The Men of Brewster Place

Content Warning: This section discusses racism, violence, death and murder, anti-gay bias, suicide and suicidal ideation, sexual abuse and violence, abortion, and addiction.

The narrator, Ben, is a man with an alcohol addiction who works as Brewster Place’s janitor. Ben announces that he has waited many years to say that Brewster Place “gave birth to more than its girl children” and argues that everyone living on the block, including the men, “had a hard way to go” (3). Every time “a She” needed something, it was usually “a He” who tried to get it for her, and Ben argues that “a poor man having to keep looking into the eyes of a poor woman […] is one of the saddest things [he knows]” (4).

Ben began working at Brewster Place in the 1950s when the block was populated by Italian and Irish Americans. The white boys who lived on dead-end Brewster Place often talked down to Ben, calling him a “shit sweeper,” but Ben stayed silent, realizing that the boys were still coming to terms with their own poverty. Over the years, Brewster Place became “a little shabbier” (6), and the demographic changed as African Americans moved onto the block.