SOURCE: Delgado, Celeste Fraser. “Stealing B(l)ack Voices: The Myth of the Black Matriarchy and The Women of Brewster Place.” In Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah, pp. 90–105. New York: Amistad, 1993.

In the following essay, Delgado discusses the voice of the women in The Women of Brewster Place which subverts white misconceptions regarding African Americans.

It would appear that books, like genetic parents, beget books and the sheer proliferation of the work, if nothing else, inscribes an impression point at which the makers and patrons the traditional canon of American literature and the very structure of the values that decides the permissible must now stop and rethink their work.

Reading against the canon, intruding into it a configuration of symbolic values with which critics and audiences must contend, the work of the black women's writing community...