Novel approach
Atlanta author Pearl Cleage balances luck, loss and life after ‘Oprah’
Pearl Cleage believes in fear. She also believes in luck. Cleage’s fear of flying shaped the book tour for her new novel — she and her husband, novelist Zaron Burnett, are driving all the way to San Francisco. But it was luck, she says, that made the tour possible.
In 1998, Cleage’s first novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, was touched by the hand of Goddess; Oprah Winfrey chose the book for her slavishly devoted book club. The title soared to the top of bestseller lists with expected celebrity, and the 52-year-old Atlantan instantly went from a moderately well-known playwright and essayist to a household name for millions of Oprah-philes.
Thanks to the Winfrey windfall, Cleage’s new novel, I Wish I Had a Red Dress, published this month by William Morrow, is virtually guaranteed a healthy response from readers. Fame, however, is not something Cleage fears. In fact, she says it hasn’t really changed her life at all.
Accidents and activism
?I Wish I Had a Red Dress is a sequel to What Looks Like Crazy. Joyce Mitchell, older sister of the first novel’s protagonist, takes center stage this time, struggling with her Sewing Circus, a support group for young, unwed mothers, and with her own loneliness. Enter Nate Anderson, a tall, handsome stranger who just may be able to fill the void in Joyce’s life.
Joyce’s string of personal tragedies — her husband, parents and two children have all died at the book’s start — hits home for Cleage. Life since the first book’s publication has been tempestuous. Her father, father-in-law and best friend died while she was writing Red Dress.
Cleage, a spare and sprightly woman whose eyes tell you everything you need to know about her unsinkable charisma, greets her own misfortune with a steadfast optimism. “You know how sometimes when bad things happen, people act like the universe singled them out to say, ‘This is going to be a bad day for you’? I don’t think the world works that way. Random things happen. Sometimes people have bad luck. But I don’t think it’s because God is mad at you or the universe is mad at you or any of that.”
In Red Dress, Cleage cooks up a tale of overcoming tragedy with a healthy dollop of social issues on the side: domestic violence, racism and drug abuse, to name a few. Joyce describes herself as a “true ’60s voodoo child,” a champion for “free women.” It’s rhetoric lifted directly from the author’s life, whose activist upbringing definitely informs her work.
“Joyce is so dedicated to her community and working with people, and I’ve got some reformer kind of missionary stuff in me too,” Cleage says. Her father, the Rev. Albert Cleage, founded the Shrine of the Black Madonna Church in Detroit in the mid-’60s, with ministries in Atlanta and Houston, and she grew up in a household constantly engaged in political discourse over African-American nationalism and the Civil Rights Movement. After moving to Atlanta in 1969, she continued her involvement with community activism, working as Mayor Maynard Jackson’s press secretary and later marrying Michael Lomax, former Fulton County Commission Chairman, with whom she has a daughter, Deignan. The two split in 1979.
Cleage’s first taste of fame came through her writing. She published two nonfiction works, Mad at Miles: A Black Woman’s Guide to Truth and Deals With the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot, and secured a position teaching playwriting at Spelman. While running the Just Us Theater Company, Cleage formed a friendship with a young actor named Kenny Leon, which led to her prolific run of three plays at the Alliance Theatre in the ’90s: Flyin’ West, Blues for an Alabama Sky and Bourbon at the Border. All three went on to productions across the country.
Fear and form
After such success, going from playwright to novelist might seem like a natural move. But Cleage says she made the transition “with great trepidation” and with lots of help from her husband in perfecting the fiction form. The risk, though, was worth her initial fear. After Oprah anointed What Looks Like Crazy, sales exceeded all ?expectations, with more than 1 million copies currently in print. And William Morrow has already launched a second printing of Red Dress after a healthy 80,000 first run.
