I Wish I Had a Red Dress (26 page)
I Wish I Had a Red Dress
Introduction
Returning to Idlewild, Michigan, and some of the characters who captured readers’ hearts in her bestseller,
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day. . .
, Pearl Cleage writes a beautifully realized work about modern times, second chances, and making a difference in other people’s lives. Joyce Mitchell, widowed too young, has a full life as a social worker, one filled with purpose and good friends. But she’s begun thinking about putting aside the black clothes she’s found so easy to wear for so long and getting a red dress. She is also realizing that she needs something more in her life. When her best friend, Sister, fixes her up with the tallest, sexiest man she’s ever met, she sees all sorts of possibilities — and too many reasons why it’s the wrong time to fall in love.
Joyce has to quickly figure out what to do with the Sewing Circus, too — the all-girl group she founded to provide day care services and counseling to local girls, many of whom are single mothers. For many of these young women, the Sewing Circus is a lifeline amid drug problems and abusive relationships. But the government has decided not to fund her program, and Joyce is desperately looking for alternatives . . . while one of the Sewing Circus members finds herself fighting for her life in this provocative and blazingly frank look at contemporary African American issues and universal matters of the heart.
Discussion Questions
1. One of the characters, Sister, makes up a list of questions for discussing movies at the Sewing Circus’s film festival. She begins with: “Do I believe this character exists in the real world? Do I like her?” Apply this question to the novel’s protagonist, Joyce.
2. What does Joyce’s “red dress” symbolize?
3. Joyce feels that movies can provide life lessons for the girls in the Sewing Circus: “My hope is that if they can recognize preventable foolishness on the screen, the lessons they learn will carry over into their real lives” [Part One, Chapter 13, “First Thought, Best Thought”]. Do you agree with Joyce? What are other benefits — or dangers — of exposing young people to art, whether its literature, painting, or the performing arts?
4. “That the problem with black women,” says Bill. He adds, “The essence of true love is surrender. All the great poets agree on that. And if there is one thing a black woman will not do, it’s surrender! No wonder nobody can stay together for longer than twenty minutes at a time!” [Part Two, Chapter 45, "The Problem with Surrender"]. Do you agree this is the problem with black women in relationships?
5. Love relationships are a major theme in this novel. Can you identify three “prototypes” or different kinds of heterosexual, intimate relationships depicted in the book? Are any exclusive to the African American community?
6. Black men are working to “get their act together” in
I Wish I Had a Red Dress
. Bill’s workshop comes up with a list of “For Men Only” goals. If you could add your “two cents,” what list would you create for them?
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day. . .
About the book
: In the ten-plus years since Ava left Idlewild, Michigan, for a life of elegant pleasures in Atlanta, all the problems of the big city — drugs, crime, disease — have come home to roost. Returning home after testing positive for HIV, she cannot turn her back on friends and family who sorely need her in the face of impending trouble and tragedy. Besides which, the unthinkable has started happening: Ava Johnson is falling in love.
Washington Post Book World
: “Following Cleage’s twists and turns of the human spirit, readers may find themselves in a very inspired and uplifted place well before the last page.”
I will bring you a whole person
and you will bring me a whole person
and we will have twice as much
of love and everything . . .
“Celebration,” Mary Evans
1
i m sitting at
the bar in the airport, minding my own business, trying to get psyched up for my flight, and I made the mistake of listening to one of those TV talk shows. They were interviewing some women with what the host kept calling
full-blown AIDS
. As opposed to
half-blown AIDS
, I guess. There they were, weeping and wailing and wringing their hands, wearing their prissy little Laura Ashley dresses and telling their edited-for-TV life stories.
The audience was eating it up, but it got on my last nerve. The thing is, half these bitches are lying.
More
than half. They get diagnosed and all of a sudden they’re Mother Teresa.
I can’t be positive! It’s impossible! I’m practically a virgin!
Bullshit. They got it just like I got it: fucking men.
That’s not male bashing either. That’s the truth. Most of us got it from the boys. Which is, when you think about it, a pretty good argument for cutting men loose, but if I could work up a strong physical reaction to women, I would already be having sex with them. I’m not knocking it. I’m just saying I can’t be a witness.
Too many titties in one place to suit me.
I try to tune out the
almost-a-virgins
, but they’re going on and on and now one is really sobbing and all of a sudden
I get it
. They’re just going through the purification ritual. This is how it goes: First, you have to confess that you did nasty, disgusting sex stuff with multiple partners who may even have been of your same gender.
Or
you have to confess that you like to shoot illegal drugs into your veins and sometimes you use other people’s works when you want to get high and you came unprepared.
Then you have to describe the sin you have confessed in as much detail as you can remember. Names, dates, places, faces. Specific sexual acts. Quantity and quality of orgasms. What kind of dope you shot. What park you bought it in. All the down and dirty. Then, once your listeners have been totally freaked out by what you’ve told them, they get to decide how much sympathy, attention, help, money, and understanding you’re entitled to
based on how disgusted they are.
I’m not buying into that shit. I don’t think anything I did was bad enough for me to earn this as the payback, but it gets rough out here sometimes. If you’re not a little kid, or a heterosexual movie star’s doomed but devoted wife, or a hemophiliac who got it from a tainted transfusion, or a straight white woman who can prove she’s a virgin with a dirty dentist, you’re not eligible for any no-strings sympathy.
The truth is, people are usually relieved. It always makes them feel better when they know the specifics of your story. You can see their faces brighten up when your path is one they haven’t traveled. That’s why people keep asking me if I know who I got it from. Like all they’d have to do to ensure their safety is cross this specific guy’s name off their list of acceptable sexual partners the same way you do when somebody starts smoking crack:
no future here
. But I always tell them the truth:
I have no idea
. That’s when they frown and give me one last chance to redeem myself. If I don’t know
who
, do I at least know
how many
?
