Joyce doesn't just have one tragic memory in her life --- she has
several. She has lost a husband, a son, and a daughter. She gave up
a secure job to open a place where she could work with teen moms
and kids from unfortunate home lives. Pearl Cleage, in I WISH I HAD
A RED DRESS, piles both the sorrow and the cliches onto a story
about an independent woman. If it weren't quite so heavy-handed,
there would be greater merit in the telling of Joyce's story.
Instead, it reads like a morality manual for today's woman, rising
from the muck and mire to bask in the glory of her own
independence. And then it wraps it all up in a love story. It's a
haphazard smorgasbord of ideas that ultimately wears the narrative
thin.

Joyce has given up her old life for a new one running the Albert B.
Mitchell Sewing Circus and Community Truth Center, otherwise known
as the Circus, a place where runaways, teens with kids, and other
folks fallen on hard times can find comfort, support, and a new
start. That's a fine thing in and of itself. Then add on the
crunchy granola friends, the best friend who is a groovy minister
with the husband who has a thing for Joyce, and the stereotypical
eager-to-learn teens who inhabit and work at the Circus. How about
the old ladies, straight out of "The Waltons," who own the house
that Joyce's love interest ends up renting? Finally, there are the
innumerable movie references, mostly about black actors who Joyce
thinks embody certain characteristics that all black people should
--- I guess no one ever told Joyce not to look to the movies for
her heroes.

Like a lesser Spike Lee film, Cleage employs everything she can to
speak to her audience, to make her points, to show how Joyce is
both tuned into the world she lives in and how she tries to tune
out but can't. She is flooded by the menagerie of today's pop scene
and tries to use its product to enact some new and important ideas
on her teens, who are starting a new life. Somehow, it doesn't all
gel together nicely --- the references pop out of the story like
pimples on a teen's face the night before the prom. They are not
necessary and don't do much to enhance the story, although Cleage
seems to think they do. I think they pull the narrative down.

Perhaps if Cleage had simply trusted in the power of her character
and the fine brave face she turns to the world, there would have
been no need for this pop junket, and the morality of the thing
would have been easier to take. I found I WISH I HAD A RED DRESS
ham-handed in its striving for integrity. It will be interesting to
see how Cleage's newly enlarged reading audience (thanks to her
last book being an Oprah pick) responds to this latest work. Joyce
could have been a great heroine and she deserves better writing and
a simpler atmosphere in which to have her story told.