The Women of Brewster Place: Mattie Michael

Throughout Mattie Michael's story, it seems that a lot of her time is spent worrying how she pleases men. In other words, she seems to live for them. Her dad wants her to court a respectable man, and therefore she spends every Sunday with a boy she neither likes nor appreciates. Knowing how much her father dedicates himself to her, she tries to please him as much as possible.
Of course, the worst act of defiance possible toward her father is to go out with Butch. However, confronted with her need to please, or rather her dependence on men and their approval, she submits to Butch as well and lets go of her own morals. Consequence? She ends up pregnant with his child.
Once the child enters her life. She does everything for him. She moves boarding house in order for him to be raised in a more comfortable environment despite her meager income and long working hours. To her luck, she comes across Miss Eva, who lets her board in her house for free. Yet even Miss Eva warns Mattie of he dependence on her child. During a small argument, Miss Eva tells her that she should leave Basil sleep by himself at night, however Mattie refutes by saying Basil is afraid of the dark. Even though there are enough rooms so that Basil could have his own, Mattie holds on to him so much that she cannot be physically parted from him.
After Miss Eva's death, Mattie understands why Miss Eva never asked her to pay anything and made sure she was saving up money: so she could inherit the house.
However, Mattie does not think of the house as her own possession, but as her son's. Maylor writes, "It would be all for him and those to come from the long, muscular thighs of him who sat opposite her at the table" (40). Mattie therefore strips any agency she has and gives everything she has to her son.
Just as her dependence got her "in trouble" so to speak the first time around, there are further consequences this time. Her son ends up killing a man, and while it's unclear what happens to him, we can assume that he kills himself since he warned her that he'd rather shoot himself than to spend time in jail. We never see him again. Miss Eva's house, then, which she ascribed to her son, cannot be "hers" to live in, and so she departs.
In the end, she becomes the owner of "Brewster Place," finally a place she owns, and where she can carry out the kindness of Miss Eva and perhaps house people more fortunate than her in terms of the loss and the pain she experienced.