Looking for Lorraine

by Imani Perry

  Lorraine also worked on a novel, All the Dark and Beautiful Warriors, which was a response to Native Son. Her character Son (that is, not somebody’s nigger but somebody’s child) is an answer to Wright’s Bigger Thomas. Son was not rendered in naturalist form (Lorraine despised literary naturalism) and a mere product of his environment like Bigger. Son attempted to shape it. As she was wont to do, she reinterpreted her literary father, and Jimmy’s, to suit the world as she saw it.

  Jimmy preferred literary patricide. He wrote of Wright’s best-selling novel Native Son:

  Below the surface of this novel there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy. Bigger is Uncle Tom’s descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle. . . . Bigger’s tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human.16

  Jimmy’s criticism, ironically, was not unlike that of those who called Lorraine a social dramatist for having an explicit set of politics. Jimmy called Native Son “a protest novel.” The difference was, Wright denied the humanity of the oppressed. Recognizing the full humanity of Black folks was, to Jimmy’s mind and to Lorraine’s, necessary in the fight for freedom. Jimmy believed they had to tell the truth about the dangers of Wright-like thinking regardless of how white audiences might take it.

  That said, Lorraine’s and Jimmy’s politics were different. He wasn’t ever going to call himself a Marxist, communist, or nationalist. He was just committed to honesty, ideology be damned. Lorraine was insistently though creatively ideological. Lorraine leaned more toward social theorist, and Jimmy was to his core a critic, truth teller, and doer. And Jimmy didn’t refer to himself as gay, he just happened to “fall in love with a boy” a number of times, whereas Lorraine, though closeted, embraced the words lesbian and homosexual to define herself.

  However, the spirit of their work was always mutually sympathetic. Jimmy called A Raisin in the Sun a play in which Lorraine served as a witness to Black America. He did too. In perhaps his most famous book, the 1963 epistolary text The Fire Next Time, he answered Walter Lee’s climactic action. In Raisin, standing before his son, Walter Lee insists upon moving into the white neighborhood and rejects the offer of a lot of cash in exchange for maintaining segregation and abdicating his dignity. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin testifies to his nephew about his late father. Jimmy wants his nephew to see how his father (like their father before him) had been crushed by the forces of white supremacy in his life. He issues an appeal to his nephew’s generation to make use of their righteous anger rather than be distorted by it. Jimmy, a former child preacher, preaches to the Walter Lees of the world and to the others. He makes plain the wages of white supremacy.

  In the second essay of the slim book, Jimmy echoes Beneatha, the character in Raisin whom Lorraine based upon herself. Beneatha, headstrong and sophomoric, questions Christianity and the existence of God. Mrs. Younger responds by slapping her across the face. As long as she is in Lena Younger’s house, Beneatha learns, she is required to believe. Jimmy, too, questions American Christianity and the way in which it inures people, Black and white, to a vile order. Instead, he says, Americans ought to move beyond the status quo of their fears, beliefs, and oppressions. That was precisely what the young Beneatha, sometimes in a silly way, was trying to do. And what Lorraine and Jimmy tried to do in their lives also.

  The literary dialogue between Lorraine and Jimmy continued in their other work. James Baldwin’s play Blues for Mr. Charlie, which was completed in 1964, and Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs, which she worked on for years, were a sort of call and response. They both referenced “white folks” in the title. “Mr. Charlie” was a general term for a white man, and Les Blancs (The Whites) was Lorraine’s play on Jean Genet’s The Blacks. Lorraine’s play takes place in a fictional African country at the dawn of its independence movement, and Jimmy’s is set in the heat of the Southern freedom movement. They both explore interracial intimacy, even love, and how it coexisted with violence and racial domination. They both confronted the question of whether violent resistance to white supremacy was a necessary course for Black people to take. In Jimmy’s play, a white man is put on trial for the murder of a Black man. This is the second Black man he has murdered (the first being the husband of a Black woman he loved). The killer is found not guilty, and the play concludes with a protest march joined by the only white man who has cast his lot with the Negroes in town. Though the people are despondent, their protest is the resolution and hope of the play. In contrast, Lorraine’s play puts the colonizers on trial, as it were, and issues them a death sentence for the cause of emancipation, even those for whom the Africans feel affection. Madame Nielsen, a British transplant who understands the African cause, is killed in crossfire at the conclusion.

  Lorraine was not only more ideologically driven than Jimmy. She was also more militant. But they weren’t really at odds in these literary conversations. As though theirs was a dialectical union, they looked at the matters from different angles: it was a waltz or, better yet, like the twist, rocking back and forth and side to side. Jimmy tended to focus upon what Americans must do in order to confront white supremacy inside oneself. He sought an exorcism and challenged Americans to become otherwise. Lorraine tended to focus upon social relations and the injustice of the political order and what that suggested about who people must be for one another. Neither of these descriptions is absolute, but they mostly hold. Lorraine was an ensemble thinker; Jimmy was a soul-centered one.

