by Imani Perry
A glimmer of the source of her urgency can be found in a letter she wrote to the New York Post in 1959. She praises Billie Holiday’s biographer, William Dufty, for an article he’d written about the recently deceased singer. There is a sense of yearning and admiration in the letter. She wrote,
There is a bold and ungarnished, yet sweet humanity in the writing which is undoubtedly the right, the incredibly right kind of tribute to what was apparently her true greatness as an artist and human being. I never knew her. William Dufty makes it possible. I am, from his account of her life, much moved. I mention greatness above because of the way it haunts Mr. Dufty’s testimony, in the things he selects to remember: her appraisal of Louis, her pronouncements of the world race question, and what the Spanish speaking people call her on the street.38
One gets the feeling that Lorraine was already contemplating what it meant to be understood well and remembered fully. She wanted the same for herself.
A Raisin in the Sun was such a rousing success on Broadway that there was soon buzz about it becoming a film. Lorraine was hesitant at first about doing a movie. She was fearful of the “glossy little paws of Hollywood.”39 But she gave in because of the much larger audience that could see the film, asking herself, “How could a writer who literally took pride in what some intended as an epithet, the label of ‘popular writer’ not see it. The popular writer in me did see it.”40
In writing the screenplay, Lorraine took the Youngers out of the kitchenette and into the landscape of Chicago. She displayed the racism the Youngers faced day in and day out: scenes between Lena Younger and her employer, Lena going to the grocery store in her neighborhood and seeing the poor quality of produce, and then traveling out to white neighborhoods to shop, where there was better food but where she was mistreated. Lorraine also included a scene in which Walter Lee, George Murchison, and Joseph Asagai listen to a street-corner Black nationalist. Additionally, she wanted the film to begin with a view of the South Side of Chicago in all its ghetto realism. Though the film crew shot three hours of footage with these additional scenes, all the overtly political revisions ended on the cutting-room floor.
In one of her journal lists of likes and hates, the producer of the film, David Susskind, took a hit. So did the politically moderate Sidney Poitier. Privately she felt less warmly about the film than the Times article she wrote about it suggested. But the movie was, notwithstanding her ambivalence, enormously successful. Lorraine was nominated by the Screen Actors Guild Awards for the best screenplay of the year and won an award at Cannes. Perhaps it was the time. Perhaps it was the fame. There was only so much she could do with Raisin. But in her deeds in the following years, there would be no more mistaking her politics at all.
Lorraine’s artistic desires sharpened. In a prospectus she wrote on December 13, 1962, for what she imagined would be a theater devoted to Black drama (she called it the John Brown Community Theatre), she envisioned an institution that rejected the rules of markets and money and was wholly devoted to Black Americans. She described it as
a theatre dedicated to, and propagated by, the aspirations and culture of the Afro-American people of the United States.
. . . a theater wherein the cultural heritage of that people, which owes to their African ancestry, will find expression and growth.
. . . a theater which, at the same time, will readily, freely and with the spirit of creativity of all mankind, also utilize all and any forces of the Western heritage of that same people in its arts.41
Lorraine wanted hers to be a theater neither bound by commercialism nor the snobbery or self-congratulatory postures of the avant-garde or arts establishment.
Lorraine believed in art, and she also believed in struggle. She dreamed about what her people might do, and what she might do, constantly. Though she had yearned for fame, it was a bitter pill. Perhaps this is why as she encountered fame, her melancholy and her need for meaningful community grew deeper. As she stepped into celebrity, she found friends who shared her yearnings and dreams. Though they never quite filled the void, they illuminated and loved one another. They dreamed and created together.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Trinity
We had that respect for each other which is perhaps only felt by people on the same side of the barricades, listening to the accumulating hooves of horses and the heads of tanks.
—James Baldwin about Lorraine1
We never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk.
