Looking for Lorraine

by Imani Perry

  In addition to going to meetings and fund-raising for the Southern freedom movement, Lorraine inspired Nina to compose and perform political music, including “Brown Baby,” “Mississippi Goddam,” and the haunting “Pirate Jenny,” which she recorded in 1964. “Pirate Jenny” was written by Bertolt Brecht for The Three-Penny Opera, a political “play with music” with a strong criticism of capitalism. It became one of Nina’s “show tunes.” She’d famously said about the 1963 “Mississippi Goddam,” “This is a show tune but the show hadn’t been written for it. Yet.”26 When it came to “Pirate Jenny,” however, the show had been written and performed many times. In the original opera, it is sung by a character named Low-Dive Jenny, a hotel maid. She is treated with derision. Jenny sings her fantasy about a pirate ship coming to burn down the town. However, when Nina sang Brecht’s song, it took on an entirely different feeling.

  As she cleans, Jenny plots an overthrow that teems with the fury of a thousand slave revolts. She is pirating the Middle Passage and claiming her freedom. On this ship, “the Black freighter,” Black people are not cargo but its vengeful captains.

  Lorraine also used Brecht as a source for her revolutionary imaginings. However, hers were not about the moment of upheaval but rather its aftermath. Hers was a less passionate and more theoretical Brechtian exploration than Nina’s. In her short story “What Use Are Flowers?” Lorraine takes up Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children. Brecht wrote Mother Courage in the midst of the rise of Nazism but set it during the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century. It stars a woman who attempts to profit financially from the war, and yet all her children are killed because of it. Brecht’s criticism of war profiteering attacks both fascism and capitalism. Lorraine’s first version of her riff on Mother Courage also took place in Germany and was titled Gedachtnis. It opened with children fighting because one has eaten a rat that they all want, and it had a folksy old wise man as its protagonist. Later she changes the folksy old wise man into a stuffy professor.

  In all the versions of Lorraine’s Brechtian story it is not the children but the mothers who are now gone. In this postapocalyptic world, the children have gone feral. They have no language and fight over scraps until they are found by the professor who tries to teach them civilization. He gives them language and cooking and building skills. He teaches them ethics, and in the poignant conclusion, moves them beyond a sense that the only purposes in life are utilitarian, by imparting the beauty of a flower. In the midst of all this, however, he imposes the rules of gender upon them. He teaches them that the girl, Lily, is “different” from the others and must be protected. He separates and categorizes and creates hierarchies among the boys and everything else in their midst. Lorraine raises the fear that the same mess might be made all over again, even if the revolution succeeds, if we aren’t careful. While Nina used Brecht to imagine Black revolt, and specifically a feminist Black revolt, Lorraine used him to expose patriarchy as something ideological, not natural.

  Both Nina and Lorraine interspersed feminist messages throughout their movement-inspired art, putting them well ahead of their time since the mainstream feminist movement hadn’t yet begun. In another show-tune-style song, “Go Limp,” Nina hilariously mocked the sexual anxieties of the mothers of young women who were joining the Southern freedom movement. Liberalism on race, the song showed, was not the same as a belief in sexual freedom or gender liberation.

  Likewise, in Lorraine’s final play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, she reveals the sexism of Sidney, who wants his wife, Iris, to look like a wild country girl. He is always undoing her tightly bunned hair and treating her like a fantasy. Sidney mocks the bourgeois sexual and racial conservatism of Iris’s sister Mavis, yet remains oblivious to his own sexism for most of the play. Lorraine and Nina’s ideas merged both at the level of formal experimentation, borrowing and reinterpreting and experimenting, and in their attentiveness to particular events and scenes. Just as Lorraine wrote complex characters, Nina did too, with stories embedded in songs. Theirs was a jazz practice, pursued with a sense of broad purpose combined with a penchant for drink and brooding.

