by Imani Perry
Ruby Dee, who played Ruth Younger in the play, described feeling anxious around Lorraine because of her impressive mind. And yet Lorraine was still young and hopeful and more than a little insecure. Though she had not followed the expected course for a good, bourgeois young Negro lady, Lorraine wrote to her mother, Nannie, a bit shyly, that she hoped the play would make her mother proud.
It had been a long time in the making. From her first publication, “Flag from a Kitchenette Window,” with its gesture to Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Kitchenette Building,” she’d shown signs that the source of her father’s wealth would become the substance of her art. And she’d kept rewriting versions of her childhood encounter with white mob violence when they moved out of the boundaries of the ghetto. The details of her play were different from those of Lorraine’s family, but squarely within the life she knew and lived.
A Raisin in the Sun used her mentor Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” as an epigraph and the source of its title. Hughes’s poem is a meditation on deferred dreams. The consequence, he suggests, might be explosive outbursts, woundedness, depression, or as Lorraine took up, sweltering and defeated people barely clinging to parched hopes, dried up like a raisin in the sun.
But we also ought to read Lorraine’s play alongside Gwendolyn Brooks. In Brooks’s “Kitchenette Building,” the poet asks if dreams might exist in the kitchenette apartment, despite all the constraint and the pressure. Hughes asks what happens to them when they do. Lorraine enters the interior of each of her characters, members of a family with a dead father’s insurance money and the choices it brings, and she answers Brooks’s question by finding all their dreams, the dreams of Black people trapped in the ghetto, and she depicts the barriers—the harrowing prospect of deferral—that Hughes anticipates. Her answer to both literary predecessors—and Lorraine was quite explicit about this in her interviews about the play—is that stepping toward something, or what she called the “affirmative” deeds of her characters, and stepping away from the limits imposed by a society bent on your destruction, was a revolutionary and liberatory move no matter what was bound to come. She had finally figured out how to answer Ellison’s “Harlem Is Nowhere” fully: racism was everywhere in Black America, but so was the human constitution necessary to fight it.
A Raisin in the Sun was received with acclaim and became wildly popular, though a few of the reviews were condescending and vaguely racist. There is a photograph of Lorraine taken by Gordon Parks from the cast party at Sardi’s opening week. Her eyes are glassy—probably she’s had a little wine—and at once stunned and joyful. Her skin glistens, her hair is rumpled. She is elegant in a black dress (her go-to choice for formal gatherings) as she watches musicians play. Such delight was preceded by years of loss and restlessness, failure, depression, loneliness, and also persistent seeking and experimentation and reading, learning, and most of all a commitment to what she took to be right, good, and meaningful. She was young, but so much had been packed in the previous eleven years. This was not a Cinderella story.
But it would become a story of illusion, or perhaps fantasy. Maybe a more straightforward word like misperception is warranted. The point is that as popular as the play was and is, it was woefully misunderstood if one believes that the author’s intent matters. In 1958, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, directed the special agent in New York to determine whether Lorraine’s play was communist in content. The bureau collected reviews and playbills, and even sent agents to view the play. One said, “The play contains no comments of any nature about Communism as such . . . but deals essentially with negro aspirations, the problems inherent in their efforts to advance themselves, and varied attempts at arriving at solutions.”2 Though their worry regarding the message of the play was diminished once FBI agents saw it, the popularity of the play once it hit Broadway also chastened the bureau. They had planned to interview Lorraine, but decided against it. The note about this decision read, “In reconsidering an interview with subject it is to be noted that the subject and her play have received considerable notoriety almost daily in the NY press. In view of this it is felt than an interview with her would be inadvisable at this time since the possibility exists that the Bureau could be placed in an embarrassing position if it became known to the press that the Bureau was investigating the subject and/or the play.”3
Lorraine, though unwaveringly a member of the Far Left, had written a play that wasn’t overtly political, didactic, or heavy-handed. She had chosen to write characters who were true, who were oppressed, who sought freedom, and who were also shaped by the society in which they lived. Her craft had grown too nuanced to read as propaganda.
Lorraine found herself in an inversion of the quandary her mentor Langston Hughes described in the 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Hughes protested the demands from white Americans that Black artists produce exotic images, and from Blacks that Black writers produce respectable ones. According to him, both sets of pressures limited creativity. Lorraine was caught between one strand of Black politics that advocated for assimilationist respectability and another that consisted of Black Nationalist commitments and leftist critiques of the bourgeois. The way the mainstream interpreted Raisin placed it squarely within integrationist-assimilationist respectability. For example, Lorraine was quoted in an article as having said, “I told them this wasn’t a ‘Negro play.’ It was a play about honest-to-God, believable, many-sided people who happened to be Negroes.” But in her scrapbook, beside a clipping of this interview, Lorraine wrote these words: “Never said NO such thing. Miss Robertson [the interviewer] goofed—letter sent posthaste—Tune in next week.”4 Her letter of correction was never printed. The misquote was repeated and even changed to “I’m not a Negro writer—but a writer who happens to be a Negro.”