  In 1963, Jimmy wrote to Lorraine in a bit of a tizzy about his novel Another Country:

  My dear Lorraine: a very particular favor but please don’t do it if you don’t want to. Some people can be read to and others can’t, so I’ll understand.

  But I am finally really reaching the end of this monstrous opus of mine. And I am so weary and have already received such dire warnings as to my probable fate when it is published—and even I can see that it’s not a very pretty novel—that my mind and soul might be somewhat steadied if I could read a couple chapters from it—from the beginning, from the end. I pick on you. I’m afraid, because I respect you as a writer and value you as a friend and because, as a Negro, you can call me if I have—as I certainly pray I have not—falsified my grim interracial drama—which is also something more than that.17

  He proposed that the group reading include Lorraine and whomever she might want to bring, his brother, and “the girl to whom the book is dedicated, Mary Painter.” Mary was a dear friend of Jimmy’s, a white American economist, famous for working on the Marshall Plan, who lived in Paris. He continued in his appeal to Lorraine, “This note is probably more symptomatic of panic, that panic which always attacks me near the end of any long endeavor, than of anything else.”18

  I do not know if Lorraine heard him read from Another Country, but I know she heard him. They both were at once fearful and truly courageous. Like Lorraine, Jimmy was afraid of heights, bridges, elevators, and planes. They both were afraid that their writing might not be good. Published in 1962, Another Country was, characteristic of Baldwin, a courageous book. It treated the counterculture of Greenwich Village that they both often occupied. Its protagonist, Rufus Scott, is a jazz musician who has a romantic relationship with a Southern white woman. As the novel progresses, their relationship grows violent, and ultimately Rufus commits suicide. In the aftermath of his suicide, the novel follows the people who surrounded Rufus. His friend Vivaldo, who is white, has a romance with Rufus’s sister, then also has an affair with Eric, who had been Rufus’s lover. These are just two of a series of partnerings among the grief-stricken and conflict- and guilt-ridden group trying to make sense of the death of Rufus.

  A
nother Country was controversial. Between the interracial and same-gender sexuality and the partner sharing, the novel alarmed the public. Jimmy finished it while living in Istanbul, perhaps because it was one of those works that was easier to get into without the puritanical American landscape surrounding him. And even though it was a Village novel, and the Village had become a recognized center of the cultural vanguard, in depicting it, Jimmy nevertheless pushed readers to the very edge of America’s willingness to see itself.

  An intellectual friendship can take many forms. It can consist of long conversations into the night about books, arguments, and art. Intellectual partners read together and write together. They also, and this is really my point, can swim in each other’s imaginations. Neither one imitating the other, but after bathing in the other’s words they return back to the shore, to the work, shaped by the beloved’s waters. That is what I see, what was so special, about these friends.

  Lorraine responded to Another Country with The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. Her play also treated the Village counterculture, queer sexuality, interracial intimacy, and a suicide. But in her play, it is a white woman in love with a Black man who commits suicide, rather than a Black man in love with a white woman. Though Lorraine received mixed reviews for her play, it is, according to my own critical judgment, a more effective work of art than Baldwin’s novel. Lorraine worshiped at the altar of clarity and organization in her writing. She didn’t care for obscurity or cluttered story lines and found Jimmy’s fiction, generally speaking, not nearly as good as his essays, which she considered among the best in the history of American writing. But the point is that the consistent thread between these two works of theirs—how the politics of race, gender, and sexuality are always at work, even in the closest of relationships—placed each of them well ahead of their time. Neither saw the struggle for freedom as limited to fights for laws and full citizenship. Freedom dreams led to complex questions about humanity and existence, about who we are and might become. They asked and tried to answer them. Their explorations took them both beyond the United States, though Jimmy was far more traveled than Lorraine ever would be, and beyond their time period. For example, they shared a criticism of the queer writer André Gide that suggested their layered approaches to ideas of freedom. Baldwin, in his essay “Male Prison,” and Lorraine, in her notes about Gide’s life, both argued that while Gide’s sexuality was transgressive, his indecent commitment to patriarchy and disdain for his wife were persistent. Neither felt warmly toward Gide for this reason. Though they were both most passionately focused on the question of race, it was a question that was never posed in isolation from other structures of difference and domination such as gender, class, and sexuality. And neither of them subjected race to monolithic interpretations. Jimmy and Lorraine understood that people, in all their messiness, had complex architectures inside and among them.

