Looking for Lorraine

by Imani Perry

  Lorraine made a joke of the fact that their intimacy wasn’t one that made the earth move, at least for her. Yet she believed a life together would be a beautiful thing. She might have been honest to a fault, or felt a bit of bittersweetness about the whole thing, or was just bitingly teasing. In any case, their love affair proceeded. It was a union that in a sense represented the avant-garde of a particular time and place. They were left-wing bohemians, an interracial couple dedicated to radical social transformation who, after Lorraine moved out of Harlem, settled in Greenwich Village, made art, and attended protests.

  They scheduled their wedding for earlier than Lorraine anticipated in her letter to Edythe. It was held on June 20 in Lorraine’s hometown. The Chicago Defender reported gleefully on the marriage of a princess of the Negro elite with a photograph of a grinning and gorgeous Lorraine. But what ought to have been a joyful occasion was overcast by tragedy. In the days leading up to their wedding, Lorraine and Bobby learned that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, two Jewish American communists who were convicted of being spies for the Soviet Union, had exhausted all their appeals and were sentenced to death. The Rosenberg case had become an important cause for the Left, a sign of how far the anticommunist hysteria would go. The answer was, so far that circumstantial evidence would condemn the parents of young children to death. President Eisenhower made a statement, along with his refusal to grant the clemency that thousands across the world begged for. He said, “I can only say that, by immeasurably increasing the chances of atomic war, the Rosenbergs may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world. The execution of two human beings is a grave matter. But even graver is the thought of the millions of dead whose deaths may be directly attributable to what these spies have done.”6

  On the afternoon of Saturday, June 19, Lorraine and Bobby picketed in front of the federal courthouse in Chicago for the Rosenbergs. Julius was executed that night at 8 p.m. He died after one shock in the electric chair. Ethel was next. They electrocuted her once, twice, three times. But her heart was still beating. The executioner administered two more shocks. Smoke rose above her head and through her ears and nostrils. Five shocks, and she was finally dead.7 Lorraine was devastated. She wrote:

  We had come to a wedding. We had come to Chicago to lose our selves in the Bridal Song. And then there were those moments when the news came. And we spoke of it quietly to one another—our voices soft under the discussion of where the cake would be placed and when the photographers would arrive. [. . .] Our voices above the champagne glasses, our eyes questioning one another between the fresh fragrant flowers in their gleaming pots on the coffee tables of the wedding house, festive flowers. The Chicago heat in the vast living room suddenly overpowering the senses, some grim terrible fire within suddenly making it more awful, more stifling—the desire to fling the glass into the flowers, to thrust one’s arms into the air and run out of the house screaming at ones country men to come down out of the apartments, down from the houses, to get up from the television sets, from the dinner tables. [. . .] The bride sits a moment in a corner alone to herself—she thinks

  And what shall I say to my children? And how shall I explain such a thing to them?8

  Lorraine wouldn’t have children and didn’t appear to want them. But she mourned the world and felt the shame of celebrating in the midst of such heartbreak. One can’t help but think about the Rosenberg children, ages six and ten, orphaned by the hysterics of the Cold War. Lorraine wondered, what did the bride and groom owe them and others of their generation?

  Bobby described the day succinctly, yet also poignantly: “We spent Saturday night picketing the courthouse in Chicago and we were married on Sunday . . . and they were executed Saturday night. And we had no heart for the wedding.”9

  But they retained their heart for art and politics. Lorraine resigned from Freedom but continued to write and organize locally with the same sense of passion. Lorraine’s mother, who had written angrily the prior year that she was worried and insisted that Lorraine must come home, was likely assuaged that Lorraine was finally a married lady. Respectable.

  To make a living, Lorraine occasionally worked as a waitress at the restaurant owned by Bobby’s parents, for whom she felt great affection (his mother was described by the FBI as fanatical communist), and took a variety of other jobs, mostly unsatisfying. The shortest was a four-day stint at a department store. She quit because the women working the floor were ordered about with a ringing bell. And for six months she put tags on fur coats in a clothing shop. Lorraine’s barely remunerative work as a member of the Left intelligentsia also continued. In 1954, she became an associate editor for the pocket-sized youth magazine New Challenge. A publication of the Labor Youth League, New Challenge featured punchy articles and eye-catching covers. Bobby also wrote for them, under the pseudonym Bob Rolfe. In standard McCarthy era fare, New Challenge was publicly attacked in a pamphlet released by the right-wing publication The New Counterattack. The authors accused New Challenge of corrupting American youth and referenced Lorraine by name. She was on the radar of conservatives, even as a struggling young artist in New York. But she wouldn’t stop.

  For Black American political life, 1954 was a watershed year, though Lorraine wasn’t entirely in step with the rest of Black America. In May, the US Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. The decision declared mandatory public school segregation unconstitutional and provided an important impetus to the civil rights movement and its militant integrationists. Lorraine’s mind was elsewhere. Several weeks before the opinion was reached, Lorraine was involved in activism to support Jacobo Árbenz de Guzmán, the democratically elected socialist president of Guatemala. But by June, Árbenz would be ousted by a US-supported coup d’etat.