By that time I can’t decide if I’m supposed to be sorry about having had a lot of sex or sorry I got sick from it. And what dif-ference does it make at this point anyway? It’s like lying about how much you loved the rush of the nicotine just because now you have lung cancer.
I’m babbling. I must be higher than I thought.
Good
. I hate to fly. I used to dread it so much I’d have to be falling-down drunk to get on a plane. For years I started every vacation with a hang-over. That’s actually how I started drinking vodka, trying to get up the nerve to go to Jamaica for a reggae festival. Worked like a charm, too, and worth a little headache the first day out and the first day back.
I know I drink too much, but I’m trying to cut back. When I first got diagnosed, I stayed drunk for about three months until I
realized it was going to be a lot harder to drink myself to death then it might be to wait it out and see what happens. Some people live a long time with HIV. Maybe I’ll be one of those, grin-ning
like a maniac on the front of
Parade
magazine, talking about how I did it.
I never used to read those survivor testimonials, but now I do, for obvious reasons. The first thing they all say they had to do was learn how to calm the fuck down, which is exactly why I was drinking so much, trying to cool out. The problem was, after a while I couldn’t tell if it was the vodka or the HIV making me sick, and I wanted to know the difference.
But I figure a little lightweight backsliding at thirty thousand feet doesn’t really count, so by the time we boarded, I had polished off two doubles and was waiting for the flight attendant to smile that first-class-only smile and bring me two more. That’s why I pay all that extra money to sit up here, so they’ll bring me
what I want before I have to ring the bell and ask for it.
The man sitting next to me is wearing a beautiful suit that cost him a couple of grand easy and he’s spread out calculators, calendars, and legal pads across his tray table like the plane is now his personal office in the air. I think all that shit is for show. I don’t believe anybody can really concentrate on business when they’re hurtling through the air at six hundred miles an hour. Besides, ain’t nobody that damn busy.
He was surprised as hell when I sat down next to him. White men in expensive suits are always a little pissed to find themselves seated next to me in first class, especially since I started wearing my hair so short. They seem to take it as some kind of personal affront that of all the seats on the airplane, the bald-headed
black woman showed up next to them. It used to make me uncomfortable. Now I think of it as helping them take a small step toward higher consciousness. Discomfort is always a necessary part of the process of enlightenment.
For the first time in a long time, I didn’t grip and pray during takeoff. It wasn’t that I was drunk. I’ve been a lot drunker on a lot of other airplanes. It’s just that at this point, a plane crash might be just what the doctor ordered
Thanks first of all to my daughter, Deignan Cleage Lomax, for her love, support, and friendship.
There would be no books without you!
Special thanks also to Lynette M. Lapeyrolerie for lending me her name! I also thank my family and friends, especially my sister, Kristin Cleage Williams, and James Williams of Idlewild, Michigan, and their family, Jilo and Olubagla, Ife, Tulani, Ayanna, James, Cabral, Abeo, Osaze, and Tatayana; Karen and A. B. Spellman, and the North Carolina beach crowd, Toyin, Kaji, Zenzi, Soyinka, Rev. E. Edmonds and Bernice; Carolyn, Omari, and Jamal Monteilh; BarbaraO; Elijah Huntley and Hanifa McClendon Huntley; the Broadway and Burnett families; Valerie Boyd; Ingrid Saunders Jones;
The Mongo
; Cecelia Corbin Hunter; Walter Huntley; Maria Broom; Jill Nelson; Michael Lomax; Pam Burnette and Miss Nyla; Curtis and Barbara Jackson; Tayari Jones; Susan Elizabeth Phillips;
Andrea Hairston; Jondre Pryor; Zaron W. Burnett, III; Meghan Skylar, and Josh Underwood; Margo Perkins; Don Bryan; Ray and Marilyn Cox; Kirk and Keith Bagwell; Marc and Elaine Lawson; Jimmy Lee Tarver; Susan L. Taylor; Granville Edward Freeman Dennis; Monique
Greenwood and the members of
The Go on Girl Bookclubs
; Jan Peterson; Nia Damali; Johnnetta Cole; Kenny Leon; Melanie Lomax; Woodie King, Jr., Pat Lottier, and
The Atlanta Tribune
; and the brothers and sisters of The Shrines of the Black Madonna of the Black Christian Nationalist Church. I also send much love to my father, Jaramogi Abebe Agyman, my father-in-law, Zaron W. Burnett, Sr., warrior-woman extraordinaire Debbie Thomas-Bryan, and my best friend, William D. “Billy Bob” Bagwell, who made their transitions during the writing of this book.
I still feel you!
Thanks also to Carrie Feron, Denise Stinson, and Howard Rosenstone for their assistance and support.
Pearl Cleage
is the author of the novel
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day. . .
, which was both an Oprah’s Book Club selection and a
New York Times
bestseller. She is also the author of
Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman’s Guide to Truth
, and
Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot
. An accomplished playwright whose stage works include
Flyin’ West
and
Blues for an Alabama Sky
, she is also a contributing writer to
Essence
magazine and frequently performs her work on college campuses. Cleage is the mother of one daughter, Deignan. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, Zaron W. Burnett, Jr.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day
Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot
Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman’s Guide to Truth
Flyin’ West and Other Plays
The Brass Bed and Other Stories
We Don’t Need No Music
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
I WISH I HAD A RED DRESS. COPYRIGHT © 2001 BY PEARL CLEAGE
. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
“A Reading Group Guide to
I Wish I Had a Red Dress
.” Copyright © 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Excerpt from
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day
Copyright © 1997 by Pearl Cleage.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2002 ISBN: 9780061834288
Print edition first published in 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
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