Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush by Virginia Hamilton

First published: 1982

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: A large American city

Principal Characters:

• Teresa Pratt (Tree), the protagonist, a sensitive fourteen-year-old African American girl
• Dabney Pratt (Dab), her mentally retarded brother
• Viola Pratt (Muh Vy), their mother, a practical nurse
• Brother Rush, Viola’s dead brother
• Cenithia Pricherd, a homeless woman
• Silvester Wiley D. Smith (Silversmith), Muh Vy’s business partner and lover

The Novel

Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush is the story of a black girl in her early teens who must deal with poverty, isolation, overhwhelming responsibility, disillusionment, and loss. That she survives and finally triumphs is the result of her own strength and, as she finally realizes, her mother’s never-failing love for her.

Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush is divided into seventeen chapters. Although the novel is written in the third person, the voice throughout is that of the protagonist, Teresa Pratt. Sometimes she is identified as the narrator; often, however, the author presents Tree’s thoughts in the first person or in fragmentary form. The matter of voice becomes particularly complex when, through the magic of the ghost Brother Rush, Tree travels into the past. Then she speaks and thinks as her own mother, a woman with two children, Tree and Dab, while at the same time never forgetting that she is really Tree, the fourteen-year-old observer. Though such segments demand close attention from the reader, they are essential to the plot; through these ventures into the past, Tree is led to important truths.

The book begins with Tree’s falling in love at first sight with a well-dressed stranger she sees while she is walking home from school. Tree’s life is not easy. She lives alone in a small apartment with her older brother Dabney, who is “slow” and often ill. Their mother Viola sometimes does not see her offspring for weeks at a time. Tree does not even know how to contact “Muh Vy” in case of an emergency, but has to hope that she will turn up when there is no food or money left. So far, Muh Vy always has.

Tree’s glimpses of her “dude” serve to bring some excitement into a life of poverty, loneliness, and frightening responsibility. It is not until the stranger appears inside the Pratt apartment, standing inside a table, that Tree realizes that he is a benevolent ghost through whose auspices she can walk into the past. On her first journey, Tree sees the young woman her mother once was, and she discovers that the ghost is her mother’s favorite brother. Just before Tree returns to the present, she sees Viola collapse after being informed that Brother Rush has been killed in an accident.

Obviously, Brother Rush is not just a creature of Tree’s imagination. In the days that follow, Dabney also mentions being transported into Brother Rush’s world, and Cenithia Pricherd, who is cleaning the apartment, sees the figure in the table so clearly that she falls into a dead faint.

On her ventures into the past, however, Tree is making some troubling discoveries. One is that her mother never loved Dabney but, in fact, abused him heartlessly. Another is that Brother Rush deliberately chose to die.

When Muh Vy appears, along with her likeable lover Silverster Wiley D. Smith, Tree is prepared to confront her mother with her knowledge. Muh Vy and Tree, however, have a more immediate problem: Dabney is desperately ill. After Muh Vy rushes him to a hospital, Tree gathers that Dab’s illness is probably porphyria, which Viola knew had caused the deaths of her brothers and which is aggravated by the use of alcohol and drugs. When Dab dies, Tree blames her mother, and indeed Muh Vy admits that she had never even bothered to have Dab tested, much less to keep him away from the drugs that to some degree were responsible for killing him.

In the final section of the book, however, Tree comes to terms with her grief and with her anger. Silvester Smith’s son Don helps her to accept the fact that all human beings are flawed—including her mother, who, despite her inability to love her son, does love Tree. While she misses Dab, Tree finds some consolation in his being freed from his misery. At the end of the novel, she looks forward to a future with new friends and a new family.

The Characters

Tree is the narrator, the protagonist, and, finally, the heroine of Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush. Tree voices almost all the opinions in the novel and describes every event from her perspective. Furthermore, Tree has many of the qualities one expects in a heroine. In a difficult situation, she displays intelligence, self-discipline, an admirable sense of responsibility, and a deep, uncomplaining love for both her difficult brother and her absent mother. Yet there is another side to Tree. When the homeless Cenithia Pricherd comes to clean up the apartment, Tree judges her harshly, summing her up as a lazy, greedy old woman. Clearly, in everyone except Dab, Tree expects perfection. Therefore, when she finds out the worst about her mother, she is at first unforgiving. Not until she learns to separate the sinner from the sin, to feel compassion for Muh Vy and for Cenithia, can Tree be considered a true heroine. Of all the characters in the novel, it is Tree who changes most drastically.