Nina Simone about Lorraine2
ON MAY 12, 1959, Studs Terkel interviewed the newly famous Lorraine at her mother’s apartment for his radio program. Lorraine described her time with the writer and working-class hero in a letter to Bobby: “Studs came out and did a tape last night and stayed for hours—because we liked him very much. He is a very wonderful and very interesting man and we got to drinking and eating and talking with Mamie and Carl and Perry and Vince up front and it was really good. . . . I asked if he had met Beauvoir when she was here and he said yes and that she is a wonderful woman who strictly knows what the hell she is about.”3
In the midst of the interview Terkel asked Lorraine what she thought about the scene of contemporary young Black writers. She responded by saying there wasn’t much happening. Not much at all except for a young exile who had come back, along with some other writers, from places like Paris and Rome. From what she’d read of this young man, she said he was “undoubtedly one of the most talented American writers walking around. . . . If he can wed his particular gifts, which are just way beyond most of us trying to write on many levels—with material of substance, we have the potential of a great American writer.”4
He was James Arthur Baldwin. Jimmy, as she called him.
The friendship that grew between Lorraine and Jimmy is storied. It was both an intellectual and a soulful partnership. Less often described, but no less significant, was her relationship with the singer Nina Simone. The three of them formed a sort of trinity. Geniuses, they produced enduring work at the cusp of the great social transformations of the mid-twentieth century. All three were, according to early twenty-first-century terminology, queer, though only Jimmy’s sexuality was publicly known. They struggled together at the crossroads of social, familial, and parental legacies with the tide of revolutionary action and deed. Jimmy and Nina are still everywhere in the public eye and popular culture. Their archives are widely shared. Books about their lives are numerous. Everyday people know their faces and voices. Lorraine remains in their shadows, but she was key to them and they to her.
Jimmy first saw Lorraine in 1958 at the Actors Studio, in Manhattan. She was there to see a theatrical workshop production of his novel Giovanni’s Room. She sat in the bleachers. But when the lights came up and luminaries of American theater expressed how much they disliked the play, little and unknown Lorraine argued with them intensely. Jimmy was grateful. “She seemed to speak for me; and afterward she talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten. A small, shy, determined person, with that strength dictated by absolutely impersonal ambition: she was not trying to ‘make it’—she was trying to keep the faith.”5
Lorraine’s advocacy for Jimmy’s play was likely born of a number of feelings. The kinship of queerness, though silent, was undoubtedly one element. This work, she knew, was important. And then she shared his persistent questioning of the rules of patriarchy and religion. After all, the character most like her in Raisin is famously slapped in the face for questioning the existence of God. There was also the matter of Lorraine’s constant racial solidarity. She took up for Black folks, as it were, and often felt herself to be at battle against the racism they experienced at the hands of white critics who frequently pointed fingers at them without introspection. She’d also already seen the potential in Jimmy. And Lorraine never hesitated as a critic, despite her youth, to make assessments of promise and possibi
lity. Not only that, she also hoped to steer his promise.
Jimmy wasn’t completely correct in his assessment of her, however. Lorraine did want fame, she wrote as much in her diaries. But he was right, she wanted to produce meaningful art far more than fame, and wasn’t willing to compromise.
Lorraine and Jimmy met again when A Raisin in the Sun was in tryouts in New Haven and he came to see it. That was when their friendship really began. About a month before their reencounter he’d had a dream “in which he was joined by a beautiful, very young black woman who, after performing a song and cakewalk with him, seemed to merge with him ‘her breasts digging against my shoulder-blades.’”6 Jimmy prophesied Lorraine.
Jimmy would refer to her as Sweet Lorraine. Sometimes her mother did, too, in letters. “Sweet” is a lesser-known archetype of Black American culture. White Americans generally know sassiness and chops-busting Sapphire. They do not know sweet. Sweet is not, as it might seem if one attends only to the mainstream rules of American gendering, a diminishing word. Among Black Americans it describes a welcoming and caring disposition and a way of being cherished. Those women who are called sweet can be and often are steely and strong. This was how Jimmy saw Lorraine. Plus he was passionate about music. And I believe she called to mind the pop standard “Sweet Lorraine,” probably the Nat King Cole version, in which he sings about her beauty, her brilliance, and leading her “down the aisle.”