  Lorraine, Nina, and Jimmy were lonely, even though they had each other. They lived in a profoundly unjust society; they saw their people suffering North and South, and grew to understand that suffering in a global sense, felt by “their people” of so many sorts. Each carried the responsibility of the artist, as well as the passion, often in solitude. Strangeness is a feature of genius. It isolates even as it is acclaimed. Hence Lorraine’s famous quip: “The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”27

  This thing of being beloved and having true friends, and yet also experiencing profound loneliness, is important to recognize. It isn’t unusual. Jimmy wrote, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”28 The grounds for friendship can be common wounds. And certainly, along with the art and the politics and the commitment, that was part of it. Nina sang her a song that day called “Blackbird” about loneliness, pain, and sorrow, about feeling unwanted and misunderstood. Lorraine echoed that feeling in a note to Nina titled “Alone, the Saturday evening before Easter 1962—7 pm”:

  I would give my soul to be with someone whom I really and truly longed to please. That would be paradise. But there are no such . . .

  Thus, I am alone. Very. Tonight. Seven o’clock. Spice, scotch and me. I shall wash my hair. No one will call—save some one whom I do not wish to see. . . .

  But worst of all, I am ashamed of being alone. Or is it my loneliness that I am ashamed of? I have closed the shutters so that no one can see. Me. Alone. Sitting at the typewriter on Easter eve; drinking; brooding; alone.29

  She could not imagine things getting better.

  Beloved but alone. The three—Lorraine, Jimmy, Nina—were apart more often than they were together, always somewhere with some long list of demands placed upon each one. Eventually that demand for Lorraine was her health. She wanted a more vital life, one that might have been possible were their lives not so far-flung. She imagined a company of friends with whom she would spend evenings, dancing and laughing. Soon after achieving it, she no longer desired fame; she just wanted a close community of people: “For money and fame I would make the exchange. But that has always been so; only now I could pay the devil his wage.”30

  They paid mightily for love, love of the people. James Baldwin died in 1987. Nina Simone, in 2003. Both were widely criticized after the 1960s for their declines. Illness and grief contorted their post-movement lives, but so did truth telling. The admiration couldn’t go on forever. Celebration waned the more Nina and Jimmy knew and said about the world. They made people uncomfortable with their vulnerabilities and rage. Their loneliness deepened. Lorraine haunted. Unexpectedly but appropriately, in the twenty-first century, after death, Jimmy and Nina were reborn as icons on posters and pillows and in books upon books. Lorraine has yet to be.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Of the Faith of Our Fathers

  The man that I remember was an educated soul, though I think now, looking back, that it was as much a matter of the physical bearing of my father as his command of information and of thought that left that impression upon me, [. . .] a man who always seemed to be doing something brilliant and/or unusual to such an extent that to be doing something brilliant and/or unusual was the way I assumed fathers behaved. [. . .] And he carried his head in such a way that I was quite certain that there was nothing he was afraid of.

  —Lorraine, on her father, Carl Hansberry1

  I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. When his life had ended I began to wonder about that life and also, in a new way, to be apprehensive abo
ut my own.

  —Jimmy, on his father, David Baldwin2

  JIMMY’S FIRST BOOK, the semiautobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in 1953. In it, the protagonist struggles with the grip of his brutal Pentecostal minister father and the hypocrisies of a church that expects his fidelity. Later, his most widely read nonfiction work, The Fire Next Time, is devoted in half to a letter of tenderness to his nephew, and caution, through the narration of Baldwin’s brother, his nephew’s father. In those books, and his later work, Baldwin repeatedly found himself wrestling with the shadow and weight of his father. It very well might have been this fixation, along with the passions and the loneliness, that allowed Jimmy and Lorraine to forge so deep a bond.

  Inheritances haunt.

  In her personal and political life, Lorraine both rejected and shouldered the expectations that went along with being her father’s child. He was brilliant, respectable, and patriotic. She was brilliant, restless, and radical. He remained with her long after his death. One of the things I have learned about death is this: no matter how grief stricken you are, no matter how much you miss them, yearning for their laughs or hands or eyes, your relationship to the dead continues long after their bodies are gone. Memory is not simply a way of holding on, it is a reencounter. Their visits continue as long as you do. Over time, you hopefully understand more about the past and more about the absent person made present. This was the way of Lorraine and Jimmy. But unlike most, they put their visitations on the page.

