA, tomorrow afternoon.

  More new words—cold words that meant only one thing to her—she could not get to Basil, and he was somewhere in this building and he needed her. How dare they do this?

  Where was her son? She had to see her son.

  She could see him tomorrow, before the arraignment.

  She wanted to see him now. Maybe they had hit him in the stomach. He had a weak stomach and might need a doctor. She wasn’t leaving until she saw her son.

  Sergeant Manchester massaged the tightness between his sleepy eyes and looked wearily at the desperate bewilderment that stood in front of him. Any pity that he might have felt for this old black woman lay buried under the memory of a hundred such faces on countless other mornings like this one. It never ended—someone’s somebody—all persistently filed in to bruise their heads upon the rigid walls of due process.

  “Lady,” he said with a tone of genuine sadness, “there’s a man laying in the morgue because of an argument in a bar with your son, and a police officer has a broken wrist. Do you understand? Now if you want to help him, I suggest that you get a lawyer, or come back and talk to the public defender in the afternoon. That would be the best thing that you could do for him right now. Okay? Please, go home. Here are the regulations and visiting hours.” And he bent his head back over his reports.

  Mattie looked at the inked markings on the slip of paper that dictated the conditions for her ever touching Basil again. She studied the fine lines and loops, commas and periods that had come between them, and they etched themselves into her mind. She crumpled the paper and dropped it on the floor.

  “Thank you,” she said, turned, and walked toward the door.

  Sergeant Manchester glanced at her back, saw the paper on the floor, and called to her. “Lady, you forgot the visiting hours.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said, without turning around, and went through the door.

  There was no need to worry, the bifocals kept telling her later that day, after seeing Basil. Acquittal was certain. This was his first major offense, and the other party had provoked the fight. There were several witnesses to this and to the fact that death had occurred when the other party’s head hit the edge of the bar. The assault on the police officer would be a bit sticky, but the court was certain to suspend the sentence when it was argued that the defendant was in an unduly agitated state of mind. It would really be an easy case, should take two days at the most, once it’s brought to trial. When would that be? The date would be set tomorrow at the arraignment. Of course, she could go in now and see her son. And please, there was no need to worry.

  Cecil Garvin pulled off his glasses and tapped the handle against his teeth as he thoughtfully watched Mattie’s retreating back. He wondered why she hadn’t let the public defender take care of such a simple case. He would be receiving a huge fee for something that wouldn’t even require a trial by jury if it was in the next county. Well, he sighed, and put his glasses back on. Thank God for ignorance of the law and frantic m
others.

  “Baby, there ain’t nothing to worry about,” she told Basil as she stroked his hand, trying to calm the frightened look in his eyes. “I went to Reverend Kelly, and he referred me to a good criminal lawyer. Now he said it would be all right, and it will.”

  “When am I getting out of here? That’s what I want to know.” And he snatched his hand away and nervously drummed it on the table.

  “Tomorrow, after some kind of hearing, they’ll tell us when you’ll go to trial.”

  “I don’t understand this!” he exploded. “Why should there be a trial? It was an accident! And that guy was picking on me over some broad. I don’t even know his name.”

  “I know, honey, but a man is dead, and there’s gotta be some kind of proceeding about it.”

  “Well, he’s better off than me. This place is a hellhole, and see what those bastards did to my face.”

  Mattie winced as she forced herself to stare at his bruised face. “They said you resisted arrest, Basil, and broke a policeman’s wrist,” she said softly.

  “So what!” He glared at her. “They wanted to put me in jail for something that wasn’t my fault. They had no right to do this to me, and now you’re sticking up for them.”

  “Oh, Basil,” Mattie sighed, suddenly feeling the strain of the last twelve hours, “I ain’t sticking up for nobody, but we gotta face what happened so we can see our way clear from this.”

  “It’s not ‘we,’ Mama, it’s me. I’m stuck in here—not you. It’s filthy and smelly, and I even heard rats under my bed last night.”

  Mattie’s stomach knotted into tiny spasms.

  “So when am I leaving?”