Pearl Cleage

Cleage, Pearl (b. 1948), poet, playwright, prose writer, performance artist, and editor of Catalyst magazine. Pearl Cleage was born in Detroit, Michigan, and was educated at Howard University, Spelman College, and Atlanta University. Early in her life her family encouraged an African American view of the world. Her father, Jaramogi Abebe Azaman (Albert Cleage), founded and developed Black Christian Nationalism. She also came under the direct influence of the political and intellectual ferment of the 1960s and 1970s.

Cleage's writing is highly polemical. A strong political spirit and commitment to the liberation of African Americans, particularly African American women, infuse her work. While she ultimately advocates the healthy solidarity of the African American community, she also broaches the taboo topics of sexism and violence against women in the African American community. She refuses to subordinate discussions of gender to race and sometimes makes the link between the two. Her writings, therefore, both invite political discussion and inspire literary analysis.

Her first books, We Don’t Need No Music (1971), The Brass Bed and Other Stories (1990), and Mad at Miles: The Blackwoman's Guide to Truth (1991), have received little or no critical attention. However, Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot (1993) has received substantially more public attention and popular acclaim. While this work blends personal experience and observation with a celebration of the African American female perspective and experience, the greatest confluence of Cleage's craft and vision is found in her dramas. These works advocate the necessity of African American women empowering themselves as individuals, surmounting the differences of class, personal experience, and philosophy, and forming supportive networks as models of survival for the African American community.

Cleage's plays are frequently performed and are beginning to appear in print. Hospice (1983) earned five Audelco Recognition Awards for achievement Off Broadway. This one-act play portrays an exchange between Alice Anderson, a forty-seven-year-old cancer patient, and her thirty-year-old daughter, Jenny, who is about to give birth. In keeping with the theme of the need for strong relationships between women, the play explores the complicated mother-daughter relationship and mandates healing where ruptures exist. Chain (1992) and Late Bus to Mecca (1992) similarly explore the condition of African American women. In Chain Cleage depicts the impact of drugs on the African American community through the story of Rosa Jackson, a sixteen-year-old addict whose empowerment is sabotaged by her drug-addicted boyfriend and the desperation of her parents. Late Bus to Mecca dramatizes the value of African American sisterhood. The play depicts an encounter between Ava Gardner Johnson and a nameless African American woman who is too physically and psychologically battered to speak. Although a prostitute, the resourceful and self-assured Ava is able to offer love and support to another African American woman and affirm the viability of her own philosophy. Flyin’ West (1994) portrays black participation in frontier development resulting from the 1860 Homestead Act and dramatizes intraracial and gender dynamics in that experience. Cleage published a novel, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, in 1997, and had a new play, Blues for an Alabama Sky, produced by the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta. The play was published in 1999; her collection, Flyin’ West and Other Plays, was also published that year.

Cleage's art is womanist in spirit and effort. Her work stands as a testament to the union of artistic vision, political and cultural sensibility, and analytic intellect.

Bibliography

• FredaScott Giles, “The Motion of Herstory: Three Plays by Pearl Cleage,” African American Review 31:4 (Winter 1997): 709–712

Carol P. Marsh-Lockett

playwright

Personal Information

Born Pearl Michelle Cleage on December 7, 1948, in Springfield, MA; the daughter of Albert Buford Cleage (a minister) and Doris Graham Cleage (a teacher); married Michael Lucius Lomax (an elected official of Fulton County, GA), 1969 (divorced, 1979); married Zaron W. Burnett, Jr. (novelist), c. 1990; children: one daughter, Deignan Njeri (from first marriage).
Education: Attended Howard University, Washington, D.C., 1966-1969; received bachelor of arts degree from Spelman College, Atlanta, GA, 1971; graduate study at Atlanta University.

