Retracing Mattie Michael’s Footsteps: Sometimes We Have to Ask Why We Love the Way We Love

There are women we meet in stories who stay with us because we recognize something.

Not necessarily ourselves exactly. Maybe our mothers. An auntie. A grandmother. The woman who always found twenty dollars when everybody knew she didn’t have twenty dollars. The woman whose spare bedroom was never quite spare because somebody was always coming home. The woman who would tell you she was tired while already reaching for her pocketbook to help.

Mattie Michael is one of those women.

If you have only seen The Women of Brewster Place, go back sometime. And if Gloria Naylor’s novel is not on your bookshelf, it deserves consideration for a place there. Published in 1982, The Women of Brewster Place won the National Book Award for First Novel and gave us seven interconnected stories about Black women whose lives converge in a battered urban housing development called Brewster Place.

In 1989, Oprah Winfrey helped bring Gloria Naylor’s women to television, serving as executive producer and starring as Mattie Michael.

But Mattie’s story is worth slowing down for.

Because when we know where a woman began, sometimes we understand differently where she ended up.

Before There Was Basil, There Was Mattie

Young Mattie Michael grows up in Tennessee with parents who love her.

That word matters: love.

It would make the story easier if her father were simply presented as somebody who never cared about her. Then we could put everything into neat little boxes. Good people over here. Bad people over there. Lesson learned.

Life rarely gives women such convenient sorting.

Mattie’s father, Samuel, is strict. Religious. Protective. He has expectations for his daughter and ideas about the kind of life she should live.

Then Mattie becomes involved with Butch Fuller.

Butch has charm. He has excitement around him. He is not the man her father would have chosen for her, and young Mattie is drawn to him anyway.

She becomes pregnant.

When her father discovers the pregnancy and learns that the baby’s father is not the respectable young man he assumed, he demands that Mattie tell him who it is.

She refuses.

And her father beats her.

Her mother eventually has to intervene with a shotgun to stop him.

Sit with that for a minute.

A young woman experiences pregnancy, fear and enormous uncertainty, and the man whose love helped form her understanding of home responds to her refusal with violence.

His judgment of Butch may even contain some truth. Butch will not become the steady partner standing beside Mattie through what comes next.

That does not make her father right.

Being right about somebody else does not give us the right to violate the person we love.

And perhaps that is the first lesson Mattie leaves us.

Sometimes We Have to Retrace the Footsteps

It is easy to meet a woman at forty, fifty or sixty and judge a decision without knowing what happened at twenty.

Why did she tolerate that?

Why did she keep helping?

Why didn’t she let him deal with his own consequences?

Why did she put so much on the line?

Why does she love like that?

Those questions sound very different when we ask them with curiosity instead of contempt.

Because none of us invented love from scratch.

We learned it somewhere.

We watched people love before we had language for what we were seeing. We absorbed what happened after somebody made a mistake. We noticed who got forgiven. Who got rescued. Who was expected to sacrifice. Who could become angry. Who had to restore the peace.

Some of us learned that love meant staying.

Some learned that love meant providing.

Some learned that love meant forgiving quickly.

Some learned that love meant never letting somebody you love face hardship alone.

Some learned that love meant keeping everybody close enough to protect.

And sometimes we carry those lessons into adulthood without realizing that we are carrying anything at all.

We simply call it love.

Then Mattie Becomes a Mother

This is where Gloria Naylor does something I find deeply human.

Mattie does not become her father.

She goes almost in the other direction.

She pours herself into Basil.

She works. Protects. Provides. Makes a life. She knows what it feels like to stand vulnerable before somebody who supposedly loves you and discover that their love has conditions you cannot survive underneath.

So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that Mattie wants Basil to experience something different.

But love can lose its boundaries without losing its sincerity.

That is important.

Because eventually Basil is arrested after a fight that results in another man’s death. When he needs bail, Mattie does something enormous.

She puts up her house.

Not somebody else’s house.

Not an abstract possession.

Her house.

The place she has worked toward. The stability she has built after leaving her childhood home pregnant. The physical evidence that all those years of surviving produced something solid beneath her feet.

She places it behind her belief in her son.