  A Raisin in the Sun, after all, is about what a South Side Chicago family will do with their late patriarch’s $10,000 life insurance check. But it was also about so much more for Lorraine personally. Her father was known as the “kitchenette king,” but what she depicted was the life of the tenants, not the owners. And that said a great deal about where her allegiances lay, politically speaking.

  And so it was mortifying when, just a few months after her play hit Broadway, the notorious Mayor Daley of Chicago charged Lorraine and her family with building-code violations on the properties they owned on the South Side. The truth is that code violations were the norm rather than the exception in Chicago’s South Side, and Daley, well known for his animus toward Black people, likely relished the opportunity to embarrass the Hansberrys, especially the newly famous Lorraine. For Lorraine, the idea that she might be involved in providing substandard housing to Black Chicagoans was horrifying. The New York World-Telegram article of June 6, 1959, about the situation bore the heading “Slum Play Author Sued as Slumlord.”3 She responded to a request for an interview from the New York Post about the situation by saying,

  When I first heard about the story, I didn’t know what they were talking about. I called Chicago and learned that my name had been placed on a piece of property when it was purchased some years ago. I wasn’t told about it and I have no legal or equitable title to that building. [. . .] Of all the things in the world I could have been hit with, this was the most painful. [. . .] I’m not a slum landlord. I’ve never derived a cent from that building—whoever owns it. Parenthetically, I might say I haven’t drawn a cent from the family since I came east nine years ago.4

  Lorraine revealed more than she likely realized. She had abandoned the monetary part of her inheritance and with that a set of priorities too. Though Lorraine was not so interested in making money, she also knew that wasn’t her father’s only driver. As she revisited his legacy again and again in her work, she explored what he taught, and which aspects of those lessons she admired and which she rejected. Case in point: while A Raisin in the Sun is certainly not about her family’s circumstance, it is filled with references to her family and home. For example, the $10,000 check is a symbol that comes from her childhood. In 1936, that is the amount the Hansberrys put into the Hansberry Foundation, which was established to fight cases of racial discrimination.

  The tragic turn of Raisin is of course when Lena Younger gives her restless son, Walter Lee, the $10,000. He fails to follow instructions about how much to set aside, and instead invests the bulk of it in a liquor store venture that is actually a con. Truman K. Gibson Jr. wrote somewhat salaciously that Carl Hansberry was once swindled in a manner akin to Walter Lee. He said that two men came to Carl with a get-rich-quick oil investment and drilling project in Centralia, Illinois. Carl fell for the racket and lost a great deal of money. Fortunately, Carl hadn’t invested all his life savings.5 I don’t know whether this is true or idle gossip. But it gets to a core tension of the play and of Lorraine’s politics. She saw the drive of capitalist acquisition and accumulation as something that was deeply American, and also perverse. When Walter Lee tells his mother that business is the meaning of life, she says sorrowfully that she remembers when they believed that the meaning of life was freedom.

  In Lorraine’s literary world, mother wisdom is trustworthy though subtle, and paternal inheritances are thorny and overpowering. In addition to responding to Richard Wright, A Raisin in the Sun played on Theodore Ward’s 1937 play, A Big White Fog, a production of the Negro Unit of the Chicago Federal Theater Project. A Big White Fog also took place in a kitchenette. Its villain, Danny Rogers, sought to get rich by creating kitchenette apartments, a not too thinly veiled jab at Carl Hansberry. It was also a domestic drama in which the characters displayed conflicting paths to escaping the exclusions and poverty of post–Great Migration Chicago. But in Lorraine’s play, unlike Ward’s, the father is dead, and women have a stake in the dreaming. Ward’s play ends with a simplistically happy communist ending (and a rejection of Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa message). Lorraine’s play ends with ambiguity.