Career

Author of plays, essays, poetry, and fiction. Work as a playwright has been produced professionally since 1981; has been playwright in residence at Spelman College and at the Just US Theater Company, Atlanta. Contributor of essays to numerous publications including Essence, New York Times Book Review, Ms., Atlanta Magazine, Pride, Black World, and Afro-American Review. Columnist for the Atlanta Gazette, Atlanta Tribune, and Atlanta Constitution. Founding editor of Catalyst, a literary magazine. Other employment includes member of field collection staff, Martin Luther King, Jr. Archival Library, Atlanta, GA, 1969-1970; assistant director of Southern Education Program, Inc, Atlanta, GA, 1970-1971; writer and associate producer for WQXI, Atlanta, GA, 1972-1973; director of communications for the City of Atlanta, 1974-1976; hostess and interviewer for "Black Viewpoints," produced by Clark College, WETV, Atlanta; staff writer and interviewer for "Ebony Beat Journal," WQXI, Atlanta, 1972; executive producer for WXIA, Atlanta, 1972-1973; instructor at Emory University, 1978; instructor in creative writing at Spelman College, 1986-1991.

Life's Work

Cleage was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1948 and grew up on the west side of Detroit. Her father, Albert Cleage, was a prominent minister who started as a Presbyterian, became a Congregationalist, then founded his own denomination, the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church. Cleage's mother, Doris, was an elementary school teacher. The family also included Cleage's older sister, Kristin. Albert Cleage, who ran for governor of Michigan on the Freedom Now ticket in 1962, was a black nationalist who later changed his name to Jaramogi Abebe Agyemen. In her collection of essays Deals with the Devil: And Other Reasons to Riot, Cleage recalled, "By the time I was eight or nine, I understood clearly that slavery and racism had created a complex set of circumstances that impacted daily on my life as an African-American...I also knew that as a person who had the advantage of growing up in a house where there were books, it was my responsibility once I achieved adulthood to work consciously to 'uplift the race,' or at least as much of it as I could, given limited resources, human frailty, and the awesome implacability of the group itself."

In high school, Cleage was academically gifted and socially popular. Upon graduation in 1966, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C. where she studied playwrighting, had a pair of one act plays produced, and became involved in an abusive relationship with a male student who, despite his violent behavior, she almost married. Though Cleage had been brought up with a strong sense of how race affected her life, her status as a woman was not something she contemplated until adulthood. In 1969, at age twenty, Cleage left Howard University to marry Michael Lomax, an Atlanta politician whom she had known for only a short time. "I wasn't a feminist when I got married," Cleage told Kris Worrell of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

Though her marriage to Lomax ended in 1979, Cleage has continued to reside in Atlanta. "I grew up in Atlanta. The fact that I was twenty years old when I arrived is beside the point. The city felt like home from the first minute I stepped off the airplane," Cleage wrote in Essence.

After finishing her undergraduate degree at Spelman College in 1971, Cleage worked at a variety of jobs in the media, including host of a local, black-oriented interview program. In the mid-1970s, she served as director of communications for the city of Atlanta and press secretary for Mayor Maynard Jackson. Her daughter, Deignan, was born during this period. Eventually, the stresses of a demanding job, motherhood, marriage, and her desire to devote more time to writing, which she viewed as her true calling, forced her to quit her job. "I have always known I was a writer, and I've always written -- I don't know another way to live. I love it, but it's very hard work because you have to tell the truth," Cleage told Howard Pousner of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

In the 1980s, Cleage began to earn notoriety as a writer. Her play puppetplay, a surrealistic piece for two actresses and a marionette, was presented as a work-in-progress at the Atlanta New Play Project in 1981 and was produced the following year by Atlanta's Just US Theater Company. Other Cleage plays were given mountings by various theater companies, including Hospice, a drama about an estranged mother and daughter, Good News, a comedy about feuding lovers, and Essentials, which tells the tale of a woman attorney who becomes her town's first black elected official. Cleage also began writing and performing "performance pieces," contributing a regular column to the Atlanta Tribune, and writing freelance essays for national magazines.

