“Well Blues for an Alabama Sky was really the first play I wrote where the woman at the center, Angel, doesn’t get to be the shero at the end. She doesn’t get to go off to a happy ending and be righteous. We left her pretty much where we found her. I wanted to see if I could write a piece with a Black woman character who had so many challenges to deal with in terms of her personal relationships that she can’t go forward,” Cleage explains.
“She doesn’t learn the lessons we wish she did in the course of the play. She continues to lie to her friends. She continues to try to manipulate people. She does things based in her fear. She’s very much afraid of being a a broke old woman begging up 125th, so she’s making all her decisions in life based on that fear. I believe all the decisions you make out of fear are actually the worst decisions you could ever make.”
In the play Cleage examines how each character handles the lack of opportunities as a result of a failing economy. The striking resemblance of the setting to 2015 America makes for a relevant piece of theater. The piece shines a light on what it means to survive in America after the party is over, the guests are gone and the music stopped.
“It’s right after the Renaissance in 1930. I started off wanting to write about the Renaissance itself which is a period of great triumph and cultural flowering, but then when the stock market crashed in 1929. It’s like that Malcom X quote ‘When white America catches a cold Black America catches pneumonia,'” Cleage says. “All these people who had been having this champagne fueled Renaissance suddenly found themselves broke and unemployed with no future possibilities for doing artistic work. And that was actual the thing that drew me. I wanted to look at the moment after the Renaissance to say okay they had a great period, now how do they meet the challenge of this economic insecurity? What did they do to move forward as artists?”
The parallels between Angel’s reality and that faced of many Americans today are innumerable. Though it was written in 1995, the images of poverty in Depression era Harlem are almost interchangeable with what those of the ever widening wealth gap in present day society. Cleage says the irony of the situation hit close to home when she revisited the play.
“It’s the 20th anniversary of the play and when I went back and read it, it really was startling to me how relevant it is. What she is talking about when she describes Harlem; what Angel is talking about that frightens her so much. Seeing people living on the street, seeing whole families wandering all day looking for a place to sleep,” Cleage explains. “We see that everyday in Atlanta. If you drive past any of the places that are shelters there are lines of people on the street waiting for a sandwich and a cup of soup.”
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“One of the things I’m interested in trying to show women in the act of or in process of being free. What does it mean to be a free woman or a free human being with some integrity? I’m always trying to put these characters in situations where they’re being tested in a way. You say you believe that, now you’re being challenged by this reality,” Cleage says. “I write specifically about African-American women so often because I take the advice I give my students, I write about what I know best. And I know myself as an African-American woman better than anybody else. I’m always thinking about women because I am one.”
Many of Cleage’s novels challenge traditional notions of African-American womanhood. Her novel, I Wish I had a Red Dress and the 1998 Oprah Book Club pick What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day are part of her feminist musings. To create a manipulative train wreck like Angel, adds another dimension to her often virtuous characters. Through Angel’s stark actions, Cleage illuminates the desperation many women secretly harbor, giving Angel a visceral quality.
“I’m always trying to write fully rounded human beings and it’s disingenuous, I think, to believe you should only write stories where positive things happen to Black characters or they only do positive things,” Cleage says. “I’m not interested in creating role models for people. I’m interested in trying to create characters that seem like real people we know. The greatest compliment a writer can get is for somebody to say ‘That’s just like my aunt, my friend, my roommate or someone we know.’ Because the worst thing is when you look at a play or read a book and say ‘People don’t talk like that or look like that,’ then the writer has failed.”
It’s the normalcy she brings to life on the Southwest side of Atlanta that allows her to touch her audience. She develops her characters through the same experiences that have shaped those who read her work; sprinkling their stories with loss, gain and most importantly love. To Cleage, it’s the audacity to love in a place the world deems unfit to nourish the emotion that’s most important.
“I wanted to write stories deeply rooted in my community. The characters are usually trying to do something good in the community, work with young people or stop violence. They’re also passionately in love and having these great romantic love affairs. I’m always conscious of how often we, as Black women writers, write stories about the problems and bad times we have, but we don’t write a lot of love stories,” Cleage explains. “I feel it’s important for us to write about the whole range, not just the hard times; but what it looks like when we fall madly in love with someone who is a good person. Not only do we write stories where we are the warrior queens fighting on behalf of something righteous, but I also want to let people have a romantic stroll in the moonlight on the West End”