  Earlier in 1954, Lorraine wrote publicly about a trial, though not about Brown. It was in a letter to the Reporter magazine regarding the trial of Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta, an independence movement leader in Kenya, had been arrested in October of 1952 for being affiliated with the Mau Maus, a group of radical anticolonialists who advocated armed revolution. Though Kenyatta was not in fact affiliated with the Mau Maus, he was sentenced by the colonial courts to seven years at hard labor. His subsequent appeal was denied.

  Lorraine’s letter was a response to a previously published article that described Africans as backward and underdeveloped, and attributed the actions of the Mau Maus and Kenyatta to that condition. Lorraine asserted that attributing cultural deficiency to the Mau Mau and Africans generally was a red herring intended to distract from the primary issue, which was “stark, brutal colonialism in one of its most ruthless expressions.” The previous author’s failure to acknowledge the details of British repression and domination, “the mass arrests of Africans; the destruction of entire villages; executions of great numbers of persons and various other methods of ‘retaliation’ which have even caused Englishmen to cry for investigation from the floor of parliament,” was to Lorraine a travesty.10 She went on to defend Kenyatta’s intellect and courage. In conclusion, Lorraine spoke specifically as a Black American woman who saw that the right side of the cause must be “with the courageous and heroic Black African men and women of Kenya and their great leader, Jomo Kenyatta.”11

  Lorraine claimed that a fundamental connection existed between the oppressed across the globe, and specifically between those of African descent wherever they were in the diaspora. She spoke in this moment not only as the pupil of Du Bois and of her uncle, Leo Hansberry, but also as a child of the expansive 1940s, as James Forman described it, one who had not been chastened by the repression of the Cold War. Lorraine’s international concerns were not entirely unique. Black newspapers also reported on the trial of Kenyatta, though the coverage paled in comparison to the Brown case. The content of Lorraine’s letter was a sign of her political orientation and where her primary attention lay, even as Black politics were heating up at home. Just two days before Lorraine’s twenty-fourth birthday the Brown rul
ing was front page news, in all American newspapers, Black and mainstream. But she didn’t have much to say about it. Of course, being a native of Chicago, Lorraine was well aware that even without segregation by law, segregation in fact could be quite violently maintained. She almost certainly anticipated the massive resistance that followed the Brown ruling. But still, the case signaled a sea change, a new terrain on which her generation’s organizing would unfold. It would be a case that mattered for her work, though she wasn’t particularly focused upon it at the time. In truth, Lorraine’s politics were increasingly on the margins of the Black political mainstream. The major civil rights organizations had largely separated themselves from the radical left in the late 1940s in the fever of postwar liberalism, symbolically and literally evidenced by Du Bois’s excommunication from the NAACP, an organization he cofounded and for which he was once a key figure. Lorraine’s political labors as a young adult had grown entirely within the structures of the Far Left, not the civil rights mainstream middle. For example, in a 1954 rally to restore Robeson’s passport, she delivered a speech that at once reflected his influence on her own work and life as an artist and also the internationalist political vision she embraced. In the speech, she made clear that she believed the US government had placed itself in opposition to the cause of freedom and liberty. This perspective encouraged her to continuously keep abreast of developments across the globe, to resist Western chauvinism, and to maintain a global set of politics.

  In describing Robeson, she said,

  This man is an American citizen, his forbearers fought tyranny on three continents, so that he might draw breath as a free being. His is a sacred heritage. When you infringe on his liberty you tamper with the labor and lives of generations of freedom seekers. We charge you with this responsibility. [. . .] We demand that [. . .] he be permitted once again to travel to the capitols and villages of the world so that his presence and his art and his humanity will again refresh the peoples of other lands and remind them that there remains still in this America of ours a people of dignity and courage and decency.12

  While still beloved by audiences, Robeson was, like his dear friend Du Bois, out of favor with the major civil rights organizations. But for Lorraine, he was still a beacon on a global stage. In the same gathering, speakers decried South African apartheid, which they accurately charged was modeled on US segregation, and the McCarran Act, which targeted “subversives” like them. Hers was a community that insisted upon fighting against unjust exploitation and economic domination and for racial justice all over the world as well as at home. They didn’t separate these concerns. Perhaps this is why it took some time for the change in US politics to come to the fore of Lorraine’s concerns. Her gaze was global.

  In the meantime, she had a full, though unsettling social and political life. In the summer of 1954 she took on a job at a multiracial communist summer camp called Camp Unity in upstate New York. Camp Unity, founded in 1927 and self-described as the “first proletarian summer colony,” was located in Wingdale, New York. A good deal of its appeal was due to its event programming each summer. Lorraine was director of the outdoor lawn program and responsible for organizing musical and theatrical performances. Her friend Alice Childress served as the director of drama, and other friends and acquaintances were fellow employees or guests. It should have been a task for which she was perfectly suited. But Lorraine’s restlessness returned. And with it came depression.