In 1990, a selection of her essays were collected into the book Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman's Guide to Truth. The title is taken from an essay in which Cleage excoriates jazz trumpeter Miles Davis for his remorseless confessions of physically abusing black women. "Either we think it's a crime to hit us or we don't ... And if we do, can we keep giving our money to Miles Davis so that he can buy a Malibu beach house and terrorize our sisters in it?," Cleage wrote.

The tone of Cleage's writings about gender and racial issues have led to charges that she resents both males and white people. Indeed, Cleage admits that she does not fully trust either of these groups. "It's not so much trying to make people frightened as to make them take responsibility. I think the skepticism is necessary. You have to have it. Otherwise you're adrift ... And then you're defenseless. Then you're not prepared when you hit racism, then you're not prepared when you hit sexism," Cleage told Worrell.

In her 1991 collection of essays, Deals with the Devil: And Other Reasons to Riot, Cleage describes herself as an "African American Urban Nationalist." She explains that this designation is not a call for separatism but a recognition "that most of us are already separate, by choice or by circumstance. For those who desire integrated living, there are many communities where that is available. But for those of us who want to live and work in African American environments, the choice should be presented as a blessing and a challenge, not a way to mark time until you can 'get out of the ghetto,' and as far away from other black folks as your line of credit can carry you. There is no reason to assume that the best house, the best school, the best store, the best college, the best food are always going to be outside our own communities. But that assumption is at the heart of the difference between African American Urban Integrationists and African American Urban Nationalists."

In her play Flyin' West, Cleage focuses on four black women in the 1890s who escaped the racism of the south by homesteading in the Midwest. The idea for the play, which is set in the real-life black settlement of Nicodemus, Kansas, came to Cleage from the writings of Ida B. Wells, a turn of the century Memphis newspaper columnist who urged African-Americans to go west in search of greater freedom. "On the surface it's about homesteaders in the American west, pioneers. But it's also a way to talk about contemporary issues, like race, gender, class, feminist issues. I'm a poet; I'm not a politician. My play is the form I use to get people to think about things that way," Cleage told Steve Monroe of American Visions. Among the theaters where Flyin' West has been staged is the Crossroads Theater Company in New Brunswick, New Jersey, with a cast headed by Olivia Cole. "Flyin' West couches an uncompromising black feminist credo in a conventionally entertaining domestic melodrama, laced with chipper comic exchanges. Its smooth blend of inspirational didacticism and homespun charm will be familiar to viewers of the women-oriented message movies shown on the Lifetime cable television network. But it has a sharper political bite, cheerfully arguing for black separatism and the right of abused wives to take vengeance into their own hands," wrote Ben Brantley of the New York Times in his review of the 1993 Crossroads production.

Cleage again turned to African American history for the basis of the play Blues for an Alabama Sky which is set in the waning days of the Harlem Renaissance in early 1930s. The play focuses on Angel Allen, a down-on-her-luck blues singer who, after breaking up with her white gangster boyfriend, contemplates marriage to a seemingly honest if lackluster black man from the south. Also on hand are Angel's neighbors, including a gay male clothes designer with dreams of living in Paris, and an earnest young woman trying to open a birth control clinic in Harlem. "You could say Cleage hits all the cliches in her story, but you could also say that she smacks them so hard their faces shine and they look fresh ... It's to Cleage's credit that she refuses to resolve the troublesome issues of birth control, abortion, sexual freedom, duty to the self and duty to the community. The play is clumsy at times, but it's never glib," wrote Lloyd Rose of the Washington Post in a review of an Arena Stage, Washington, D.C. production of Blues for an Alabama Sky starring Phylicia Rashad in 1996.

