by Imani Perry
In her diary just eleven months earlier, she had planned out her life; she dreamed it would be a year of writing and traveling.
I do not yet know what it is like to feel death descending. But having lived with chronic diseases, I know the tight pull of shingles around the perimeter of my flesh, the spastic paralysis of fatigue and sharp pain entangled, all the while knowing that I will not get well. A reckoning urgency, an inventory of your life: these are the things that take up space in the grief that accompanies your body’s betrayal. I know Lorraine felt it all.
Nina’s song took Lorraine, a daughter of migration, back to the South, back to the root. Nina had changed the lyrics, taking it from a mocking “coon song” written by James Bland in 1880 to a powerful evocation of intimate rural Black Southern life. That was their work: telling the true story. In the second stanza, the tempo picks up and the song turns from melancholy to buoyant. Nina testified to the energy and hope of the movement they were in, one that Lorraine wouldn’t survive.
In Lorraine’s final days, Dorothy and Bobby sat in vigil at her bedside. Her family visited and said their good-byes. Jimmy came to the hospital to see about her and then went to Europe. In Chicago, a controversy had brewed over Wright Junior College making his novel Another Country required reading. The queer and interracial sexuality were deemed “damaging” by angry parents. Jimmy was distressed, and rather than coming back to the States as he’d planned, he traveled to France. On the night of January 11, he came down with severe flu symptoms and a high fever that roiled his body all night. The next morning, at 8:50 a.m., January 12, 1965, Lorraine died. Jimmy told his brother David that his suffering and her passing were one.
The lights went down on Sidney Brustein’s Window after 101 performances. It had been a struggle to keep it up. There was no show on the afternoon of the twelfth. Its run ended with Lorraine. Years later, Jimmy, in one of his reflections on her death, described Lorraine as a prophet and a martyr of her generation, though she did not die by a bullet. He wrote:
I’ve very often pondered what she then tried to convey—that a holocaust is no respecter of persons; that what, today, seems merely humiliation and injustice for a few, can, unchecked, become terror for the many, snuffing out white lives just as though they were black lives; that if the American state could not protect the lives of black citizens, then, presently, the entire state would find itself engulfed. And the horses and tanks are indeed upon us, and the end is not in sight.4
Jimmy did not bemoan that Lorraine hadn’t lived to see the progress, because he wasn’t sure much progress had been made at all in the decade after her death. Bitterly he wrote, “Perhaps it is just as well, after all, that she did not live to see with the outward eye what she saw so clearly with the inward one.” She’d died for a cause that was mightily resisted and had not been achieved, and according to Jimmy, it was not “farfetched to suspect that what she saw contributed to the strain which killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine was dedicated is more than enough to kill a man.”5
Though Jimmy had seen her at the hospital as she was dying, she was at that point rendered mute by the pancreatic cancer that had metastasized. She could only smile and wave. So Jimmy remembered another occasion as their last time together, a time when she was still standing: “She was seated, talking, dressed all in black, wearing a very handsome wide, black hat, thin, and radiant. I knew she had been ill, but I didn’t know then, how seriously. I said, ‘Lorraine, baby, you look beautiful, how in the world do you do it?’ She was leaving. I have the impression she was on a staircase, and she turned and smiled that smile and said, ‘It helps to develop a serious illness, Jimmy!’ and waved and disappeared.”6
She dazzled until the end.
Among the obituaries, wires, letters, memories, and encomiums to Lorraine after her death there are poems. It is not uncommon for very beautiful people, and by that I mean all sorts of beauty (and she possessed all sorts), to inspire poetry. But also, I think, it was the peculiar and wondrous collection of qualities she possessed that made poetry—an impressionistic, descriptive form, one that offers much more than logic or simple narrative—the form immediately reached for by those who remembered her. On the day of her death, Larry Pendleton wrote a poem titled “To Lorraine.” In it he spoke of her dying: “Whence come the bird that beats with sparrow wings / against my windowpane / Futile are its efforts to reach the fair Lorraine, the aesthetic frail Lorraine.”7
In contrast, Richard B. Moore, the Barbadian socialist intellectual whose tribute appeared in the January 28 issue of Workers World, remembered her in large, strong terms, not the withering form of her last days.8 Their testimonies were both true. Her body was ravaged in the final days. Her spirit seemed to live beyond it, at the very least in the feelings of those she left behind.
Blow the trumpet blow
On a frenzied note of anguish
Keen and shrill and piercing
With a long loud wail,
Of rending, agonizing blues
For sadly now we mourn
The great deep loss
Of one so young and beauteous
Yet filled with deepest feeling
For her crushed and struggling people . . .
Langston Hughes, Lorraine’s model and mentor, who so deftly wove depth into simplicity, began his poem dedicated to Lorraine with the phrase “in time of” which in French is translated as “lors,” approximating the beginning of her name. The rain is silver, according to Hughes, precious yet melancholy. He wrote of the bountiful earth because he saw in Lorraine a territory as well as the heavens yet also as the rain from the heavens feeding the seeded earth. He expected a blossoming after the sky had finished its weeping, all due to Lorraine’s life and work.
