Pearl Cleage knew what it meant to be a black nationalist.

That was easy. When she was a child in Detroit, her parents preached that black was powerful and it was beautiful.

Jessica McGowan/AJC / Special (ENLARGE)
Pearl Cleage's latest novel, 'Seen It All and Done the Rest,' was released last week. It's set in West End.
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But now that she was a grown woman, the question was, did she know what it truly meant to be a citizen?

That was the query and challenge her husband, Zaron Burnett, issued nearly three years ago when he suggested they take a cross-country drive to find the answer.

Cleage had just begun writing her latest novel, "Seen It All and Done the Rest," released last week, set in the West End neighborhood she has called home for nearly 40 years. She was in the midst of defining her protagonist, Josephine Evans, an expatriate actress who returns to Atlanta to settle some messy family business and tamp down an even messier public scandal. It all takes place against the backdrop of the Iraq War.

Burnett's question wound up suggesting a framework for the novel, but also set the author on a more personal journey: How could the main character wrestle with the meaning of citizenship when her creator had never seen the purple mountains' majesty or the fruited plain with her own eyes?

Cleage and Burnett hit the road in May 2005, stopping when and where they felt like it from Atlanta to Santa Barbara, Calif.

"I thought we'd run into racism running through Texas, I thought that the mountains would be scary," Cleage says. "But when I saw my first snow-capped mountain I began to cry. Driving across the Great Plains, meeting the people, it was revelation. It was like a whole lot of armor falling off me. The idea that I could have been so wrong was exhilarating.

"I had to come back and think about my relationship to the country. I have all this space now that used to be filled with fear," Cleage says.

So it was for her ironic that "Seen It All" was released on the same day that Barack Obama gave his much heralded speech on race, citizenship and his embattled minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Cleage wept as she watched.

Cleage's late father, Albert Cleage Jr., was the founder of the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church in Detroit, which has congregations across the country, including the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Atlanta. As such, she grew up with a black nationalist ideology. She saw flickers of that in the endless video snippets of Wright's sermons. The whole thing reminded her of her first husband, Michael Lomax, whose run for Fulton County Commission in the late 1970s caused the opposition to put out handbills saying Lomax was the son-in-law of a black radical, Cleage says.

Watching the Obama speech, she says she was encouraged by the message of creating a stronger country through frank, transracial dialogue.

"I understand [Wright's] rage and his determination to talk to his congregation about real things."

But eventually, "you realize how much energy it takes to be defiant all the time," Cleage says. "There was a time when we needed to be, to change the way we were forced to live. That's where Rev. Wright and his generation came in. They made it possible for us to arrive at this moment.

"That was the strategy we needed to win and we did. Now we have the laws, and we don't need to march. The next step is figuring out how to move through the world as free citizens and translating that into new language and new behavior."

Her next book, a collection of essays due out in 2010, might include meditations on that new language.

"You're never done," the 59-year-old writer says. "There's so much to learn."

SIGNING

Pearl Cleage: 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Shrine of the Black Madonna Cultural Center, 946 Ralph Abernathy Blvd S.W., Atlanta (signing only)

7:30 p.m. Thursday, Charis Books & More, 1189 Euclid Ave. N.E., Atlanta (reading and signing).