  Although Lorraine wrote a play without Ward’s crude Marxism, and also without Richard Wright’s naturalist social determinism, she did embrace Richard Wright’s famous call for Black writers to focus on quotidian Black existence and regional specificity. In the landmark treatise on Black Chicago that emerged from the Works Progress Administration’s Negro in Illinois study, Black Metropolis, the authors described how, in Chicago, “the Negro community recognized the favored position of the waiter, butler and chauffeur. . . . They had close contacts with the wealthy whites and were able to acquire the manners, polish and social graces attendant to upper class behavior.”6 This was Walter Lee. Proximity to white elites created a restless yearning for that kind of wealth and leisure. The conventional Marxist idea, that susceptibility to false consciousness is maximized in the remove from proletarianism, is also evident in Lorraine’s work. It is present in Lena Younger’s remembrance of Walter Sr.’s description that a man was made to work with his hands. Walter appears to have been left, metaphorically, empty-handed. But he claims his inheritance not when he steals money but by rejecting it. In refusing the money a white man, Linder, offers them to not move into the white neighborhood, Walter Lee honors his father’s legacy and creates a legacy for his son.

  Walter Lee is not the only one who has desires regarding the paternal inheritance. Beneatha does too. She wants to go to school. Lena and Ruth, both domestic workers in other people’s homes, want a home of their own. These are all hopes for something better as the fruits of the father’s labor. Beneatha also seeks a collective inheritance. It drives her interest in Africa and anticolonialism and her fascination with one of her suitors, Joseph Asagai, an African student who is committed to independence. The other is the bourgeois George Murchison. Asagai and Murchison represent divergent paths of the Black and educated: one might become an intellectual and one might become bourgeois in attitude and status. While George Murchison completely rejects Africa, and says that there is no heritage of value in Africa, Beneatha’s enthusiasm for the continent is sophomoric. However, when Walter Lee gets into it—jumping on the table, dancing with Beneatha, proclaiming Jomo Kenyatta as his man, referencing Ethiopia, and Shaka Zulu—the scene transforms from comedic to politically significant. Walter Lee is not a scholar or bourgeois. He enters into a trance of sorts, a reverie in which his political agency is real, in which m
oney might not be the most important thing, in which he can connect joyfully with the sister he resents. Lorraine wanted theatergoers to think about the questions: To whom do Black American people belong? In which of the father’s many mansions?

  She believed of all the characters, Asagai had the best answer. Lorraine said of him: “My favorite character is the African suitor. I think he’s a true intellectual. He is so confident in his perception of the world that he has no need for any façade. I was aware that the Broadway stage had never seen an African who didn’t have his shoes hanging around his neck and a bone through his nose. The only Africans I’ve known have been students and he was a composite.”7

  Although it is well established that Beneatha was based upon Lorraine, perhaps Asagai was too. He is a twin of hers of sorts, also imagining a yet unseen future, one freed from yokes. And he has Lorraine’s intellect. Indeed, frequently male characters in Lorraine’s work say words she would say or have ideas she would have. One wonders why this is. Why give the men her voice and often the biggest ideas? Some critics have suggested that despite her feminism, Lorraine couldn’t quite fully embrace a feminist vision. She often began projects with women characters at the center of her work, and then turned those central characters into men. She rarely mentioned the women writers who shaped her ideas, though it is clear several did. Patriarchy puts men at the center. Lorraine depicted that truth and sometimes succumbed to it. But that didn’t mean Lorraine wasn’t a thoroughgoing feminist. Yes, Beneatha is a bit silly, but she is also intellectually courageous. Even though Asagai is a captivating and brilliant suitor, she isn’t ready to live an ostensible fairy tale and become his wife. Then there is Lena Younger. She could have easily been cast as a servile Mammy figure. But she is the head of the family. She is a woman with hopes and dreams and sensitivity. She is flawed, courageous, and filled with integrity. And she possesses her own sort of militancy, not unlike Lorraine’s mother who sat with a pistol on her lap to protect the family from a white mob.