by Imani Perry
He spoke of her light shining on humanity, and serving as a guide on freedom’s road:
She brought the light of faith. . . . She believed in victory beyond defeat; in triumph beyond tragedy; that in spite of shattered human hopes and man’s inhumanity to man there are bright goals ahead worth every ounce of energy one has to give them. . . . She brought to us the light of truth. Truthfulness for her was the central fact. . . . It meant the spirit of honesty and loyalty in personal relations, a basic respect for every man. . . . She brought to us the light of love. In her we saw a playful element sometimes overlooked in our thought about love. She knew also how to use the lighter touch to relax people in conversation and endeavor, and how to plant a fruitful thought while they smiled. But more than in any other way, her love for life was shown by the spirit of utter self-giving which marked her daily work.
Callender spoke of how Lorraine shone her light on others. I wonder now how we shine a light on her: how we not only remember and marvel, and marvel we should, but also witness the seams of an exceptional and extraordinary person, to see with some depth and complexity the constitution of a life containing such gifts, generosity, and courage, such truth and love, without too much intrusion or sensation. Catching a likeness of Lorraine means to me, as witness to her life, telling as true a story as I know how, from the trifles to the hollows, from the heights to the depths. Communist activist Alice Jerome’s wire after her death—“Your life renews our faith in youth and liberation. Even in death you are beautiful”—is as true today as it was at the hour of her death.23 So too are Martin Luther King Jr.’s words: “Her creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.”24
The funeral congregation filed out to the sounds of another hymn traditionally sung in Black churches, “Come Ye Disconsolate,” written by the Irish poet Thomas Moore:
Joy of the desolate, light of the straying,
Hope of the penitent, fadeless and pure!
Here speaks the Comforter, tenderly saying,
“Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot cure.”25
Someone risked his life to attend her funeral and milled about in the snow-covered crowd: Malcolm X. He was then in hiding and under constant death threats, yet frenetically trying to organize the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Like Lorraine, Malcolm was pursuing an anticolonial, internationalist model of freedom. Recently, they’d had some lovely moments together. She’d taken him to task for once berating her in public for marrying a white man. He apologized, and they talked about the world they both imagined could be, with struggle. They both ran out of time. Three weeks after Lorraine’s funeral, on Nina’s birthday, Malcolm was murdered. His death, her death, and, over the next three years, the deaths of so many others left a trail of grief.
Nina’s and Jimmy’s voices changed after that. Their anguish sent them into depressions and rage. Jimmy opined that all the world’s problems that Lorraine was trying to fix undoubtedly wore her body down. They wore down Nina’s mind.
The day after Lorraine’s funeral there was a vigil in Harlem of a thousand people demanding an end to school segregation in New York. Lorraine was laid to rest in Croton. Days later, Nina wrote in her diary, “She’s gone from me and I’m sure it’ll take like many years to accept this thing. It’s so far out.” The next day she went on a cruise with her husband and said, “The rocking and rolling of the ship almost made me scream with pain.”26 Nina began to have suicidal thoughts. But in March, she was with Jimmy in Selma for the historic march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Time marched on. In the words of one of Lorraine’s comrades, Ella Baker: “The struggle is eternal. The tribe increases. Somebody carries on.”27
Nina wanted to do something more for her dear girlfriend, and so she wrote a song titled “Young, Gifted and Black.” Those were Lorraine’s words. They came from a speech Lorraine delivered to a group of young writers: “The Nation Needs Your Gifts.” In it Lorraine made a specific call to Black youth to embrace their identities and the struggle, “though it be a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so to be young, gifted and black.”28 She told them, “You are . . . the product of a presently insurgent and historically vivacious and heroic culture, a culture of an indomitable will for freedom and aspiration to dignity.”
The ode Nina wrote became an anthem for the next stage of the movement, a stage that in many ways finally matched the radical fire Lorraine had possessed all her life. Lorraine, once dismissed as bourgeois, was embraced by the Black Power generation. The militancy and radicalism of the 1930s, which had in many quarters lain dormant for years, came roaring back. Perhaps it was because the world was moving quickly, but not quickly enough. Perhaps it was because people finally caught up.
After her death, Bobby treated Lorraine’s legacy with great care. He attempted to place stories she wrote in various magazines. He edited Les Blancs (which, somewhat ironically, was decried in the press as being anti-white) and put together a biography in her own words, also titled To Be Young, Gifted and Black. But her papers stayed private for years. Between the brevity of the record left behind, keeping her “in the closet,” and the casting of Lorraine as a “before the movement” figure in the mainstream press and criticism, the wider public has lived with a truncated story of who Lorraine was for many decades. And yet there were always gestures to something more. There were always murmurs; murmurs about her sexuality, about her radicalism, about the work we’d never seen.
Murmurs become shouts. In 2014, when the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust, under the executorship of Joi Gresham, published some of Lorraine’s most intimate thoughts, people were hungry for more. She had never gone away; after all, Raisin is still the most frequently produced work by a Black American playwright. It has had numerous revivals, a musical, and three film versions. But now people want more. And we deserve it. Her other work also deserves hearing, reading, and more performances. Her essays, her excerpts, her heart and mind put down on paper will be pored over. Her pages lie in state at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture up in Harlem, right near the Speakers’ Corner Lorraine once preached from. She is waiting for us.