Jimmy wasn’t going to marry Lorraine. But he did lead her down an aisle of sorts. And she did the same for him. He was already famous when they met. His semiautobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain had been published in 1953 and Giovanni’s Room in 1956. The latter had stirred up quite a bit of controversy because it portrayed a tender and tragic love affair between two men. Lorraine was six years his junior and new to fame. And yet he treated her as an intellectual peer, a confidant, and at times a friend whom he implored for help. In the spring of 1959 he wrote her a letter asking for assistance with his play The Amen Corner. Jimmy wrote,
Out here on a sand bar, working and taking walks by the ocean, which seems to be my particular brand of therapy . . . back at the end of the month. This is a begging letter. I wish you’d make a point of giving Lloyd Richards the script of Amen as soon as possible. . . . I think I’d like to try to explain to him that my reluctance—or something—about handing him the script had only to do with a certain, treacherous shyness, and with my reservations about my script.7
He was vulnerable and playful at once. “Begging,” that simple word, has a particular Black vernacular ring. It is often issued as a complaint about somebody who asks for too much. He wrote this word, and writing was of such importance for the two of them, and it cued their common ground, the soulfulness in these highbrow thinkers. Both Lorraine and Jimmy tended toward the speech affectations that public figures routinely adopted in those days. They enunciated and sounded almost haughty in public. Yet the rhythm of everyday Black speech is there in their private communication. She answered on her birthday, May 19, teasing him:
Jimmie Dear—Got your “begging” note yesterday. Been out of form myself for a week. Here is Lloyd’s address. . . . Have fun on your sand bar and work very hard. I shall try to get the manuscript to Lloyd—though I ordinarily see him seldom. Haven’t read it myself yet—haven’t even read a newspaper since I last saw you. Love, Lorraine.8
It wasn’t the only time Jimmy would ask her to help him with his nervousness about writing. But most of the time their interaction was simply that of a raucously good friendship. As the writer Gene Smith described, “She and James Baldwin were great friends, although at times a passerby might believe that they were about to slug it out at a party or at his place or hers. They yelled at each other, ranted and raved, drank. They also laughed.”9
Jimmy would, in several places, try to describe their bond. There were other figures, like Medgar Evers or Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X, about whom he also wrote retrospectively, and loved, but that was always quite different from his memories of Lorraine. It might have had to do with her gender. When he wrote about the assassinations of these other friends, men, he tried and charged the nation. He also autopsied it, exposed its festering innards. But about Lorraine he wrote intimately, though he also insisted upon her genius, power, and righteousness. In describing her as “Sweet Lorraine,” Jimmy said:
That’s the way I always felt about her, and so I won’t apologize for calling her that now. She understood it: in that far too brief a time when we walked and talked and laughed and drank together, sometimes in the streets and bars and restaurants of the Village, sometimes at her house, gracelessly fleeing the houses of others; and sometimes seeming, for anyone who didn’t know us, to be having a knock-down-drag-out battle. We spent a lot of time arguing about history and tremendously related subjects in her Bleecker Street, and later Waverly Place, flats. And often, just when I was certain that she was about to throw me out as being altogether too rowdy a type, she would stand up, her hands on her hips (for these down-home sessions she always wore slacks), and pick up my empty glass as though she intended to throw it at me. Then she would walk into the kitchen, saying, with a haughty toss of her head, “Really, Jimmy. You ain’t right, child!” With which stern put-down she would hand me another drink and launch into a brilliant analysis of just why I wasn’t “right.” I would often stagger down her stairs as the sun came up, usually in the middle of a paragraph and always in the middle of a laugh. That marvelous laugh. That marvelous face. I loved her, she was my sister and my comrade.10
Full of drink and mirth, he left her place enchanted by her marvelous face and laugh. And they shared something profound: loneliness. He wrote, “Her going did not so much make me lonely as make me realize how lonely we were. We had that respect for each other which is perhaps only felt by people on the same side of the barricades, listening to the accumulating hooves of horses and the heads of tanks.”11
Their retreat into “down home” talk, the echo of the South in both of these second-generation migrants in apartments and bars in the Village, was essential. It beat back loneliness of a personal sort, which both of them carried everywhere. It also must have been a relief to cast off the burdens of being in the public eye. And yet, when they were in the public eye, together, they could function like a marvelous tag team, their ideas bouncing back and forth, rapid-fire. They both participated in a roundtable titled “Liberalism and the Negro,” hosted by Commentary magazine, a publication that vaulted the literati of the 1950s and 1960s into the sphere of public intellectualism. This discussion consisted of a group of writers: Langston Hughes (Lorraine’s mentor and Jimmy’s sometime nemesis), Alfred Kazin, Nat Hentoff, Emile Capouya, and Lorraine and Jimmy. At one point, Jimmy responded to a question from Hentoff, who wondered whether Black writers had sufficiently questioned the value of assimilation.