The alteration in Viola is less dramatic. While she does what she can to save Dabney, she cannot bring herself to love him. Yet she does love Tree enough to break the habit of a lifetime. When she admits that she abused Dabney and neglected both of her children, Muh Vy for once is facing facts instead of running away from them. She, too, has become a better person.

Unlike Tree and Muh Vy, most of the characters in Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush remain the same throughout the novel. As Tree learns more about others, however, her readers share her new perceptions of them. For example, Tree finds an explanation for Dab’s increasingly erratic behavior, as well as an index to his pain, when she discovers that he is addicted to drugs. Similarly, when she sees Brother Rush throw himself out of the car, Tree realizes that the glittering “Numbers Man,” who seemed so carefree, was actually suffering so much that he took refuge first in alcohol and eventually in suicide. Tree also discovers that Cenithia is not greedy but actually hungry and that she is not a ridiculous old woman but a person who is both brave and proud.

Unlike these characters, Silversmith and Don are exactly what they appear to be. From the moment Silversmith appears at the apartment door, Tree intuitively trusts the big man, who, she notices, is so careful not to misuse his physical strength. It is evident that he loves Muh Vy; it is also evident that there is room in his generous heart for her daughter. Silversmith’s function in the novel is twofold. By joining with Muh Vy to make Tree’s life better, he assumes the role of the father for whom Tree has yearned and thus makes it possible for the book to end on a hopeful note. At the same time, the qualities united in his nature—strength and tenderness, respect for others and a sense of responsibility—make him a paradigm.

Don Smith, too, is important to both plot and theme. At Dab’s funeral, when Silversmith is preoccupied with Muh Vy, it is Don who moves to console Tree, thus establishing a friendship that enables her to move out of her isolation. In addition, Don can be seen as a model for other young black men. The boys on the street corner, and even Tree’s beloved Dabney, see girls as sexual prey, to be used and thrown away. In contrast, as he proves when he takes Tree on her first date, Don sees them as fellow human beings. Thus, like his father, Don is presented as an ideal.

Critical Context

Few writers for young readers are better know than Virginia Hamilton, who for decades has been delighting her public as well as winning high praise from critics. Among her many successful books are The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), a finalist for the National Book Award and a Newbery Honor Book, and her best-known novel, M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974), which won both the National Book Award and the Newbery Medal. After completing The Gathering (1981), the third work in a science-fiction trilogy, Hamilton returned to realism with Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, another Newbery Honor Book.

While she writes in a genre that has fixed conventions—for example, the absence or the relative unimportance of parents, the focus on a young protagonist who functions as a savior, and the inevitable happy ending—Hamilton is not enslaved by custom. She places her characters in unusual situations; one thinks of M. C. Higgins, perched on a bicycle at the top of a pole, keeping watch over his mountain domain; of the time-travelers in The Gathering who are trying to rescue an unhappy computer; and of Tree, walking through Brother Rush’s mirror into another world. Hamilton avoids the use of stock characters as religiously as she eschews humdrum plots. Each of her characters is distinctive, and many of them are memorable, in part because Hamilton often has them reveal their thoughts in poetic language, reflecting the rhythms of black dialect. Critics agree, however, that it is not her technical skill but her powerful imagination that keeps Virginia Hamilton at the top of her genre.

Bibliography

Farrell, Kirby. “Virginia Hamilton’s Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush and the Case for a Radical Existential Criticism.” Contemporary Literature 31, no. 2 (Summer, 1990): 161-176. Argues that the novel’s “apparent celebration of black solidarity overlays a regressive vision of relentless sadistic competition.”

Guy, David. “Escaping from a World of Troubles.” The Washington Post Book World, November 7, 1982, 14. Guy comments that Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush “could vaguely bore me and utterly astound me within the space of a single chapter” and wishes that Hamilton would “release her remarkable imagination from the contrived situations of the conventional young adult novel.”

Heins, Ethel L. Review of Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, by Virginia Hamilton. The Horn Book Magazine 18, no. 5 (October, 1982): 505-506. Praises the novel’s characters as “complex, contradictory, and ambivalent as is life itself: sometimes weak, sometimes attractive, always fiercely human.”

Paterson, Katherine. “Family Visions.” The New York Times Book Review, November 14, 1982, 41, 56. A highly laudatory review of Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush. Paterson challenges readers to read the first paragraph of the book and “then stop—if you can.”

Townsend, John Rowe. “Virginia Hamilton.” In A Sounding of Storytellers: New and Revised Essays on Contemporary Writers for Children. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1979. A thorough overview of Hamilton’s early fiction.