by Imani Perry
Lorraine’s unpublished experimental writing in the early 1950s reveals the ways in which she saw herself as both part of an activist community and part of an intellectual and artistic tradition, specifically a Black tradition. Black history and her milieu made their way into her imagination, and her imagination revealed her commitments. In a short story written in 1950, she riffed upon Ralph Ellison’s classic 1948 essay, “Harlem Is Nowhere,” in which he asserted that the world of Harlem was a sort of no-man’s-land, one in which the imagination and artistic sensibilities of migrants to the North were held captive by the social discrimination of Harlem. Harlem was a landscape that didn’t match up with folkways learned on plantations, according to Ellison. What and how they’d learned to navigate down home, wasn’t quite right for up North. Lorraine imagined one of those migrants of whom Ellison wrote, and wrote a story about him. In the process, Lorraine troubled Ellison’s focus and formulation.
Lorraine imagined a Georgia-born Black soldier returning to the United States from World War II battlefields in Europe with an eye missing. Rather than going home, he goes to Harlem, looking for something different from what he’s known: “Suddenly, outside the train window there’s New York. Sunshine on bridges and skyscrapers. Sunshine. Different from Georgia sunshine, different from deep inside him where he can still see other sunshine, something through the thin, unhappy trees of a German forest.”19
Lorraine’s critical response to Ellison is found in her character’s voice. She has him think, in free indirect discourse: “The soldier came up out of the subway with his friend and . . . Harlem is everywhere.” Then she scratched that out and wrote, “Everywhere there is—Harlem.” Rather than Ellison’s “Harlem is nowhere,” for Lorraine’s character Harlem is found everywhere and encompasses wholeness of Blackness. All the beauty of Blackness can be found in Harlem, according to her protagonist. He goes on, “I am home man . . . no stuff. I hear Dinah Washington and see Joe Louis’ picture in a window.”20
Lorraine appears to have been struggling with Ellison’s sympathetic portrayal of migrants, not because of its sympathy, which she shared, but rather because of what he believed racism had made of them. Ellison wrote,
In relation to their Southern background, the cultural history of Negroes in the North reads like the legend of some tragic people out of mythology, a people that aspired to escape from its own unhappy homeland to the apparent peace of a distant mountain, but that, in migrating, made some fatal error of judgment and fell into a great chasm of mazelike passages that promise ever to lead to the mountain but end ever against a wall. Not that a Negro is worse off in the North than in the South, but that in the North he surrenders and does not replace certain important supports to his personality.21
For Ellison, being displaced from down home meant that the migrants’ survival techniques went from heroic to tragic, or as Ellison put it, that to which “Faulkner refers as endurance” became “mere swagger.”22 Lorraine chose instead to focus not upon the limitations of Black folks’ skill at navigating the white folks up North, but the everywhereness of white supremacy, even up in Harlem. To make this point clearly, her soldier is shot and killed by police:
“You”
Sharp, clipped fast . . . a white man’s voice.
Danger. Hatred. Georgia hatred. Georgia woods and Georgia sun.
Why? Where did they come from.
“You there . . . put your hands up.”
And then the sound in the Harlem night. Gunshot. Lynchshot.23
The story ends awkwardly. There is a gesture toward the ugliness of McCarthyism: a witness to the killing is warned by police that he should not go to a communist meeting. With this strange conclusion Lorraine tried to (unsuccessfully) weave together the Red Scare and the Jim Crow police state that ensured, despite the promises of the North, Georgia was everywhere.
These scribblings of Lorraine’s were done before Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man had been published, a vast and profound text that included a powerful indictment of white communists and their patronizingly romantic view of Black people. However, Ellison had already distanced himself from the Communist Party when he wrote “Harlem Is Nowhere.” At first he rejected communism, because it had lost a rigorous analysis of class relations and was trying too hard to fit into the American mainstream. Later, he moved toward political liberalism as an aesthetic ideal and virtue. Lorraine, in contrast, unflinchingly embraced the party. Perhaps that was part of her quibble with Ellison. But her troubling of his essay, at least as I read it, is less rooted in communism than it is invested in a more impassioned confrontation with white racism, a resistance to the arbiters of aesthetics who might objectively evaluate “quality” without always attending to inequality. Her point was this: white supremacy was terrible and ubiquitous. Period. There was no need to equivocate or blame its victims.
