[She’s been canonized as a hero of both mainstream literature
and radical politics. Who was she really?] [[link removed]]

THE MANY VISIONS OF LORRAINE HANSBERRY  
[[link removed]]

 

Blair McClendon
January 17, 2022
The New Yorker
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ She’s been canonized as a hero of both mainstream literature and
radical politics. Who was she really? _

With “A Raisin in the Sun,” Hansberry became an emblem of
American progress., Photograph by David Attie / Getty

 

It is a lonely, wild, and often fatal thing to be Black and brook no
compromise. Lorraine Hansberry was rigorous and unyielding in her
life, but she was gone too soon and claimed too quickly by those who
thought they understood her. Like many other Black giants of her time,
her image proved pliable in death. She was turned into a saint so that
her life could be turned into a moral. Yet she struggled beneath the
weight of her own complexities and sorrows. She achieved literary
celebrity but called herself a “literary failure,” was supported
in a marriage that ultimately collapsed, resisted her family but
didn’t denounce it, became an icon of the civil-rights movement that
she relentlessly criticized, and wrote a masterpiece only to watch as
it was widely misunderstood.

When I first encountered “A Raisin in the Sun
[[link removed]],”
I treated the play with suspicion. I was in high school, and thought
that any Black writer who received such universal praise must have, in
some way, sold out. I followed Hansberry’s protagonist, Walter
Younger, Jr., as he confronted the future, “a big, looming blank
space—full of _nothing_.” I watched him try to fill that space,
begging and plotting and raging and falling into the abyss of deferred
dreams that still swallows people whole. Despite my best efforts, I
was moved. Perhaps I had succumbed; perhaps I would sell out, too.

But I had misread Hansberry. She knew all about Black success in
America—its rewards, its costs, its limits—and her vision of it
was murkier and more unsettling than she is given credit for. “A
Raisin in the Sun” was the first play written by a Black woman to
appear on Broadway—in 1959, when Hansberry was twenty-eight. It was
an instant hit, and Hansberry’s age, race, and gender made her an
emblem of American progress. “Raisin” follows the rise and fall
and rise again of the Youngers, a Black mid-century family trying to
turn its loss into a legacy. Walter Younger, Sr., has died, and the
payout from his life-insurance policy promises to transform his
family: five people across three generations squeezed into a
kitchenette on Chicago’s South Side. Walter’s widow, Lena, uses
part of the windfall for a down payment on a home in a white
neighborhood. Against her better judgment, she entrusts another part
to Walter Younger, Jr., to open up a liquor store, instructing him to
set aside enough for his sister Beneatha’s medical-school education.

It is very nearly a tragedy. Walter believes so deeply in the American
Dream that he cannot see the traps laid in his path. His business
partners swindle him, and he loses everything. He is offered a
devil’s bargain to gain a small portion of it back: a white man from
the Youngers’ new neighborhood offers to pay them to relinquish
their house. Things can be set right if they will give in. But Walter,
who has considered his whole life a failure, refuses to say “yes,
sir” yet again. The curtain closes as the family prepares to move
into their new home.

On its surface, “Raisin” was the perfect play for its time. The
Youngers are dignified, working-class folk, hemmed in by injustice,
demanding nothing more than their fair share of the national bounty.
For liberal white audiences, the play suggested an uplifting moral
about universal humanity. For liberal Black audiences, it was
consistent with the messaging of the civil-rights movement.

But Hansberry was more radical than her broad appeal would suggest.
This was the same playwright who would later insist that it was quite
reasonable for Black people to “take to the hills if necessary with
some guns and fight back.” As Charles J. Shields writes in his new
biography, “Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind ‘A Raisin in the
Sun’
[[link removed]] ”
(Henry Holt), Hansberry’s ex-husband and longtime collaborator
“wept with disappointment” over the early reviews. They struck
him, Shields explains, as “too mild, and none of the themes or ideas
were touched on about Black family life, the stresses of poverty, the
conflict of the generations—nothing.”