Cleage says fame hasn’t affected her much. “I think of Madonna as being famous. I’m not famous like that. People saw me in the grocery store after I was on ‘Oprah’ and they were so surprised. And I kept saying, ‘Well, I still have to eat. She didn’t give me a personal shopper.’”?Book sales allowed her to put a new roof on her home and fund a writing award at Dillard University, where Lomax is now president. Other than that, Cleage says her life was “already going in a really wonderful way. I didn’t move, I didn’t buy a new car. I didn’t do a lot, because I was already living just the way I wanted to.” That includes maintaining her residence in West End, where she’s lived for more than 20 years.
“It’s a perfect neighborhood for me because it’s like a little town,” she says. “My neighbors and family tease me because I’m fairly reclusive until I have to do a book tour.”
Her neighborhood, though, is changing. West End is seeing the first hints of gentrification, with whites and other races moving into the mostly black community, and Cleage admits that some of her neighbors are unhappy with the transition. “I think their reaction is fear-based. And I think if we can get over this, Atlanta will be much more interesting, if we can mix it up.”
Success and snobbery
Cleage believes the city’s racial divide also haunts its arts community. Black audiences and white audiences don’t tend to mix, she says, and smaller black theaters struggle to survive. Although Lomax was a big supporter of the arts during his tenure on the Fulton County Commission, Cleage says the political winds have changed in recent years. “The politicians in place now don’t really have a big focus on the arts, so a lot of the public money that can make a small theater like Horizon or 7 Stages or Jomandi survive just dried up.”
To Cleage, Atlanta focuses too much on the arts as a money maker, not as a significant part of cultural life. She sees the city as a place that supports business, not the arts.
“We act like there’s no poor people in Atlanta, we act like there’s no race problem in Atlanta, we act like there’s no homophobia in Atlanta, and those things are definitely here,” she says. “But we’re not looking for a culture that talks about those things. We’re looking for a culture that celebrates people who aren’t controversial, people who don’t challenge us, who are either already dead or who have already been certified by New York.”
A bold statement, especially coming from an artist who used Atlanta as a springboard for national notoriety before being certified by New York. How does Cleage explain her success?
“I don’t know. I think I’m really lucky,” she says. “I’m very disciplined and I work very hard and I’m good at what I do. But I know a lot of people who are very disciplined and work very hard and are good at what they do and never get the level of commercial success and recognition that I’ve gotten.”
New York critics have a tendency to sneer at Oprah and her chosen authors. The snobbery doesn’t bother Cleage, she says, because she believes that Oprah does good work. “I am absolutely certain that her starting a book club made people read books who haven’t read books since high school. I know that that’s true, because I got letters from these people. And that’s wonderful.”
Besides, she says, she’s not writing for Publisher’s Weekly. It’s the regular folks she’s after, admittedly a mostly black female audience that Cleage says reads “voraciously,” thanks in part to authors like Terry McMillian.
Cleage’s successes have made her part of a national community of black writers, she says. While on tour for Red Dress, she’ll have a joint reading in Chicago with her friend and fellow author E. Lynn Harris.
But it’s hard for authors to form a real community, Cleage says, especially when compared to theater people. “The thing that brings writers together,” she says with a chuckle, “is fear. It’s like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve gotta do this tour, what am I going to do?’ Or, ‘Oh my God, I can’t ?figure this out.’”
Eyes on the future
“If you want to make God laugh, make plans,” Sister Judith says in Red Dress, and it’s advice Cleage seems to take to heart.
“My husband always says there’s only two questions you ever have to ask yourself: What is, and what is next.” For Cleage, the answers are obvious. “What is” is a national book tour, which means more than a month on the road with her husband, to whom she dedicated the new book. And “what’s next” is another novel, this one set in West End.
As for her next play, plans are shakier. She still owes Kenny Leon a play — Ernesto’s Eyes never made it to the Alliance stage as she had promised — but Cleage says she’s absolutely certain she’ll work with Leon again.
“I got a message from Kenny yesterday saying, ‘OK, all the festivities from my leaving are over, so let’s get together, have a glass of wine and talk about what we’re going to do next.’”