  Jimmy was six years Lorraine’s senior, and Nina Simone was three years her junior. At their ages, these differences mattered, though they didn’t impede. While Jimmy spoke of Lorraine as a girl and also a peer, Lorraine is generally talked about as Nina’s elder and teacher. This is largely because of the way Nina recounted their relationship. Nina, who with her rendition of the Gershwin tune “I Loves You Porgy” became famous merely a year before Lorraine did, described Lorraine as the person who politicized her. Case in point: on the evening of Nina Simone’s debut at Carnegie Hall, May 21, 1961, Lorraine called her not to congratulate her but to discuss Martin Luther King Jr.’s arrest in Birmingham and what Nina ought to do for the movement.19

  Two months later, Nina, who hadn’t been explicitly political beforehand, was at a civil rights fund-raising meeting with Lorraine and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) officers at the apartment of the actor Theodore Bikel.20 Lorraine had brought Nina into the movement, but they became really close in 1962, when they found they lived near each other in their vacation homes in Upstate New York. Nina described Lorraine’s influence on her: “It would take a special kind of friend really to pull me into the ideas of the Black Movement and force me to accept that I had to take politics seriously. That special friend was Lorraine Hansberry.”21 Nina said Lorraine took her out of herself and pushed her to see the bigger picture. She frequently visited Lorraine in the Hudson Valley. In September of 1962, Nina gave birth to her daughter, Lisa. Lorraine was named Lisa’s godmother and gave the baby “a beautiful silver Tiffany hairbrush and comb for her christening present.”22 This was characteristically Lorraine. She was gracious and cosmopolitan. She was also an aesthete, but didn’t care for trivialities. Nina wrote, “Although Lorraine was a girlfriend—a friend of my own, rather than one I shared with Andy [her husband]—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.”23

  The time Nina and Lorraine shared wasn’t just political kinship; it also provided Nina with a refuge from Andy Stroud, her abusive husband. The poet Nikki Giovanni said about Nina and Lorraine’s relationship, “What is important is that she loved her and she was loved in return. She never had to watch her back. With Andy, she watches her back.”24 Like Lorraine had with Jimmy, she and Nina shared an intimate retreat from the loneliness. But it was also a fertile ground for their imaginations and interior lives.

  Nina described her further: “Lorraine was definitely an intellectual, and saw civil rights as only one part of the wider racial and class struggle. . . . Lorraine was truly dedicated; although she loved beautiful things she denied them to herself because they would distract her from the struggle, which was her life. She wore no makeup except lipstick and had only five dresses. “I’m pretty the way I am,” she’d say “I don’t need lots of clothes.”25

  This restraint, the effort to discipline herself, seems to have been at once a reflection of Lorraine’s values and also perhaps a bit of ascetic self-punishment for her voracious yearning for beauty.

  I do not know whether Nina and Lorraine discussed sexuality. Nina was tortured by her own. She felt deep shame over her desire for women, and Andy’s rage about it made things even worse. Andy and Nina’s partnership was not like Lorraine and Bobby’s. It remained romantic. They were never friends, nor interlocutors. Andy drove Nina to work to the point of exhaustion, while Bobby encouraged and facilitated. And yet in a sense, Nina and Lorraine probably both felt trapped. Bobby was Lorraine’s protection from a profoundly homophobic society. And though Lorraine embraced her sexuality, sometimes begrudgingly, it was unquestionably difficult to do so. But the stuff of Nina and Lorraine’s intimacy in that respect is not in my hands, and cannot be read through their works the way it can with Jimmy and Lorraine’s intimate relationship. It is clear, however, there was shared passion. I imagine that their special affection for the name Simone entertained both of them. Lorraine loved Simone de Beauvoir, and Nina took her stage name (first intended to hide her bar singing from her religious mother) from the actress Simone Signoret, a favorite of Nina’s who would eventually translate A Raisin in the Sun into French.

  Nina’s husband, Andy, recalled, “Lorraine carried her over into high gear, put her on fire.” Neither Nina nor Lorraine was interested in accommodation or respectable liberal politics. They believed the fight for freedom was for all intents and purposes a war. Nina was definitely as militant as Lorraine.

  When they were in New York City, Lorraine would go to the Village Gate to hear Nina play piano and sing. As a girl in North Carolina, Nina had trained as a classical pianist. She was a prodigy. However, when she came up North with the intention of attending the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, she was rejected. Devastated, she made a living playing piano and eventually singing in an Atlantic City nightclub. There she’d crafted a creolized sound of her own. Nina blended classical, jazz, pop, and blues tunes and cultivated a distinct genre- and gender-bending back-of-the-throat vocal sound. Lorraine heard the South in Nina’s voice like she did in those of her
parents. Yet Nina was also the sound of her generation. Lorraine witnessed in Nina an artist who had no hesitation when it came to borrowing and blending from every tradition at her disposal. She did so both to craft her original artistic voice and to make something unapologetically Black. Nina was a model of extreme discipline, one who composed music in her head nonstop. But Nina’s discipline wasn’t about restraint and closing off the imagination or the ranging and raging desires, aesthetics, and interests. It was a discipline that allowed for creative expansion. Her discipline was vivid and on fire rather than punishing. For Lorraine, who had often castigated herself for having too many ideas and running in too many directions at once, Nina had to be inspiring. She proved that expansiveness didn’t have to mean failure. Even Nina’s rendition of “I Loves You Porgy,” from a show that Lorraine despised for its stereotypical rendition of African Americans, must have made Lorraine rethink her sense of the world. Nina changed some of the lyrics because she refused to sing a parody of Black English, and she reinterpreted it as a truly powerful and plaintive love song. She was an example of how creative one could be with the archive of art they had at their fingertips as Americans and as modern people, and how it all could be put into the service of freedom dreams.