In recent years, the puzzling paradox of how a Black lesbian Communist
became a darling of mainstream America has been explored in multiple
biographies, including Imani Perry’s “Looking for Lorraine
[[link removed]]”
and Soyica Diggs Colbert’s “Radical Vision
[[link removed]],”
and in Tracy Heather Strain’s documentary “Sighted
Eyes / Feeling Heart.” Shields’s portrait is the latest attempt
to expand our sense of the personal struggle behind the public figure,
and to illuminate the many contradictions that she sought to live and
work through.

Hansberry was not raised to be a radical. She was born in Chicago in
1930, the child of an illustrious family that was well regarded in
business and academic circles. Lorraine’s father, Carl Augustus
Hansberry, was a real-estate speculator and a proud race man. When
Lorraine was seven years old, the family bought a house in a mostly
white neighborhood. Faced with eviction by the local property owners
association, Carl fought against racially restrictive housing
covenants in court. Shortly before the case was argued, a crowd of
white neighbors gathered outside the Hansberry home. Nannie,
Lorraine’s mother, stood watch with a gun. Someone hurled a brick
through the window, narrowly missing Lorraine’s head. When the
police finally arrived, one officer remarked, “Some people throw a
rock through your window and you act like it was a bomb.” It was
1937. The bombing of Black families would come.

Carl Hansberry’s fight wound up before the Supreme Court, where he
won his suit; Lorraine, perhaps, learned something about the need to
stay and fight for what you deserve. Or at least that’s the neatest
version of the story. Shields’s biography lays out a more complex
narrative of political inheritance. Carl was not just a warrior
against housing segregation. He was also, Shields says, the “king of
kitchenettes,” a businessman who spotted an opportunity in
Chicago’s rapidly growing Black population. Urban housing was
scarce, in part because white landlords refused to rent apartments to
Black families. Carl, through a few intermediaries, set about
“blockbusting”—getting white families to sell cheaply by moving
Black residents into their neighborhoods. He’d buy a building, then
erect flimsy, flammable partitions dividing the apartments into
cramped kitchenettes—like the one that the Youngers yearn to escape.
“When a decent return on rental property was 6 percent, Hansberry
was making 40,” Shields writes. This unseemly fact has been glossed
over by some biographers, who have described Carl Hansberry as an
entrepreneur. The complaints from his renters make clear that
“slumlord” is a more accurate description.

For Lorraine, being the daughter of a kitchenette king was a problem
from the start. Shields describes her being sent to kindergarten in an
expensive white ermine coat, then shoved to the ground by her
classmates, leaving the fur stained. As she grew up, she drifted away
from the politics of her parents, who remained committed Republicans
even as most Black voters were shifting their party allegiance; at the
University of Wisconsin, she began campaigning for Henry Wallace’s
Progressive Party. After the police turned up at a local protest that
Hansberry attended, her parents forbade her to continue supporting the
insurgent candidate. “I am quite sick about it,” she wrote to a
close friend. “They are afraid Little Lorraine will call up one
night from the police station and ask for her pajamas.” She kept
volunteering for Wallace.

Hansberry also got involved in student theatre, and her nascent
political and artistic aspirations fed off each other. In another
letter, she wrote, “One either writes, paints, composes or otherwise
engages in creative enterprises . . . on behalf of humanity—or
against humanity.” Never a strong student, Hansberry left school
during her sophomore year and moved to New York. She took a job as an
assistant at _Freedom_, the Harlem-based leftist newspaper run
by Paul Robeson
[[link removed]], and
was immediately thrust into the city’s political ferment. The names
that crop up in Shields’s biography—Robeson, Julian Mayfield,
W. E. B. Du Bois, Alice Childress, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Claudia
Jones (Hansberry’s erstwhile roommate)—read like a _Who’s
Who_ of the postwar Black intelligentsia, which is to say, it reads
like a list of F.B.I. surveillance targets.

