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Remembering The Women of Brewster Place

08/24/09

Publishing/Literary

To celebrate its six-decade history of honoring great American books, the National Book Foundation has been posting daily blog entries highlighting the National Book Award in Fiction Winners from 1950 to 2008. Commentary will come from such established authors, critics, book reviewers, bloggers, booksellers, and librarians as MacArthur "Genius" Award-winner Jonathan Lethem; David Ulin, book editor for the Los Angeles Times; Jess Walter, National Book Award Fiction Finalist for The Zero; and Elinor Lipman, a novelist and former National Book Award judge. Daily blog posts will appear on www.NBAfictionblog.org.

I was invited to participate in this initiative. Check out my post about Gloria Naylor's THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE:

I didn't know my grandmother very well. The woman we affectionately called Grandlovey passed away when I was still a young girl of six or seven. What I do know about the small woman with a church in her basement was gained from a mixture of stories and myths recounted by relatives. In between legend, there were some truths: Grandlovey was a neighborhood matriarch who tried her best to protect her eleven children, who cared for people who were and weren't related to her, and who loved her first husband too hard.

There's no doubt that my desire to know Grandlovey more intimately is what attached me to Mattie Michael, the neighborhood matriarch of The Women of Brewster Place. Mattie stored gems of wisdom in her pocket. She lived more life than the average person. She also loved too hard.

Mattie could have been my grandmother. And the other women who inhabited Brewster Place--a community that housed the souls of a diverse slice of black folk--could have been my aunts and cousins, the ladies I gossip with at the beauty salon, the mothers I pass on the bus stop.

Read the rest of my entry.

Check out all the posts at http://www.nbafictionblog.org.

posted by Adminposted by Felicia Pride

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