Free I Wish I Had a Red Dress by Pearl Cleage Page B

easy to spot somebody making a bad choice in the movies. That’s why we all holler when the terminally naïve teenage victim skips off to picnic in the woods. My hope is that if they can recognize preventable foolishness on the screen, the lessons they learn will carry over into their real lives.
    Of course, I’d rather they got some of this information from reading classics like The Color Purple and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , but as my mother used to say, if wishes were horses then beggars would ride. Once I told my mother she should collect all her sayings and write them down and she said writing books for black folks was like doing sleight of hand for the blind. My father told her to stop being cynical, but she just rolled her eyes. My mother was not what you would call “a race woman.”
    Waiting to Exhale was the first movie I tried to get them to analyze. All of our regulars were here that day: Tee, Nikki, Tiffany Smith, Patrice O’Neal, Sherika Hill, Sheila Lattimore, Deena Anderson and Regina Johnson. At first everybody said what sets all the bad stuff in motion is when the philandering husband informs his wife that he won’t be taking her to the company Christmas party because his mistress doesn’t want to be alone and “she shouldn’t have to be.”
    “Plus,” Nikki had said, rolling her eyes, “to add insult to injury, she’s a white woman.”
    I agreed that was a pretty terrible moment, but I argued that things had gone bad long before he appeared in the mirror over his wife’s shoulder wearing that beautiful tux and a look that said whatever the problem was, it was all her fault.
    “When was it, then?” Patrice asked, sounding doubtful.
    “I think her defining moment came when she started doing things for him that she didn’t want to do,” I said, “like postponing her plans to open her own business, continuing to make love after he started counting—”
    “Puttin’ her kids in a school where they were the only black ones,” offered Deena, a devoted mother of twins.
    “Not puttin’ him out after she found out he was foolin’ around,” Regina added.
    “So are you sayin’ it’s her fault?” Tee was still frowning.
    “Not her fault, ” I said. “Her choice . She didn’t have to stay with him if he didn’t respect her.”
    They were quiet for a minute. The idea of leaving all that status, material wealth and male protection behind on principle would take some getting used to. How many women ever got to live in a house like that?
    “Well, I know one thing,” said Tiffany, cuddling Diamante, her six-week-old son by T.J., the Lattimore brother currently serving time for armed robbery, “Miss Girl sure messed homeboy’s stuff up big time.”
    There was admiring laughter and a chorus of amens for the wronged wife’s dramatic destruction of the contents of her husband’s carefully organized closet.
    “I like when she tossed that match in and set the whole mess on fire!” added Sherika, who didn’t have any kids yet, but often had one of her younger sisters with her.
    “A woman got ten years for that in Texas,” I reminded them. My comment elicited a general groan.
    “See there, Miz J.” Tiffany spoke for the group. “You always takin’ the fun out of stuff. In real life, Gregory Hines ain’t necessarily gonna move in next door to Loretta Devine either, but let us have that, okay?”
    I made a mental note to remember that today. It’s important not to spend every waking moment teaching somebody something. You wear people out. Sometimes, it’s better to just let it be. Besides, Gregory Hines has to live somewhere, right?
    In the small kitchen, Tee had paper plates, plastic cups, a case of fruit juice boxes, trash bags and a mountain of Pampers. The floor had been swept, the bathrooms had been scrubbed and the only snow on the front steps had fallen after midnight. There was absolutely nothing else left to do, so I sat down to open Sister’s bag of goodies.
    The