The refrain in the poem repeats “of life of life of life.” It is an incantation. I am reminded of Walt Whitman’s words, “What good amid these, O me, O life?” And of the answer Whitman provides himself: “That you are here—that life exists and identity, / That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”9 I imagine Hughes was thinking of Whitman’s words when he wrote them. The other great American bard was right. The play goes on. The plays go on. Verses have followed. Many decades later we have the playwrights who came later to show for it: August Wilson, Anna Deavere Smith, Suzan Lori Parks, Lynn Nottage . . . And we have the seekers and the freedom fighters, too, from their various walks of life.
The last word of Hughes’s poem is “new.” Assurance of the eternal return, that Lorraine’s seeds would yield fruit—that was his belief and that of many of her beloveds. They were trustworthy and trusting of her passions long after her passing. I am struck now, after digging through the archives about her and also her archives, that they knew back then what so many contemporary critics have failed to grasp. I am talking about those who have said that besides Raisin nothing is left of her but scraps, and about those who opine that the frailness of her body toward the end made a mess of her work. But I shouldn’t be surprised, I guess. Even back then, right at the moment of her death, there were people eager to speak of her decline, to narrow her and stomp her into the past.
A cruel obituary in the conservative magazine the National Review stated, “In her last years she wasted time spitting angry clichés at pacifist meetings and race rallies. It may be said that this great selflessness of which good writers can so often convince themselves as well as others is the true thief of the gift that commercial self-seekers couldn’t give away if they tried.”10 And Jerry Tallmer, despite calling himself “sympathetic” to Lorraine, said this about her: “She was an angry young woman; charming, good-looking, quick with a witticism, sophisticated, knowing and angry. The anger was so hard inside her that you could almost feel it like a rock. She tried to cover it with the charm etc., and with a cloud of tangential verbiage; indeed at times she spoke, except in her plays, with the muzziness of mysticism.”11
Lorraine was not a mystic. That was a stupid claim. She believed in human
action and responsibility. But she was angry, righteously so. However, calling a public Black person angry was then, as now, a dagger. It was used to suggest moral failure. Like the other passions, anger is often cast as reckless and useless when in the hearts and minds of Black people, perhaps because passion lies in opposition to passive acceptance. Passion moves and insists. Tallmer was wrong; it isn’t a rock at all. It is living as a protest.
I woke up early on Memorial Day 2017, in the four o’clock hour, to write about Lorraine’s funeral. She wasn’t a soldier, but she certainly was a warrior and a veteran. It seemed right. Her services were held on January 16, 1965, at the aptly named Church of the Master in New York City. There was a blizzard outside. Most of the crowd of seven hundred who came to pay tribute stood through the storm, because there wasn’t enough room in the church. Inside, attendees stood through scripture and prayer. They sang the hymn “Abide with Me,” a song that stares death in the face:
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies. Heaven’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee; In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.12
Outside as snow and wind whipped, I imagine the sound traveled.
The first speaker was James Forman, Lorraine’s high school mate, then later her friend in the movement, who signed his letters to her with his old nickname, “Rufus.” He said of Lorraine,
I felt she was a person who believed in acting and believed in acting on her belief. . . . I think it’s appropriate that we try to extract for ourselves some of the things that guided her through her life. . . . First of all, I think it was the commitment to action. . . . Those of us who are in this room today could perhaps have an everlasting memorial to Lorraine if in fact we continue the work that she so nobly began in trying to end segregation in the Deep South in the United States.13
Forman was followed by her mentor, Paul Robeson. Robeson marveled at such wisdom in one so young. He quoted the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” Of its various verses, he chose to end on this one: “Sometimes I feel like an eagle in the air.” Like Forman he asked the congregation to follow Lorraine’s guidance in life after her death: “At this farewell, Lorraine bids us to keep our heads high and hold on to our strength and power to soar like an eagle in the air.”14
Hers was a death of inversion. Nannie, the mother, sat grieving her young daughter in the church. Her mentor mourned the mentored. And yet it was also clear that Lorraine was remembered as a teacher, a wise soul who became an ancestor in the blossoming of youth. It was in this spirit that Ruby Dee, who spoke as a representative of the artistic community, said, “She pointed the way to wider artistic horizons.”15
Nina Simone was next. She sang and played the piano. Nina said of the funeral, “I didn’t cry, I was beyond crying by that time.”16 She had finished a final performance at Carnegie Hall just twelve hours before coming through the storm to say good-bye to her dear friend Lorraine. She played “In the Evening by the Moonlight” again, and an Israeli folk song that she knew Lorraine loved. Jimmy wasn’t there. He sent word though. The wire read in part:
Lorraine and I were very good friends and I am going to miss her. Grief is very private I really can’t talk about her or what she meant to me. We talked about everything under the sun and we fought like brother and sister at the very talk [sic] of our lungs. It was so wonderful to watch her get angry and it was wonderful to watch her laugh. We passed some great moments together. I am very proud to say and we confronted some terrible things. She is gone now. We have our memories and her work. I think we must resolve not to fail her for she certainly did not fail us.17
In the print obituaries written by journalists who knew her, Jimmy’s words were echoed. They spoke of brilliance, beauty, flashing anger, and youthful laughter. Sylvester Leaks wrote in Muhammad Speaks, “The ingratiating warmth of her smile, the nimbleness of her intellect in debate or just plain discussions or the wrath of her indignation and anger were something to behold. She was one of two women . . . whose wrath I would never desire to be a victim of. She could peel you alive in one paragraph.”18 Joanne Grant wrote in the Spectator: “Two qualities for which I shall best remember Lorraine are her ability to get excited, stirred up over injustice, narrow mindedness, stupidity and her ability to laugh. These two aspects of her character were strikingly expressed in her two most outstanding physical characteristics—beautiful flashing eyes and a generous warm laugh.”19
At the service, Nina’s songs were followed by words from the actress Shelley Winters, who, while weeping, expressed trembling frustration that technology had sped up fast enough to build cutting-edge weapons but not a cure for Lorraine’s cancer. It was a personal word, but also one that again captured Lorraine’s values. She loved peace and people.
