by Pearl Cleage
Q: How does diving so deeply into the issues of the day, the pathologies of our society and our community, affect you as a person outside of your writing?
PC: I think that looking closely at our community and thinking deeply about what I see there is part of my work. As a writer, I have the responsibility to try to understand why human beings do the things they do, and create characters that allow me to explore the wide variety of those behaviors.
I don’t set out to write about issues. I set out to write about people, characters who are situated in real times and places. Because problems and challenges exist, my characters run up against them, too. At the same time, they are trying to figure out their personal relationships and their love lives.
I am very concerned about the degree of violence and intolerance in our world. I hope that my writing is part of the movement of people to reclaim their countries and communities and remake them as places of safety and peace. I’d like West End to be so peaceful that they don’t need Blue Hamilton anymore so he can just relax and raise his child and love his wife, but we aren’t there yet.
Q: What, if any, bullets of insight or awareness are you hoping to lodge in the consciousness of your readers with Baby Brother’s Blues?
PC: I hope that people will find these characters interesting enough to spend a couple hundred pages with them. I hope that, as they follow the journey of General and Blue and Zora and Baby Brother and Brandi and Abbie and Peachy and the rest of these folks, they will see themselves reflected in some of the challenges and some of the choices. I hope this book tells a good story that draws you in and won’t let you go until it’s done!
Q: When did you know that you were a writer, someone who would write for a living and be published? When did you feel that you had arrived?
PC: I have always known I was a writer. I started telling stories to my big sister when I was just two years old! When she learned to read and taught me at age four, I started writing my stories down in little notebooks, and I’ve been doing it ever since! I never thought about whether or not I could write for a living. I started publishing very early, while I was still in high school, but I usually got a few dollars and a few copies of the magazines in payment.
I always thought I would have to do other things to pay the rent! It has been such a blessing to me to be able to write full-time and make a living at it. As for feeling like I had arrived, I think the wonderful thing about writing is that you can keep doing it, and working to get better at it, until you’re too old to hold the pen and see the pages!
I’m not trying to arrive anywhere. I’m trying to work hard and be a better writer with each and every book. I love the process of writing and I hope to continue to do it for the rest of my life.
Q: What advice do you most commonly give people who tell you they want to write novels?
PC: I tell people they should keep journals to help them get into the habit of writing for at least half an hour a day. A journal helps you begin to look more closely at the world around you and how you feel about what you see. Developing a point of view and voice are crucial to the writer’s art, so a journal is a good place to start.
I urge them to write each and every day and to think of learning to write the same way they would think of learning to play the trumpet… you have to practice if you want to get good at it! I also encourage people to think about developing their craft before they start trying to figure out how to make money. If you write well and work to write better, I believe you will find an audience. But writing isn’t a field to go into to be a millionaire—most writers never make enough to pay the light bill!
Q: What is it about the process of writing that sustains you? Challenges you? Fulfills you? Makes you crazy?
PC: Writing is the way I answer my own questions about the world. When I look around and see that my community isn’t safe, I ask myself: Why isn’t it safe and what would it take to make it safer? When I start trying to figure out what it means to be in love, I create characters who are trying to figure it out, too; that allows me to discover the answers along with the characters and the reader. The most challenging thing, I think, is to figure out what story you are trying to tell.
At the early stages, all things are possible and it is the writer’s job to focus in on the one story that you can’t stand not to share. When I find the thread of the story I’m looking for, I am always grateful and very excited. I think there’s always a moment when you feel like you’re crazy for even trying to write this story. You hate the pages you’ve got, you have no idea where you should go next, and you don’t even like your characters anymore!
At that point, you should get up, turn off your computer, leave your office, and go outside for a while. Sit on the front steps, wave at your neighbors, drink a glass of wine with your beloved, play with your grandchildren—anything to remind you that the world that’s making you crazy is all in your head. It’s only make-believe. Real life is something else altogether and writing, even wonderful writing, is only a pale reflection. So when you feel crazy, just remember, “It’s only a novel… it’s only a novel… it’s only a novel.”
Q: What would your readers be most surprised to learn about you?
PC: I think most readers would be surprised to learn that I can cook a great Thanksgiving dinner, complete with turkey, homemade dressing, mac and cheese, collard greens, and all the trimmings!
READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. How do you feel about the strategy adopted by Blue Hamilton to protect his neighborhood from crime? Has traditional law enforcement failed our communities to the extent that drastic alternatives like Blue’s need to be adopted to protect its livelihoods? What approach would you think most promising or effective?
2. Precious Hargrove’s quest for higher political office is complicated by many factors, in this novel most specifically, her son’s sexuality. Do you think today’s political elections have gotten sidetracked from the issues, or is a politician’s personal and family life relevant to their conduct and effectiveness in office?
3. The atmosphere of Atlanta’s West End is so powerfully evoked in this novel that it is almost a character in itself. Do you feel a strong sense of community where you live? How can a positive sense of community be created?
4. Blue has a very clear concept of past lives influencing our current lives. Do you believe in reincarnation? If so, how does this influence your life choices on a daily basis?
5. Do you believe, as General Richardson comes to, that signs from those who have passed on make it to the world of the living?
6. The war in Iraq rumbles menacingly in this book’s background. What conclusions about the war can we draw from the author’s portrayal of Baby Brother?
7. Abbie Browning is hesitant to put bars on her windows, feeling it would transform her home into a prison. What do we sacrifice in order to ensure our own security?
8. Captain Lee Kilgore claims to have originally wanted to idealistically stop drug dealers from shooting up the neighborhood, but she spiraled downward into corruption. How are good intentions degraded? How does one protect oneself from that sort of corruption?
9. Kwame Hargrove’s down-low sexual activities ultimately cause his family considerable turmoil. Would it have been better if he’d been honest about his tendencies? And if he had, how do you think his family would have reacted?
10. Conversely, what choices are available to Kwame’s wife, Aretha—a woman with a child, married to a good provider who is also bisexual? What would you do in her situation?
11. Do you share Samson Epps’ contempt for deserters from the military? Is there any situation where avoiding service could still be honorable?
12. After Regina Burns gets pregnant, she longs for her husband to rein in his covert activities. How realistic is it for people to get their partners to change?
13. Lee feels contempt for Precious’ expressed attitude about young criminals: that they are victimized products of their env
ironment. Do we sometimes overly rationalize bad behavior? How much do you think environment determines our behavior?
14. Do you think Blue was right to urge General to take his own life?
15. At one point Blue contemplates the world in which his child will soon be born. How optimistic do you feel about the world that we are leaving for future generations?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PEARL CLEAGE is the author of Babylon Sisters, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day…, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, Some Things I Never Thought I’d Do, and I Wish I Had a Red Dress, as well as two works of nonfiction: Mad at Miles: A Black Woman’s Guide to Truth and Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot. She is also an accomplished dramatist. Her plays include Flyin’ West and Blues for an Albama Sky. Cleage lives in Atlanta with her husband, writer Zaron W. Burnett, Jr.
ALSO BY PEARL CLEAGE
NOVELS
Babylon Sisters
Some Things I Never Thought I’d Do
I Wish I Had a Red Dress
What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day…
NONFICTION
Mad at Miles: A Black Woman’s Guide to Truth
Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot
PRAISE FOR Baby Brother’s Blues
“I always love Pearl’s take on my literary birthplace and current hometown.”
—E. LYNN HARRIS, in USA Today
“Events happen at such breathtaking speed that it’s easy to pull a muscle in your eagerness to turn the pages.”
—The Washington Post
“[A] scorching morality tale.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The reader is engrossed to the end.”
—Booklist
“Cleage’s descriptions are lively, her dialogue snappy, and the problems she describes are urgent and timely.”
—Deseret Morning News
“This is most arrestingly a work of beautifully complex characters…. Cleage at her best.”
—Paste magazine
Baby Brother’s Blues is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2007 One World Books Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Pearl Cleage
Reader’s guide copyright © 2007 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by One World Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
ONE WORLD is a registered trademark and the One World colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
READER’S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by One World Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2006.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Jessica Care Moore for permission to reprint “Armageddon Love” from The Alphabet Verses the Ghetto by Jessica Care Moore, copyright © 2003 by Moore Black Press. Reprinted by permission of Jessica Care Moore.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Cleage, Pearl.
Baby Brother’s blues: a novel / Pearl Cleage—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. African American men—Fiction. 2. Conduct of life—Fiction.
PS3553.L389 B32 2006
813'.54—dc22
2005057714
www.thereaderscircle.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-49704-8
v3.0