James Baldwin, with whom Lorraine became friends in 1958, got to the heart of the matter, however, when he talked about the impact of A Raisin in the Sun, writing in reflection, “I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater. And the reason was that never in the history of the American theater had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage. . . . But, in Raisin, black people recognized the house and all the people in it.”6 The popularity of her play with Black audiences provided a vision of what the theater could and should do for Black communities consistent with the aspirations and values of the artistic community she belonged to in New York. Ossie Davis, who would replace Poitier in the role of Walter Lee when Poitier left the production, also understood what some other Black leftists didn’t:
I have a feeling that for all she got, Lorraine never got all she deserved in regards to Raisin in the Sun—that she got success but that in her success she was cheated, both as a writer and a Negro. One of the biggest selling points about Raisin . . . was how much the Younger family was just like any other American family. Some people were ecstatic to find that “it didn’t really have to be about Negroes at all!” . . . This uncritical assumption, sentimentally held by the audience, powerfully fixed in the character of the powerful mother with whom everybody could identify immediately and completely, made any other questions about the Youngers, and what living in the slums of South Side Chicago had done to them, not only irrelevant and impertinent, but also, disloyal.6
But this was incorrect, according to Davis. And she did right not to hit the audience over the head with the politics because, as he said, “Lorraine’s play was meant to dramatize Langston’s question, not answer it.”7
Many years later, one of her harshest critics, Amiri Baraka, wrote:
We missed the essence of the work—that Hansberry had created a family on the cutting edge of the same class and ideological struggles as existed in the movement itself and among the people. What is most telling about our ignorance is that Hansberry’s play still remains overwhelmingly popular and evocative of black and white reality, and the masses of black people dug it true. . . . It is Lorraine Hansberry’s play which, though it seems
conservative in form and content to the radical petty bourgeoisie . . . is the accurate telling and stunning vision of the real struggle.8
Although much of the critique from the Black Left was unwarranted, and I think incorrect, it was curious that the public so easily embraced the play. Broadway aesthetics entail certain ethical commitments. Why didn’t A Raisin in the Sun trouble them? It might have something to do with how in the play Lorraine mastered the strategic art of appeal—the use of comfortable conventions for the sake of political argument and subversion. Given that the civil rights movement protest itself was so often a highly aestheticized performance of respectable citizenship, Lorraine’s play was consistent with the energy of struggle in that moment. In other words, by making a family that was conventional in some ways, Lorraine invited her audiences to identify with them as they struggled with the depth and breadth of American racism and inequality. The danger was, however, that people could stop at their comfort with the characters and never push themselves further on the question of racial injustice.
The skepticism of some members of the Black Left was heightened precisely because of the way Lorraine became a darling of the theater world. In that process, she was placed into categories that were familiar American archetypes, ones that lay in contrast to her politics as a leftist, a feminist, and a believer in global anticolonial, antiracist politics.
Oftentimes Lorraine was described in the press as a sort of ingénue. Her physical beauty and grace added to their confusion about who she actually was, politically speaking. Lorraine cut a striking figure long before her fame, as evinced by one FBI agent’s physical description in 1956: “5′4″ 105–110, Negro, Italian hair cut, no glasses, light brown, yellow shirt and black toreadors.”9 Several years later, as she became famous, it seemed journalists couldn’t help but mention her appearance. Vogue magazine described her as a woman still dressed in the “collegiate style.” The article about her in the June 1959 issue was accompanied by a full-page photograph taken by David Attie. All the images from that shoot were staged yet gorgeous. Attie captured her intellectual confidence, armor, and remarkable beauty. In some she wears a textured French-style boatneck top, chinos, thick white socks, and laced shoes and poses at her desk, or with crossed legs with a pen in hand, or leaning on her typewriter. The other set is more serious. She poses in front of a bookshelf and behind flowers in a dark blazer and pearls, arms crossed with a knowing smile. Her hair is freshly hot-ironed and her lipstick is conservative. She is glamorous in a manner that seems at once studied and casually self-assured.
The journalist Sidney Fields described her as “slight, small, pretty with a soft voice and a skyfull of life and ideas for opera librettos and new plays.” He also mentioned her penchant for self-deprecation and playfulness when speaking of her Ping-Pong game. “At the start I look devastating. At the finish everybody beats me badly.”10
Ted Poston, another journalist, referred to her as a “tousle-headed gamin” and “the comely but strong-minded lass,” and commented in a way that indicated he was both amused and taken by Lorraine:
There’ll be no rags-to-riches moving, for instance, from the third floor walk up apartment in Greenwich Village where she lives with her husband Robert Nemiroff and her happily neurotic collie, Spice. She seemed horrified at the idea the other day as she sat half curled in a living room chair, her black-sweatered arms clasped around slim legs clad in rumpled brown corduroy trousers.
“I’m a writer,” she said rather indignantly (an opinion endorsed by every first string drama critic in town), “and this is a workshop. We’re not celebrities or anything like that.