Lorraine blended the tradition of Black literature and resistance with her radical politics in these early works. However, she consistently refused to see race merely as a form of class oppression, or Black people as merely the lumpen, a sector of the proletariat of America. Racism was, to her, a monster of its own that must be confronted.
Confrontation had degrees, however. It was one thing to protest or to write protest literature and articles. It was another to step into the line of sight of the powers that be. Though Lorraine had come from a family that challenged the color line, they had done so while remaining hewn to patriotic ideals of American liberal democracy and capitalism. In the early 1950s, however, she stepped boldly onto another path. She had to know it was risky. Her mentors Du Bois and Paul Robeson were prime targets within an intellectual and political community of Black socialists and communists who were under surveillance. Being a communist wasn’t strange back then. It didn’t have the sting of revulsion attached to it that one often senses today. But it was, in the United States of the early 1950s, most certainly an identity that made you vulnerable to steady attack from the powerful. In 1951, Du Bois had circulated a petition protesting nuclear weapons, and in response he was arrested and indicted for being an agent of the Soviet Union. As a result of the trial, he became a pariah in many circles. At the time when Lorraine sat before him as a student, he was so stigmatized that he found himself struggling to buy groceries. And in 1952, his passport was revoked. The State Department claimed they took it because they could not authorize him to attend a peace conference in Canada, but it had the effect of limiting his connection and political influence and potentially his moving abroad.
Paul Robeson’s passport had been revoked even earlier, in 1950, the year Lorraine had arrived in New York. The revocation was dramatic. Robeson, a global performer, attempted to renew his passport in order to work. Before granting him the new passport, the State Department requested that he sign an affidavit declaring that he was not a member of the Communist Party and that he was loyal to the United States. Robeson refused to do so. He was thereafter denied a passport for eight years.
As a result of Robeson being denied the right to travel abroad, Lorraine was asked to go as his representative to the Inter-American Peace Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, in March of 1952. The conference, a communist gathering, raised concerns across the Americas. It had been originally planned for Buenos Aires, Argentina, then Brazil, and then Chile, where it was formally banned by the government. It was finally set for Uruguay. Many prospective delegates were refused visas and passports and otherwise prevented from attending. Lorraine slyly obtained a passport under the pretense that she was going to be vacationing in Europe.
The answer to the question why Lorraine was chosen as a representative for Robeson can be found in who she had shown herself to be in just under two years’ time: a diligent student, a worker, a laborer for the cause of freedom, and also an artist like Robeson. She was, in a sense, his and his friend Du Bois’s political daughter. She could be Robeson’s proxy. As she was wont to do with meaningful events in her life, Lorraine wrote a fictional vignette about the trip. In it, a
wife has been banned from travel because of her activism, but she gets her husband to travel to South America for a peace conference in her stead. In Lorraine’s story, a self-possessed young woman is at the vanguard, not the proxy.
Lorraine accepted the responsibility granted by Robeson, and was one of five US delegates at the 280-delegate conference. The American delegation consisted of Angel Torres, a Puerto Rican seaman; a Mrs. Schwartz of Chicago; Mary Russak of the New York Labor Conference for Peace; and Elmer Bendiner of the National Guardian. All of them were affiliated in some way with communist peace organizations. Other delegates came from Venezuela, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Chile, and Colombia, in addition to local organizers from Uruguay.