BALDWIN: I feel that there’s been far too little.
HENTOFF: In other words, equal for what?
BALDWIN: Equal for what, yes. You know, there’s always been a very great question in my mind of why in the world—after all I’m living in this society and I’ve had a good look at it—what makes you think I want to be accepted?12
Then Lorraine jumped in:
HANSBERRY: Into this.
BALDWIN: Into this.
HANSBERRY: Maybe something else.
BALDWIN: It’s not a matter of acceptance or tolerance.
We’ve got to sit down and rebuild this house.
HANSBERRY: Yes, quickly.
BALDWIN: Very quickly, and we have to do it together. . . . You know, in order to be a writer you have to demand the impossible, and I know I’m demanding the impossible. It has to be—But I also know it has to be done. You see what I mean?
In the same discussion, they echoed each other another time, this time with Jimmy responding to Lorraine’s calls. In considering the failures of Southern white writers Carson McCullers and William Faulkner when it came to racial matters, Lorrain
e said:
William Faulkner has never in his life sat in on a discussion in a Negro home where there were all Negroes. It is physically impossible. He has never heard the nuances of hatred, of total contempt from his most devoted servant and his most beloved friend, although she means every word when she’s talking to him and will tell him profoundly intimate things. But he has never heard the truth of it. . . . The employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house. You see, people get this confused. They think that the alienation is equal on both sides. It isn’t. We’ve been washing everybody’s underwear for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean.13
And then Jimmy said Lorraine’s point was very important, and remarked that Carson McCullers’s treatment of Black people “doesn’t reveal anything about the truth of Negro life, but a great deal about the state of mind of the white Southern woman who wrote it.”14
This call and response between Jimmy and Lorraine would also move throughout their written work. At the beginning, it was in the way they both struggled with the legacy of Richard Wright. He was the great Black literary father. Wright had taken an early interest in Jimmy as a young writer, but Jimmy turned on his mentor and attacked Wright’s Native Son. He considered Wright a nihilist who diminished the full humanity of Black people. Lorraine agreed, although she thought the way Jimmy upbraided Wright gave fodder to racist white people (despite her own rather aggressive criticisms of Wright in Freedom). With A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine made her criticisms of Wright’s messages more oblique than Jimmy’s. Like Native Son, Raisin begins with the sound of an alarm clock, alerting the viewer or reader that one is waking up in the ghetto. In Native Son, the protagonist Bigger’s first duty is to kill a rat that has entered their cramped apartment. Lorraine rejected Wright’s analogy between rats and Black people. When Lena Younger has chosen the new house, her daughter-in-law Ruth refers to their soon-to-be departed kitchenette apartment as a rattrap. The description gives Lena pause, and she responds by telling Ruth a story about Walter Lee’s and her dreams. The message is they are not rats; they are human. The most dramatic rat reference of the play comes after Walter Lee has been swindled out of their money, including that which would send his sister, Beneatha, to college. Beneatha refers to Walter Lee not as a man but rather a “toothless rat.” Lena Younger angrily lectures Beneatha. She tells her, when you measure a man, measure him right, meaning she must have sensitivity to his experience when evaluating him. Yet again, through the voice of Lena Younger, Lorraine says: we are not simply what circumstance has made of us, we are more.15