CONCLUSION
Retracing, May 2017
Lorraine Hansberry was a giver. Bitterness never prevailed long enough in her spirit to destroy the “lift” that was such a large part of her talent, and which comes naturally when human beings are created on stage. Mostly we see shadows being titillated into life, only to fall because their authors had no lover for them. I hate and deplore her death. We cannot afford such losses. As she once said of Baldwin: “We should be grateful we have him.” I say: we should be grateful we had her. Although what the hell all these words give her now, I don’t know. Relieve my chest. A gift given too late.
—Letter to the Village Voice from
Camille Skirvanek of Brooklyn, published January 21, 1965
IN THE TRADITION OF ALICE WALKER, who followed the literary and literal maps of Zora Neale Hurston’s home and life, I find myself wanting to stand in the places Lorraine stood. I want to make sense of the world in her spaces and on her terms. And I want to tell you about it. It isn’t so pretty. There is as much hell as heaven on this other, after the movement, side. Much has changed, some for better, some worse. Walking in the aftermath teaches this lesson. In the summer of 2017, I wonder as I wander, somewhat angrily at the absence of a marker for Lorraine in Greenwich Village. But in October of 2017, a red plaque was embedded in the rust-colored brick at 112 Waverly Place, in honor of Lorraine. Still, the Village is no longer hers. The multiracial lesbian bar (the only one that was multiracial in New York in the 1950s) was a short walk away from her home, and it is gone. It is now a Mexican restaurant, which I don’t expect will last much longer either. It isn’t highbrow. Although the Village has a queer history and present, Lorraine’s presence is faint at best. She’s not really here. Nor
is the bohemia that once was, nor the poor who were there before that. They have been displaced by cool accumulation and edgy wealth.
I walk past the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Six Degrees of Separation, a play about a Black gay conman who finagles his way into the New York elite, is up. Hamilton, a remix of American history in the vernacular of Black and Brown New York is playing nearby. So too is August Wilson’s Jitney. All of them seem to have something to do with the space Lorraine left on the Great White Way. But it isn’t visible to the untutored eye. History, after all, has to be told to count as such.
There’s more of Lorraine uptown in Harlem, where she lived briefly and visited frequently. Langston’s ashes are in the same building as her archive. And the question that remains is one Jimmy once asked: What do we do with all that beauty? How do we weave it all together? The answer is not for one person to give. It is, as she knew, a collective duty. The battles Lorraine fought are still before us: exploitation of the poor, racism, neocolonialism, homophobia, and patriarchy. She models some of what we must do to confront them: use frank speech, beauty, imagination, and courage. And be with the people.
In Ajijic and Provincetown, there are still tiny bohemian enclaves. But the rougher edges have been cleaned up, and the rougher people—locals—mostly expunged or cast on the margins. I have been to Provincetown many times. Its scent salt-soaked, and the pale gray light, even on sunny days, is intoxicating. Couples—two women, two men—hold hands everywhere. It is as beautiful as Lorraine said. I have yet to visit Ajijic or Montevideo. What I have written about them is based upon photographs and text. And dreams. All through my youth and young adulthood I had detailed colorful dreams, but then they ceased. Writing about Lorraine, they returned. My own memories of Latin America—Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Mexico, La Republica Dominicana—are now tinged by Lorraine’s thoughts. The writers, the radicals, the dreamers I’ve read have a landscape. Ocean waters baptizing revolutionaries, la gente en las calles with palmas on either side. Looking for Lorraine has, for me, conjured up a scenic hope and the romance of possibilities past.
Chicago remembers Lorraine. The home the Hansberrys integrated, where a racist’s piece of concrete nearly caught her head, is a historic landmark. The neighborhood is also now a mostly Black community. There is even a Lorraine Hansberry Park nearby. A school and a theater bear her name. I remember Chicago. When I was a girl, in sweltering summers spent in the basement of a Y on the West Side, in the line of sight of the most infamous housing project in America, I learned what Lorraine knew about Chicago’s ghettoized children. The West Side was then a step below the South Side because it was the dwelling place of more recent migrants with more country edges. We did syncopated cheers: songs about our zodiac signs and imagined lovers, stomping and clapping in rhythm. I braided hair early each morning for the children of exhausted mothers: cornrows, plaits, puffs, careful in response to the winces of the girls who were tender headed. We ran around the track and danced until we were drenched to the repeating bass and high hat of house music. And if anyone was insulted, he or she fought back.