  She wrote to Robert:

  My Own Dear Husband,

  I am sitting here in this miserable little bungalow, in this miserable camp that I once loved so much, feeling cold, useless, frustrated, helpless, disillusioned, angry and tired. The week past that I spoke to you about was the height of all those things to the point where I didn’t care too much a couple of times whether or not I woke mornings.13

  She recovered in her own letter, at least in word, from such depths of sadness by focusing on the beauty around her. She meditated on the land: “hills, the trees, sunrise and sunset—the lake the moon and the stars / summer clouds—the poets have been right in these centuries darling, even in its astounding imperfection this earth of ours is magnificent.”14

  She then moved on to trifles: her frustration about the finances of the camp and that it means that some staff will be fired (and how it angered her to be asked to do the dirty work of dismissing them). In contrast to her irritation with people, nature almost seems medicinal in her account: a balm that doesn’t remove her suffering but gives her some refuge. It is somewhat ironic, however, that at this place called Camp Unity that it wasn’t other people but rather inanimate living things that eased her suffering, at least a little bit.

  In another letter written that summer, she complained vigorously to Bobby about the disorganization of the camp and the many failures of her coworkers. Lorraine’s hypercritical and impassioned complaints and her fussiness, depression, and aestheticism ebbed and flowed. An irrepressible confidence in her own intellect always stood alongside, and in dramatic contrast to, her uncanny ability to be deeply self-critical. And the depression remained. She wrote: “A couple of days I have been feeling so miserable that I didn’t want to do anything but build myself a tree house and forget it. You know what I mean—there are times when you are sure that peace in symphonies, and grass and sunlight and mountains is not to be found in life—and honey that is a desperate feeling.”15

  And yet, she left the countryside. Sometime that summer she went from Unity back to the city: not to New York but to Chicago. Lorraine and Robert spent most of the summer of 1954 apart, her handful of letters my sole evidence of their partnership in those days. In September, Lorraine wrote Bobby from Chicago, addressing him playfully as “Hello Bookie,” but between the lines were sadness, tension, and also a persistent depression. Her restlessness had completely overtaken her mood by then: “I am still a little nervous, smoking too much and remarkably restless and fidgety as I indicated on the telephone. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me. I haven’t called a single friend—my mother has been urging me to, But I dread seeing people—I am not being dramatic this time, I dread it something fierce.”16

  Her words are ones of yearning, for him, but also of ambivalence. She is wanting for something they don’t have, and she’s not afraid to say so. But at the same time she is passionately attached to him. He is her confidant, intimate, and friend.

  She writes, “I do wish we were closer in some matters so that there were no aspects of my problems that we could not share—and I get this is not the case. We are really terribly different kinds of people.” In one sentence, she tells Bobby she desires him; in another, she confesses she is troubled by things in their marriage.

  And then, Lorraine pivots suddenly from the difficulty in their relationship to the problems in her writing, which seemed to be an easier terrain for connecting, and an assessment of her own work ethic:

  I have re-read my play a couple times to my disgust. Had a new idea—a libretto. John Henry—“An original American folk opera” By Serge Hovey (sp) Libretto by Lorraine etc.

  This of course is why I don’t produce a goddamned thing—I am too full of dreams! I have quietly resolved—yes I will piddle around with a Libretto after My play is finished—my novel is well under way—I mean it! And according to that schedule and God knows what else between—it should take me 3 years to get around to the research—! Of course it will take Serge 3 years to really learn anything about Negro music.

  And then of course there is this tendency towards distraction—Lorraine the Actress . . . Lorraine the journalist, etc.17

  Her deep confidence is amusing and fascinating. For example, she judges how long it would take noted composer Serge Hovey to learn something or “anything” about Negro music, and yet she has an unfailing self-criticism about her own work as an artist. The vacillating, one surmises, is what made space for what would eventually be such a bold artistry, and yet one that was also sensitive and even tender.

&nbs
p; The letter reveals another side of her personality. She was a keen and sensitive reader, one for whom books were an aid for self-recognition. And at that moment, what she was reading was especially self-referential. She wrote, “I have been re-reading ‘You can’t go home again’ by Thomas Wolfe. There are things to be said for that boy! And some rather crushing things to be said against him, I’m afraid (with regard to the standard 3 Negroes, Jews and Woman). Anyhow it is especially fitting that I am reading it just now. I will tell you about it all frightfully profound I assure you—Don’t you wish rather desperately that your wife was a little less full of horse manure?”18

  Beyond her endearing self-deprecation, these words illuminate Lorraine’s deepest aspirations, anxieties, and emotions. The Wolfe novel is one about a celebrated writer who returns home to find that the community that he depicted in his most recent novel is unhappy with how they have been cast. They reject the writer for the way he has stripped them down and exposed their warts. He is forced to leave home again. The writer seeks his purpose in various corners of the globe and finally gives up and returns to the United States. Despite Wolfe’s flatfooted treatment of others, the “Negroes, Jews and Woman,” the story resonated with Lorraine. She was raised with the precept that one must never betray the race or the family. And yet, in her persistent habit of observation and dissection, she was finding things about the family worthy of examination and criticism of the sort that would of course provide useful literary fodder. She just had to work up the gumption to use it.