“But I am going to get the landlord to paint that hall. We’re not bohemians. They can’t carry us that far.”11
While some critics couldn’t get enough of her charm and beauty, others failed to see her as anything but one of the stereotypes of Black experience. It was as though the very word Negro conjured up images that overtook all evaluation. One wrote,
Miss Hansberry says that her many years of living in a squalid Negro ghetto inspired her to write the play depicting the plight of a typical Negro family who much like herself is trapped by housing discrimination, forced to live in tenement jungles. . . . Miss Lorraine Hansberry, twenty-eight-year-old authoress of the play, drew heavily upon her own background as a child and a young woman raised in the slum section of Chicago to produce this supreme effort.12
Of course Lorraine was raised on Chicago’s South Side, but her upbringing was far from squalid. Other critics overemphasized her middle-class status, as though the life of the Black working class was a wholly separate realm from Lorraine’s life. One wrote, “Her Chicago family was, unlike the family in the play, comfortably middle class.”13 Her middle-class background formed the basis for her dismissal by many Black leftists who ought to have known better, both because of her history of political activism and because they, like she, certainly knew that class distinctions in the Black community were often more theater than substance.
Lorraine’s responses to the class-based dismissals of her work were nuanced rather than defensive. These people, thinking abstractly rather than empirically, misunderstood the position of the Black middle class and its distinction from its white counterpart. Lorraine saw this ignorance as the inevitable outcome of a segregated society. While white elites might not find themselves in the thrall of their working-class brethren, Black elites lived in the thick of the segregated ghetto. She described how her “two best friends in high school regarded themselves as much of the ‘middle class’ as I. Yet, one of them was the daughter of a postal clerk and the other the child of a chauffeur. Our dress habits, recreation and, in most ways, aspirations were virtually indistinguishable.”14
Lorraine was frustrated by some critical evaluations of the play, even as she understood them. She was particularly frustrated that Walter Lee’s “ends” were read without complication. They were deliberate and clearly shaped by Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, the WPA Negro in Illinois project’s publication Black Metropolis, and Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, which she considered an essential companion to the writings of Karl Marx. Walter Lee’s yearnings were a manifestation of Veblen’s theory of desire in a capitalist society, one that cut across class and caste. Her mastery of full characters, her sensitivity to speech and personality so that the characters never read as types, made the politics invisible to so many. But Lorraine intended to correct that.
In May of 1959 she wrote a letter to Bobby about a lecture she delivered at Roosevelt University. In it, she compared Arthur Miller’s classic character from Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, and her Walter Lee Younger and argued that Walter Lee had more heroic potential. The audience responded with a standing ovation. In an essay from the New York Times based on that talk, “Willie Loman, Walter Younger, and He Who Must Live,” Lorraine argued that Loman, that iconic figure of American drama, was a sign of the crisis provoked by the closing of frontier. He is “left with nothing but some left over values which had forgotten how to prize industriousness over cunning; usefulness over mere acquisition, and above all humanism over success.”15 Walter Younger, though wholly American, according to Lorraine, possessed a typicality that was different because he is Black and at every turn denied. His actions might affirm life rather than be caught in the death cycle of manifest destiny and consumerism.
This was in the tradition of Black Americans, according to Lorraine, a people who she says “have dismissed the ostrich and still sing ‘Went to the rock to hide my face, but the rock cried out: No hidin’ place down here!’” quoting the traditional Negro spiritual “Sinnerman,” which her dear friend Nina Simone would record six years later. Walter Lee’s assertion that they will move into the house despite the resistance of the white neighbors does not change the basic social order, according to Lorraine. It is not revolutionary. But it nevertheless matters a great deal, because it puts him at cross-purposes with “at least certain of his culture’s valu
es” and he draws “on the strength of an incredible people who historically have simply refused to give up.” He has “finally reached out in his tiny moment and caught that sweet essence which is human dignity, and it shines like the old star-touched dream that is in his eyes.”16
Even while defending her play, she accepted that in some quarters any critical judgment of it was attacked as racist, and she found that amusing. And yet “the ultra sophisticates have hardly acquitted themselves less ludicrously, gazing coolly down their noses at those who are moved by the play and going on at length about ‘melodrama’ and/or ‘soap opera.’”17
Though she said some critics got the play terribly wrong, Lorraine admitted her own failures. The problem was just that Raisin’s critics had failed to actually ascertain what was wrong with it. She instructed them that the real problem with Raisin was it lacked a central character who anchored the play. She said that while some saw that as an inventive choice, it was a consequence of her indecisiveness and the limits of her skill. I am not sure Lorraine was correct. Mastery of the ensemble form was perhaps her greatest gift. But regardless of whether one takes her position or mine, her confident reading of her own work is unusual in its sharp assessment. It often amounted to quite brilliant ways of saying “they have no idea what they’re talking about.”18 In particular, and this became a recurring point of hers, she was highly critical of those who believed obscurity, total uniqueness, and inscrutability were markers of artistic sophistication. They attacked her play’s simplicity and use of convention or what she called “old bones,” but she believed more meaningful discussion tended to “delve into the flesh which hangs from those bones and its implications in mid century American drama and life.”19