Then Basil runs.

And Mattie loses the house. Her home.

She Wasn’t Stupid. She Loved Him.

This is where I don’t want to do what people so often do to women after the consequences arrive.

See?

She should have known.

That’s what happens when you keep rescuing people.

Maybe there are lessons about boundaries here. Of course there are.

But humiliation is a poor teacher.

Mattie made an enormous decision because she loved her son and believed in him. The fact that the decision cost her terribly does not retroactively make her unintelligent.

It gives us something far more useful to examine.

What are we willing to collateralize for love?

Mattie literally put up the house.

Women do this figuratively every day.

Sometimes the house is money we cannot afford to lose. Sometimes it is credit, sleep, health, career momentum, friendships, safety, years, peace or another chance we already know we don’t have in us.

Sometimes nobody even asks us directly.

We volunteer the house because somewhere along the road we learned that this is what loving somebody looks like.

That deserves examination without shame.

Her Father’s Love and Mattie’s Love Were Not the Same

There is an extraordinary symmetry in Mattie’s life.

Her father loves his daughter and cannot tolerate a decision she makes outside his authority.

Mattie loves her son and struggles to leave him alone with the consequences of his own decisions.

These are not morally equivalent acts. Beating your daughter is not the same as posting bail for your son.

But both relationships give us something to think about.

Her father seems to believe love gives him more authority over Mattie’s life.

Mattie seems to believe love gives her more responsibility for Basil’s life.

There it is.

Authority over someone. Responsibility for someone.

Both can become distorted when love loses sight of where one human being ends and another begins.

Sometimes loving somebody means refusing to control their choices.

Sometimes loving somebody means refusing to carry their choices.

Those may be two of adulthood’s hardest lessons.

And Look Who Keeps Giving Mattie Somewhere to Land

There is another thread running through Mattie’s story that I love.

Women.

When her father beats her, her mother intervenes.

When pregnant Mattie needs somewhere to go, Etta Mae gives her refuge.

Later, Eva Turner opens her home to Mattie and little Basil when Mattie is struggling to find decent housing.

That is worth noticing.

The story isn’t telling us to stop trusting people. It isn’t warning women to become cold, suspicious little islands who never risk anything for anybody.

What a miserable lesson that would be.

Instead, The Women of Brewster Place keeps showing us different kinds of human attachment.

Some love controls.

Some love rescues.

Some love desires.

Some love shelters.

And some of the safest love Mattie encounters simply says:

Come on in. There’s room.

No ownership required.

Maybe We Should Ask Different Questions About Our Own Lives

As women, we can spend years asking whether somebody loves us.

Perhaps there are other questions worth putting beside that one.

What does this person’s love ask me to surrender?

What do I automatically offer because I love them?

Do I believe loving somebody means saving them from consequences?

Do I feel responsible for keeping people from being disappointed?

When someone tells me their painful history, do I begin renegotiating boundaries I had before I heard it?

Do I mistake understanding somebody for being responsible for them?

And perhaps the gentlest question of all:

Where did I learn to love this way?

Not What’s wrong with me?

Not How could I have been so stupid?

Not Why didn’t I know better?

Where did I learn it?

Now we have somewhere useful to go.

Go Back to Brewster Place

If you haven’t read Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, you may want to find it.

And if you remember only pieces of the television adaptation, watch it again with older eyes.

Don’t rush through Mattie to get to the lesson.

Watch the women.

Watch what they give one another. Watch what they tolerate. Watch where they find shelter. Watch what happens when somebody else’s choices arrive at a woman’s doorstep carrying a bill.

Then think about your own footsteps.

We are allowed to revisit what we learned about love without dishonoring the people who taught us.

Our mothers were learning too. Our grandmothers were learning.

The women who raised them were working with whatever pieces of freedom, tradition, faith, fear, survival, tenderness and possibility had reached their hands.

We inherited some beautiful things. We inherited some expensive things.

Wisdom is learning to tell the difference.

And perhaps that is why Mattie Michael still has something to say to us all these years later.

She does not ask us to stop loving deeply.

She asks us to look at what we put behind that love.

Because eventually every woman deserves to know:

I can love you without putting up the house.