The gathering began secretively because Uruguay, like the previous countries from which it had been canceled, also declared it illegal. The subterfuge consisted of delegates pretending they were having parties by playing loud music and dancing outdoors. Whenever they retreated indoors, they delivered conference papers. On Lorraine’s first full day of the conference, she attended a women’s meeting. She sat in the audience and listened to an address by a former woman deputy of the Uruguayan parliament. After the address ended there was some communication in Spanish that Lorraine didn’t understand. The crowd applauded, although Lorraine didn’t know what for. A woman approached her and said, in English, that Lorraine had been elected as one of the honored women who should sit on the presidium and speak. Stunned, Lorraine stepped up to deliver her report, with the help of a translator. Midway through, she was interrupted by a police officer who strode into the room. The women quickly pretended that they were having a prissy ladies’ tea. Once he left, and the coast was clear, Lorraine finished her report. At its conclusion a Brazilian woman brought her a bouquet of red carnations. Lorraine was deeply moved. She thought of the women who had been jailed and terrorized in the US for their activism, she thought of her people suffering, and she was honored to be selected, the sole Black American woman at the conference, to represent them all.
As the sessions were being held indoors, local protestors took to the streets to object to the government prohibition against the conference. Dockworkers, trade unionists, and journalists demanded a repeal of the ban. A delegation appeared before the Department of State in Montevideo and won a permit to hold the conference on the condition that no nation, and by this they meant the United States, be attacked by name.
After this victory, five thousand people took to the plaza. It was nighttime, but a platform at the center of the plaza was lit by floodlights. Lorraine stepped up on the platform and played a tape of Paul Robeson’s voice greeting the delegates, and the crowd cheered. Afterward, Lorraine was embraced and told repeatedly that Latin Americans stood in solidarity with Black Americans.
Lorraine found common ground there, and not just on the question of peace. She met Uruguayan activists who opposed racial discrimination and exclusion in their country. Later, in a written newspaper report of her time in Uruguay, she recounted marching in tandem with other young people of the Americas. Lorraine felt her persistent anger at police officers rise up in Uruguay as it often did in the States, but she walked with a group that was fighting back against the cops’ bullying ways. And that thrilled her. Armed with a hopefulness about the possibilities of struggle, she said, “We began to walk, I shall never know where so many young people came from and of course there were police along the streets with their long swords at their sides and their arms crossed and their faces drawn into those long sober expressions peculiar to police all over the world—and these young people linked my arms with theirs and we began to walk four abreast through the streets of Montevideo.”24 They sang, and Lorraine, with a young Argentinian man on her right and a young Brazilian man on her left, felt the pulse of the future, their linked fate pumping through linked arms.
It was a stark contrast to the United States, a place where, as she described, so many young men were turned into “monsters” in service to the US military. The gathering itself wasn’t huge, but it felt that way to Lorraine. Rather than the hodgepodge of protestors on corners in the Village, she was among thousands singing for freedom.
Before Lorraine left the States for South America, the Montevideo conference had been declared illegal by the US State Department. Lorraine knew that by attending she would put herself more directly in the path of surveillance and judgment from the US government. Several months after her triumphant return, in July of 1952, a representative of the State Department came to her mother’s home and took Lorraine’s passport away.25 She’d sit, the following year, at Du Bois’s knee at the Jefferson School of Social Science. Teacher and student were condemned by the state. And the FBI began their surveillance of her.
The record the government kept of Lorraine in the following years was one of both visibility and invisibility. They would look for everything, and see very little.
CHAPTER FOUR
Bobby
I do wish we were closer in some matters so that there were no aspects of my problems that we could not share. [. . .] We are really terribly different kinds of people.1
—Lorraine to Bobby
IN A LETTER TO HER FRIEND EDYTHE, Lorraine wrote about her life in New York:
See only foreign movies, no plays hardly, attend meetings almost every night, sing in a chorus, eat all the foreign foods in N.Y., go for long walks in Harlem and talk to my people about everything on the streets, usher at rallies, make street corner speeches in Harlem and sometimes make it up to the country on Sundays. [. . .] Write stories and articles for all the little journals of the working class around. Supposed to get married about September.2
I have thought about that last sentence: “Supposed to get married.” It might just be that Lorraine didn’t go for conventional “feminine” frivolousness, and for that reason it sounds flip. Maybe they’d talked about her betrothed, Robert Nemiroff—or as she called him, Bobby—many times before, and this was just quick information. Perhaps she was afraid to tell Edythe, so she wrote like she was ripping off a Band-Aid. Or maybe Lorraine was ambivalent.
