Gloria Naylor begins her “novel in seven stories,” The Women of Brewster Place, with a prologue that outlines the successive ages and ethnic identities of an inner-city housing project. By end of the final paragraph, Naylor has set the stage for the neighborhood’s African American phase with a wave of exuberantly blended colors, smells and textures that evoke the physical and emotional presence of the book’s collective protagonist, its black female residents. Naylor’s visual and olfactory images evoke the women’s assertive sensuality while a series of carefully arranged parallel contrasts conveys the emotional complexity of their lives in Brewster Place.
At the beginning of the final paragraph about Brewster Place’s ethnic residents, Naylor nonchalantly uses the word “colored,” which until recently was the accepted term for people with any noticeable trace of African ancestry, to refer to the neighborhood’s present inhabitants. She immediately revivifies the tired old term by shining it through a prism of warm, earth-based tones such as nutmeg, saffron and ebony. These exotic color images serve a dual purpose: they shatter the dull homogeneity that is sometimes ascribed to the lives of poor black women, and they establish a firm link to the daily tasks of cooking and washing that are woven into the fabric of daily existence.
Later in the paragraph, Naylor’s references to “the aroma of vinegar douches and Evening in Paris cologne” hint strongly that the book’s characterization and plot structure will include an element of frank sexuality. Naylor further characterizes the sexual lives of the Brewster women with a series of strong verbs—cursed, badgered, worshiped and shared—which, taken together, suggest a complex emotionality. She expands the notion of emotional complexity by adding a string of contrasting compound adjectives--hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding and easily pleased-- that bring to mind not only the contradictory nature of human life but also the multi-faceted nature of the human psyche.
As the prologue nears its conclusion, the author offers a spare, unsentimental summation of the lives of poor, black women: “They came, they went, grew up, and grew old beyond their years.” In a writerly reference to the power of stories to ensure continuity and rebirth, however, Naylor transcends the seeming finality of her penultimate statement with the image of an ebony phoenix, suggesting that the vivid word picture each character creates has some lasting significance in the longer novel of human existence.
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