Chicago remains segregated. Lorraine wouldn’t be surprised. Police still seem, to many of its people, an occupying force that threatens more than it protects. She would agree. Families like the Hansberrys are not ghetto-bound, but those she admired are. And that matters. Lorraine’s beloved Chicago is, however, only part of the story: vast, and the key place it reserves for her is necessary yet not enough. In the public relations record she is recollected in the way of Black firsts, one in a long line of great Black artists to emerge from Chicago, a hallmark of its renaissances, longer and more varying than Harlem’s, and distinctively Chicagoan in the persistent concern with socially relevant writing. She is inspiration and role model. But in truth she ought to be remembered for all the ways she troubled the world then, and would have today too. Where would her place be? In Boys-town—an expensive upper-crust queer community where her brownness would still be an oddity? Probably not. Although her love of women would be treated more kindly today, there is a good chance Lorraine’s sexuality would be used to push her away from the center of American theater and thought. Her far-left radicalism, if she were alive today, would not only be decried, it would also make her the subject of constant skepticism. She wouldn’t have been satisfied with the gains of Black elites while a million sit in cages and many millions go hungry. She would hate warmongering. And she would have that trite insult “hater” lobbed at her for criticizing the Ralph Bunches of today. She had no interest in tea at the White House when people were suffering. But others did and do. We know who they are. And I know Lorraine would be moaning the capitalism-assimilation blues. Perhaps she would leave this country, like Du Bois did. Though probably she would go to the Caribbean or Latin America and not farther. She was unrepentantly American, though in the broadest sense. Though her politics were global she was passionately attached to the New World.
I drove to her burial site in Croton-on-Hudson for her birthday in 2017. It is my father’s birthday too. He is dead. I can’t place a call. For him there is no gravesite to visit, no shiva to sit. I know I will honor him in honoring her. He would love it that way.
I wondered what sort of flowers I should bring her. And then I thought of Lily, the lone girl in Lorraine’s story “What Use Are Flowers?” In the beginning of it, Lily is the hardest fighter among the feral children. But the girl silently, and I imagine wide-eyed, points at a flower, a lily, when choosing her name.
Lilies are flowers of resurrection or better yet, if I am to be true to Lorraine’s vision of the world, rebirth. I have spent years working on this story of her life, wanting to force a bloom—pointing to the pages and pages and books and ideas of hers that have remains encased. But when I stop at the flower shop before getting on the highway, there are no more potted lilies. Easter is past. So I purchase a halfway blossomed bouquet and worry that the flowers will wilt too soon.
When I get to Bethel Cemetery, they are still fragrant and now tautly open. I drive around the perimeter, not sure where to enter. I decide to turn into the parking lot of the public library because it looks as though it was designed in the midcentury. I imagine that she must have visited that library frequently. After parking, I walk to the edge of the cemetery. A man is tending to graves and I ask him, “Do you happen to know where the headstone of Lorraine Hansberry is?” He is a solid man, one who I would have placed as a New Englander if I weren’t in the Hudson Valley: red-faced, straw-haired, friendly. It is apparent that he works for a living. He moves about with confidence and muscle memory. I appreciate that he seems un-bothered at my Blackness, but I can tell he is curious. He tells me that he tends to only a few of the headstones and asks if she is my teacher or grandmother. I don’t quite know how to answer. The answer isn’t exactly no, though it isn’t formally yes. I mumble something purposefully unintelligible.
The caretaker tells me that the cemetery is seven acres and gives me the name of someone else to call who is not available today. I will have to come back, he guesses. Okay, I say. I will just walk around a bit. I have all day. He says the older deaths, ones dating back to the Revolutionary War, are in the center, so focus on the edges. I begin on a diagonal. As I start to walk, he warns me that I must tread carefully in a graveyard. It is easy to fall. I thank him and take a few more steps.
There it is, in my direct line of sight.
“There it is,” I tell him. I want to say “There she is,” but I am trying to be calm. He replies, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I am not. There she is.
It is hot. Ninety-one degrees. Birds are chirping in the bush directly behind me as I sit before Lorraine’s headstone. Someone has left five pennies as an offering on top. I leave the lilies at the foot of the grave and ask for her blessing. On the left is another headstone, slightly behind hers, bearing my grandmother’s maiden name. I pick up a silvery-charcoal rock for my altar at home.
I cannot stay at her gravesite long. My allergies are t
errible. My eyes burn, my throat itches. The sun beats directly on my forehead. I go to the car, sit in the air conditioning and let the Benadryl work as I take notes. Then I drive to her house. It is difficult to find. I go around in circles at first because it is on a road with no visible sign. But finally I see the steep, tiny path and drive up. There isn’t a place to park. I just stop the car and get out. Standing in front of Chitterling Heights, I can hear the lake water not many yards away. I do not want to make too much of coincidences, but the windows in her home remind me of my own. Windows that when you look out of them all you see is trees. I wonder if when she was bedridden she had her bed facing in a direction where she could see the trees. It is the one regret I have about the place where I live. When I am sick enough that I cannot get out of bed, my bed is not angled toward the trees. One day I will fix that.
The last stop I make before going into town is to the water. In the years since Lorraine’s death, Black Rock Park has become polluted. But I imagine she once waded here with other Croton residents. I cannot go in. I am at the water’s edge. The park is noisy with nature, but like everywhere I went in the town, the people are quiet. Someone plays with a dog, a man in a construction uniform writes in a journal. This is a place to think. To imagine.
The best words I ever read in memoriam of Lorraine are the words that keep me writing, not just about her but in her wake and light. They are words for all of us to remember her by, and to become and eventually perish and persist by too:
