What looks like Crazy on an Ordinary Day

Pearl Cleage

A caution here – this book is an adult book with adult themes and language; and a truly enjoyable read.

In an interesting opening interior dialog, Ava Johnson tries to come to grips with the harsh reality that she is HIV positive on the flight back to her hometown of Idlewild, Michigan. A successful entrepreneur “dreaming big” in a thriving Atlanta, her salon is brought to a grinding halt by a woman that waves a letter her husband received in the mail from Ava suggesting he should be tested.

“As noisy as the salon always was on Saturday afternoon, it got quiet so fast, all I could hear was the Anita Baker CD we'd been playing all morning. I tried to stay calm and ask here if she wanted to go into my office so we could talk. She didn't even let me finish.

‘I don't want to go anywhere with you, you nasty heifer'”.

Appointments cancel; business dries up. Cutting her losses, Ava sells the salon and heads to Idlewild to visit her sister Joyce and try and decide what she wants to do with the rest of her life – planning to spend the summer with Joyce and leaning toward an eventual move to the west coast.

Joyce is unable to meet her at the airport on arrival, and sends Wild Eddie Johnson – who now prefers to be called “just Eddie”, to pick up Ava.

Joyce, a recent widow, has devoted most of her time and energy into a church group. Ava reluctantly decides to help Joyce with her “sewing circus” group, a support group for at risk teenagers. Ava's big city perspective, along with the discovery of her health problem, leads to a major rift with the minister. But the minister is less than he seems.

Eddie provides the stability and, eventually, the backbone, to expose the minister and support Ava and Joyce in their insistence that the “sewing circus” must be saved because it is too important to let church politics kill it.

In fits and starts over the summer, and as the problems with the church grow, so does the relationship between Ava and Eddie, a relationship that Ava fears far more than Eddie does. In some ways very modern, in some old fashioned, Ms. Cleage weaves a nifty tale.