In Bourbon at the Border, first staged at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in 1997, Cleage deals with the aftermath of historical events. In the play a group of middle aged characters cope with the memory of their experience as young activists in the 1960s when their attempts to register black voters in Mississippi met with violent resistance. The setting is an apartment overlooking the Ambassador Bridge which connects Detroit with Windsor, Ontario. "Out of all my plays Bourbon at the Border was the hardest for me to write, but I'd call it a love story in spite of itself. These characters are struggling to find a peaceful place to love each other," Cleage told Angela P. Moore of Upscale. It was important to Cleage that the characters in the play were depicted as regular working people, not legendary radicals or rarified intellectuals. "There's this feeling that everyone in the civil rights movement was either martyred and killed or they not only survived but went on to be elected mayor or go to Congress. It's a feeling that everybody involved was a great warrior," Cleage explained to Mark Binelli of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

As to the future, Cleage expects to continue what she's been doing for decades: thinking and writing about African-American women, promoting action to improve their lives, and celebrating their strength and achievements. Cleage told Lynell George of the Los Angeles Times, "I'm less interested in what people call themselves than in what they do. How they live their lives. If they are working in neighborhoods, raising their children and struggling to build positive relationships with women and men, then I call that a feminist. If they call that 'a good strong black woman' that's fine too."

Works

Selective Discography

• Recordings and Videotapes: A Nation of Poets (recording), 1990; We Who Believe in Freedom: A Gathering Around the Urban Campfire (video), 1996.

• Plays (location and year of original production): Hymn for the Rebels, Howard University, 1968; Duet for Three Voices, Howard University, 1969; The Sale, Spelman College, 1972; puppetplay, Just Us Theater, Atlanta, 1981; Hospice, New Federal Theater, Off- Broadway, New York City, 1983; Good News, Just US Theater, Atlanta, 1984; Essentials, Just US Theater, Atlanta, 1985, Porch Songs, Phoenix Theater, Indianapolis, IN, 1985; Banana Bread (television play), WPBA, Atlanta, 1985; Come and Get These Memories, Billie Holiday Theater, Brooklyn, NY, 1987; Flyin' West, Alliance Theater Company, Atlanta, 1992; Chain, Women's Project and Productions and the New Federal Theater, Off-Broadway, New York City, 1992; Late Bus to Mecca, Women's Project and Productions and the New Federal Theater, Off-Broadway, New York City, 1992; Blues for an Alabama Sky, Alliance Theater Company, Atlanta, 1995; Bourbon at the Border, Alliance Theater Company, Atlanta, 1997.
• Performance pieces (written and performed by Cleage): The Jean Harris Reading, 1981; The Pearl and the Vipers, 1981; Nothin' But a Movie, 1982.
• Books: We Don't Need No Music (poetry), 1971; Dear Dark Faces (poetry), 1980; One for the Brothers (chapbook), 1983; Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman's Guide to Truth (essays), 1990; The Brass Bed and Other Stories (fiction), 1991; Deals with the Devil: And Other Reasons to Riot (essays), 1991; Dreamers and Dealmakers: An Insider's Guide to the Other Atlanta Games (non-fiction), 1996; What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (fiction), 1997.

Further Reading

Books

• Peterson, Bernard L. Jr. Contemporary Black American Playwrights and Their Plays, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988.
• Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Vol.27, Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1989.
• Contemporary Theatre, Film and Television, Vol.13, Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1995.
• Notable Black American Women, Book II, Detroit, MI: Gale Research, 1996.

• American Theatre, December 1992, p. 59; March 1994, p. 58.
• American Visions, October-November 1994, p. 31.
• Atlanta Journal and Constitution, February 3, 1985, p. J10; May 18, 1986, p. J2; January 18, 1989, p. C3; October 13, 1993, p. E1; March 19, 1995, p. M4; May 11, 1997, p. L1.
• Essence, June 1996, p. 78.
• Los Angeles Times, August 30, 1993, p. E1.
• New York Times, October 6, 1993, p. C16; October 10, 1993, New Jersey weekly desk, p. 13; June 6, 1996, Connecticut weekly Desk, p. 16.
• Upscale, September/October 1997, p. 62.
• Washington Post, July 29, 1993, p. C1; September 15, 1994, p. C1; September 13, 1996, p. F1.

— Mary Kalfatovic