Lorraine and Bobby met early in 1952 at a protest against racially discriminatory hiring practices at New York University. He was a graduate student there. Bobby was just under a year older than Lorraine, Jewish, and a native New Yorker. They were different from one another. But both were, as Lorraine’s friend Douglas Turner Ward would describe it, on the rebound. Bobby had been briefly married before. Lorraine had been engaged to a “Harlem slickster” named Roosevelt “Rosie” Jackson. Rosie was gorgeous, a leader of the Labor Youth League, urbane, and very working class—of the milieu Lorraine admired. But in addition to all those appealing traits, Rosie was enamored of all the bourgeois trappings that Lorraine had put behind her. More devastating, Rosie became a heroin junkie, and his addict’s profligacy got Lorraine evicted from her Harlem apartment. So that ended that.
When Bobby came around, different as he was from her ideal, and from her, he and Lorraine did share a great deal: they were both members of the radical left, intellectuals, and artists. Bobby would become something much more than just her husband. He was a friend until her death, a caretaker, one who encouraged and facilitated her writing, and after her death the one who ensured her legacy.
Lorraine wasn’t nearly as sure about Bobby as he was about her that first year they were dating. She was honest about it. In a letter, written the day after Christmas in 1952 from her family home in Chicago, however, she declared her love for him. And her intentions:
My Dear Bob,
Once again I wrote you a very long letter—the important simple things which it said were that I have finally admitted to myself I do love you, you wide-eyed immature un-sophisticated revolutionary.
She claimed to have thrown away that sentimental piece in favor of “this breezy little missle [sic].”3
The letter proceeds oddly and yet sweetly into a list of assertions about her life, and his, and their relationship. About her work she said:<
br />
1. I am a writer. I am going to write.
2. I am going to become a writer.
3. Any real contribution I can make to the movement can only be the result of a disciplined life. I am going to institute discipline in my life.
4. I can paint. I am going to paint.
The END4
The declarations that she already is a writer, is going to write, and will become a writer are at once, it seems, a literal fact (she had begun publishing here and there) and a statement about both her ambition and her identity. In contrast, while she asserts that she can paint and is going to paint, she doesn’t call herself a painter. It’s not even clear whether “I can paint” is a declaration of skill or simply a statement that nothing is keeping her from doing something she loves.
But her weakness on both matters and more, by her own judgment, was a lack of discipline. Lorraine was restless, seeking, searching, and interested in dozens of things. She was always doing, never lazy or indulgent, but not disciplined. At least not yet.
Following her statement about vocations, she shared her feelings about Bobby. She declared her love for him, “problems be damned,” and her need for him. They would, she said, struggle together. He is what she wanted in a man. The words are humorous, sweet, and clinical at once. She sounds removed but convinced:
My sincerest political opinion is that we have reached a point in a truly beautiful relationship—where it may become the fullest kind of relationship between a man and a woman. I want it that way (stop blushing).
. . . That it is possible that our sharing a life together would be a rather beautiful thing.
. . . Pilar was wrong—the earth doesn’t “move.”
The END5
Lorraine moved rather matter-of-factly through the case for their union. She said she loved him; there were problems, but she believed in the possibility of fulfillment and beauty. And yet she concluded with a reference to the characters in Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. In the relevant scene, Hemingway’s two protagonists, Robert and Maria, have just made love for the first time. They encounter their friend Pilar, who insists upon knowing “how it was.” Maria finally responds, under pressure, by saying that “the earth moved.” Pilar is at once mystified and expert, declaring that the “earth moves” only three times in a person’s life.
