The Men of Brewster Place

Ben remembers the cold winter day when Mattie Michael moved to Brewster Place. It was snowing, and Ben watched her move in with a van full of plants. He knew that her new apartment would get little sunlight and that most of the plants would die, but Mattie refused to pity herself or her plants. She was “one of the finest women” Ben knew (42). According to rumors, she came to live on Brewster Place because of “a no-good son” (42), but Ben never pried into other people’s business.

Mattie’s son’s name is Basil. Basil ended up in jail after he accidentally killed a man in a drunken brawl, and Mattie used her house as collateral to bail him out. When he fled, she lost the home she had worked her whole life to pay off and was forced to move to Brewster Place. Basil worked three jobs for three years and saved his money to pay his mother back. He dreamed of the day he would be able to “honor her trust” and “truly become a man” (43-44). One day, he even went to Brewster Place to see where his mother lived and briefly spoke to Ben. However, he didn’t have the courage to reveal his true identity.

By the time Basil had saved the $47,000 he needed for a deposit on a new house, Mattie was dead. He left the check on her grave. Basil decided that he wanted to be in a serious relationship where he could become “the father [he] never had” and “act like the man [he’d] finally grown up to be” (46). First, he visited Mattie’s hometown of Rock Vale, Tennessee, hoping to meet his father. Rock Vale was a small town, and Butch Fuller was easy to find. Butch told Basil that he knew that Basil was his when Mattie got pregnant, even though the doctors had told him he had a low sperm count and that having children was unlikely. Basil asked Butch questions for an hour. When he finally stood up to leave, Basil exploded at Butch, upset that the man hadn’t even asked him his name. Butch told Basil that he’d been thinking of his name since his birth and wished him a safe trip.

Upon leaving, Basil worried that he might have inherited his father’s low sperm count, which turned out to be true. However, this made him feel like his birth was miraculous. He began searching for a wife, announcing on first dates that he was “looking for a commitment” (50); to his surprise, this scared women off. He understood that women had reason to be cautious of men, but he also argues that “black men weren’t the only reason for the mess black women were in” (51). Eventually, he met Helen, the boss’s secretary at the umbrella factory. She was well educated and had a good sense of humor, though she wasn’t conventionally beautiful. Their relationship began to get serious, and Basil met Helen’s friends and family.

He decided to tell her about his past one Sunday after church. However, during the service, he was distracted by a young woman with two small boys. The boys were four and six years old and angering their mother with their fidgeting. Helen told Basil that the woman, Keisha, was her cousin and “bad news.” After the service, Keisha hurried over to say hello, even though Helen tried to avoid the other woman. She was just 20 years old, and Basil noted that “her dress was too short and her perfume was loud” (53). Then, the youngest boy, Eddie, looked up at Basil and asked if he was his daddy. Keisha hit the boy and warned him to stop embarrassing her, but Basil crouched down and introduced himself to the boys, asking what they would like to do with him if he were their father. The older one, Jason, told Basil that a “real daddy would take [them] to the circus” (54). He asked Helen if they might take the boys to the circus one day. She made an excuse about work but didn’t argue against Basil taking them.

The following week, he picked up Eddie and Jason and took them to the circus. The next week, they went to a baseball game, and the week after that, they went to a rodeo. Basil invited Helen along, but she continued to make excuses and warned him that he was becoming too attached to the boys. He argued that he could break “the cycle” and “make a difference in the lives of those boys” (57), but Helen had no interest in becoming a stand-in mother to Eddie and Jason. Helen began to pull away, but Basil was focused on the boys. One night, he babysat and watched movies with the boys while Keisha went out. As he dozed, Jason tried to wake him up for the best part of the movie, calling him “Daddy.” Eddie insisted that Basil was not their daddy because “Daddies go away” (59). Basil promised himself that he would never leave the boys and convinced Keisha to marry him.

They both knew that the marriage was for the boys, and Keisha kept up her stream of lovers. She respected Basil, though, and he stopped her from hitting the boys and diminishing their self-confidence. Basil thought they could become anything they wanted and worked double shifts to start a college fund for them. However, Basil got angry when he learned that Keisha was introducing her lovers to the boys. They had a huge fight, and the next week, a pair of detectives showed up at Basil’s job with an arrest warrant. Basil asked if he could go home to say goodbye to his sons before they took him away. He found the two boys watching television while Keisha was locked in the bathroom.

Basil hugged the boys goodbye and promised to come back. Eddie reminded Basil that his seventh birthday was the next day. Basil promised not to run if the detectives let him stay, and Eddie and the boys both had tears in their eyes when they told him no.

Basil served six years in prison for involuntary manslaughter. The boys were never allowed to visit him and didn’t receive the letters he sent. In his absence, Jason served time in juvenile detention for theft and assault, and Eddy built a “hard and permanent” shell around himself (64). Basil is determined to regain the boys’ trust, but he wonders if his presence would have made any difference in the path their lives took.