I liked Cleage's attitude, so I looked for her other work. She's written and produced plays, which I haven't seen, and a powerful book of essays, Deals with the Devil and Other Reasons to Riot (Ballantine, 1994).

After Crazy and her second novel, I Wish I Had a Red Dress, Cleage set her novels in Atlanta, where she lives. In particular, she invented a neighborhood called West End, which was reclaimed from drugs, crime, and squalor under the leadership of Blue Hamilton, a man with a somewhat shady past who decided that if he couldn't fix the world he could at least fix the nearest part of it. Though West End isn't totally free of problems or conflict, it's a lovely place to visit, and Cleage's characters are ado better.

Till You Hear From Me is Cleage's Obama novel. The protagonist, Ida B. Wells Durham, the daughter of an Atlanta minister who was a pillar of the Civil Rights Movement, worked in Obama's 2008 campaign. As the novel begins, soon after the election, Ida has not yet found a job in the administration because her father had denounced the new order in a widely circulated video interview.

Cleage had the Jeremiah Wright hullaballoo in mind, of course, though her own father, Albert Cleage, was an important figure of the same generation. She told an interviewer in May 2010,

I really wanted to look at the Jeremiah Wright question. I was saddened by what happened between Wright and Obama, the positions that the old-line civil rights guys had -- I