As author of The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor has assured her place in a body of literature which she has revered since childhood, a reverence owed directly to her mother. "My parents were from the real South. My mother loved to read as a child, but discrimination prevented her from using the public libraries. She came from a family of tenant farmers with nine children and little money for books, so she would hire herself out to work in fields on Saturdays for fifty cents. By the end of the month she saved up two dollars which she sent away to book clubs."¹

Fulfilling a promise to his wife not to have their children born in the South, Naylor's father moved with his wife to New York in 1949, a month before their first daughter, Gloria's, birth. Three daughters were born to the couple. "Here her children...