The last speaker was Leo Nemiroff, Bobby’s brother. He spoke on behalf of the family. Leo quoted a letter written to Lorraine by a seventeen-year-old friend who, that past October, had learned of her terminal illness: “This letter is mainly being written so the hot ache I feel inside can be shared with yours. This terrible cruelty—what does it mean? After your call I was overcome with a sorrow I have never known.” She wrote then of walking through the city, and an imaginary walk through humanity: “customs, language, struggle, suffering . . . throughout all, and creating all, and being all are people, people, people!”20
The human condition was Lorraine’s obsession and commitment. She had confronted death not only literally but also philosophically and spiritually. Leo ended by quoting Lorraine’s own observations about Marion Bachrach, an elder communist writer, as Marion lay dying. Lorraine had been deeply affected by their meeting at a cottage on the cliffs of Maine overlooking the ocean. Marion, she said, “was a woman who had lived such a purposeful and courageous life, and who was then dying of cancer.” In her final days, Marion was still writing, had begun painting, and remained a dedicated American radical. She hadn’t given up the cause of fighting for freedom. And, according to Lorraine,
that was the way she thought of cancer—she absolutely refused to award it the stature of tragedy, a devastating instance of the brooding doom and inexplicability of the absurdity of human destiny . . . for this remarkable woman it was a matter of nature in imperfection. . . . It was an enemy but a palpable one, with shape and effect and source and if it existed it could be destroyed.21
But the “genius of man,” as Lorraine called it, wasn’t quick enough to save Marion. Or Lorraine.
Lorraine’s prescience about death, as she witnessed the end of another radical woman’s life, can and I think should be read alongside another one of her prophetic descriptions. Lorraine wrote a story called “Renascence” under her pen name, Emily Jones, when she was in her twenties. In it, a thirtysomething writer named Pip has died, and her partner, Andrea, is left. Alone. By naming the dead woman Pip, Lorraine made reference to the Black cabin boy in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Cast about in the ocean, the boy loses his mind and then becomes the intimate of and cabinmate to Captain Ahab. In Melville’s story, being cast about in the ocean was a harrowing conversion experience, and the cabin boy was never the same:
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes. . . . Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.22
Like Lorraine, who couldn’t swim and feared being swept up into the ocean like Melville’s cabin boy, her character named Pip both feared and loved the water. She waxed poetic about it, from a distance. Andrea remembers this about her lover. Over pages, Andrea is reborn, baptized by watching the water flow after Pip’s death. It is a tragic end. And I mean that in the classic sense.
Lorraine dedicated the story to E.S.M., Edna
St. Vincent Millay. I do not know whether she ever met Millay. Maybe it was just her love of Millay’s art that inspired the dedication. Millay was, to Lorraine’s generation of Village lesbians, something of a heroine. She flouted convention. She made her own life. And she took up space with her pen. The title of Lorraine’s story, “Renascence,” is the same of that of Millay’s most famous lyric poem. Millay’s poem is a meditation on the sublime in nature and it is also about grief. In Millay’s poem the rain baptizes, turning grief into rebirth. In Lorraine’s story, that is what the ocean does for Andrea. In “Renascence,” as with all of her work, the fossils of what Lorraine read, what questions she wanted to pose to the world, her answers, and her deepest desires emerge with gentle dusting.
It is easy to think Lorraine predicted her own death in “Renascence.” Like Pip, she was a writer who died under age forty and left behind a woman who loved her . . . and a man, too, and so many others. But the truth is more astonishing. Even as a young woman, Lorraine understood that this was part of the core of life: the plunging depths of death and the task of going on after the death of the beloved, not simply as endurance but as a baptism, a rebirth, a new beginning.
The honorary pallbearers at Lorraine’s funeral included famous friends: Ossie Davis, the actress Diana Sands, Shelley Winters, Dick Gregory, John Oliver Killens, and Rita Moreno, as well as the women she loved privately, Renee Kaplan and, most intimately, Dorothy Secules. In the eulogy, delivered by Eugene Callender, a pastor and freedom fighter, he used Proverbs 20:27 as his guide: “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.”
