Home time and island time: novelist Pearl Cleage finds inspiration just outside her window in Southwest Atlanta, while Paule Marshall has twice drawn on a long ago trip to Grenada

Black Issues Book Review, March-April, 2004 by Gwendolyn Glenn

When Pearl Cleage is ready to work on a novel, a play or a column, she simply walks down the hall to a room in the front of her house in Atlanta's historic Southwest community.

Cleage's office is dominated by an old battered gray-metal desk she picked up for $20 many years ago and still loves. Photographs of her daughter, husband and other family members surround her. A bulletin board is in place for Cleage to jot down thoughts as they come to her. Papers of various sorts are scattered around, the CD player is going, and the tigerlike cat that leaped on her screen door some years ago, as an orphan kitten is asleep somewhere in the room.

Two regular-size windows in Cleage's office that are anything but regular when it comes to influencing her writing. "Through those windows in I can watch my neighborhood go by," Cleage says. "I watch girls getting pregnant too soon, guys hard eyed and looking mean whom I knew as cute four year olds. By choice, I don't leave my Southwest neighborhood much, and these windows are my windows to all of it."

Cleage's Southwest neighborhood is an historic section of Atlanta. It is home to the Atlanta University Center, which includes Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morris Brown, and the Interdenominational Theological Center. African American singles and families live in charmingly renovated Victorian houses, as well as in more recently built homes.

Cleage enjoys the extremes and contradictions that can be found in her neighborhood. "Southwest has everything I'm into in writing, and it feeds me in a way that makes me enjoy my work more," Cleage explains. "The mayor lives here, so does Congressman John Lewis and Andrew Young. We have $500,000 homes, rooming houses, crack houses and homeless people."

From her corner of Cascade Road, she has a view of a school-bus stop where she observes young girls struggling with baby carriages, and she witnesses people doing good and bad things on a regular basis.

There's also the vibrant garden of a neighbor across the street that mixes in with the urban elements of the area. Like most of her writings, many of the characters and the urban gardens Cleage wrote about in her latest novel, Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do (One World/Ballantine, November 2003), were created from her window sightings. The same can be said for the young women she created in her novel I Wish I Had a Red Dress (William Morrow, July 2001).

"The contradictions that I write about in my novels are here every day," Cleage explains. "Some writers write about blacks, but they never see blacks. I came up with the idea of a safe zone for women (in I Wish I Had a Red Dress) because I'd love to walk around here at night, but I don't because I have to be conscious of muggers and predators. So I wondered what it would be like if Southwest had a safe zone for women."

Cleage does not find most other places in the world nearly as fascinating as Southwest Atlanta. "I'm less interested in finding something New," she says. "I'm content and happy with what I've found here."

Nonetheless, Cleage is planning to travel to gather material for her next play. One of the characters still brewing in her head will have spent time in Havana, Cuba, and Cleage wants to go there before writing.

"I hope to go on one of those artists exchanges" she says. "I've been invited but I have a fear of flying. Now I'll go on a boat. That's me. Give me two weeks in Cuba trying out my bad Spanish, and I'll be able to make the character more real."

Marshall's Peripatetic Life

From mid-August to mid-December, Paule Marshall teaches writing at New York University in Manhattan, and she spends the rest of the year writing at her condominium in Richmond, Virginia. Years ago, this daughter of Barbadian immigrants developed a strong curiosity about the beauty of Grenada, also called the Spice Island because of its well known production of cinnamon, cocoa, mace, nutmeg, saffron and other spices.

On approaching the West Indian island of Grenada by boat, travelers are greeted with the view of colorful lush hillsides dotted with houses, endless unspoiled, white sandy beaches, and warm, crystal-dear blue waters lapping lazily at the fine powdery shoreline. This is the view that author Paule Marshall saw in the early 1960s when her cruise ship docked in Grenada, where she was to spend a year conducting research for a novel. Marshall was ultimately inspired to write The Chosen Place, The Timeless People in 1969 (Vintage; reissue edition, September 1984), and Praisesong for the Widow in 1983.

What Marshall found on this 21 mile long and 12-mile-wide island during her one-year slay was a physical splendor that was much different from her parents' homeland of Barbados, the coral island she often visited.

"There was the huge pristine expanse of white sand that curved endlessly," Marshall says. "The water was so extraordinarily clear that you could see through the depths, and the roads were a canopy of exquisite bamboo."

Marshall had received a Guggenheim Foundation research grant, which made it possible for her In hire a housekeeper and sitter for her two-year-old son, and rent a home minutes from the island's well known Grand Anse Beach. She says she and her son spent every afternoon swimming on Grand Anse Beach, and watching for that green flash of light that is visible for a split second when the Grenadian sun disappears out of sight behind the sea.