Whether she knew it or not, Hansberry was already one of them. She had
been identified by an F.B.I. informant at a meeting of a leftist
college group; by the time she died, in 1965, the Bureau’s file on
her was a thousand pages long. In 1952, when Robeson was unable to
attend an international peace conference in Uruguay—the State
Department had cancelled his passport—Hansberry went in his place.
She wrote an article describing the trip, in which she referred to the
Korean War as “the murder in Korea” and denounced U.S. domination
of Latin American economies. If she wasn’t yet a revolutionary, she
was certainly talking like one.

But _Freedom_ was falling apart. As the civil-rights movement
shunned many of the leftists with whom it had once made common cause,
fault lines among Black activists became unbridgeable divides. The
vice-president of the New York chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., buckling
under anti-Communist pressure, shouted down Robeson during a panel on
helping Black people find jobs in radio and television. Many prominent
intellectuals disavowed their old allegiances, but Hansberry, whose
fealty to the Communist cause endured, later called the N.A.A.C.P.
“outmoded.”

Through her political circles, Hansberry had met Robert Nemiroff, the
son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and the two became a couple.
Hansberry called him, with a certain fondness, a “wide-eyed,
immature, unsophisticated revolutionary.” On the eve of their
wedding, in 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed. The
fiancés slipped out of a party at the Hansberry family home to attend
a candlelight vigil. In an unpublished short story based on the event,
Hansberry evoked her outrage that night, a “desire to fling the
glass into the flowers, to thrust one’s arms into the air and run
out of the house screaming at one’s countrymen to come down out of
the apartments.” In college, Hansberry had said that artists had to
be for or against humanity. The narrator of her story looks at the
moral disaster and wonders, “What shall I say to my children?”

Hansberry and Nemiroff shared political commitments, but “desire”
in a deeper sense was missing from their marriage. Hansberry wrote to
her husband obliquely about her attraction to women: “I want one or
two things which you simply cannot give.” In letters, she seems torn
between her radicalism and the social conservatism of her upbringing.
Intellectually, she had reservations about marriage—“I know, for
instance, that one does not go on loving people because one says
meaningless vows”—but she struggled to see the alternative:
“What then? Promiscuity? Revolting.”

The internal conflict between Lorraine the Village radical and
Lorraine the daughter of the Chicago bourgeoisie would become a
familiar and painful one. She believed that homophobia was a
“philosophically active anti-feminist dogma.” She subscribed
to _The Ladder_, the “first national lesbian publication,” and
when it ran a piece about “how lesbians should dress and act” she
dashed off a characteristically emphatic letter to the editor. As a
child of the Black élite, she wrote, she had been taught how to dress
and act for the “dominant social group.” It had not changed which
hotels would deny her entrance, or stopped the cops from sneering at
her mother when a brick shattered her window. Appeasement, Hansberry
believed, wouldn’t get you very far. Her demand was freedom, nothing
less.

But living freely could be nearly impossible. Even when Hansberry’s
marriage began to dissolve and she started dating women, she and
Nemiroff continued living together. (They would divorce a year before
her death.) Her sexuality was well known in the Village, where she
could be seen driving a convertible with a girlfriend, but it was
never a public matter in her lifetime. When “A Raisin in the Sun”
made her a celebrity, the editors of _The Ladder_ tried to persuade
her to come out publicly. Hansberry said that, as a Black lesbian
Communist, she had been forced to decide “which of the closets was
most important to her.”

It is hardly surprising, then, to encounter Hansberry writing to
Nemiroff, in 1956, that she was “terribly lonely, almost to the
point of madness.” Adding to her despair was the torture of writing.
In her early twenties, she had finished several plays and staged
readings with her friends, but she considered the work inadequate. In
a letter, Nemiroff wrote, “You are so obviously grappling with
yourself, uncertain, unresolved about many things.” What she needed
was “a little more self-confidence; a little more self-honesty and
self-criticism.” He continued to champion her after their marriage
ended, managing her career and prodding her to write through bouts of
depression.

In her journals, Hansberry described an ordinary day in the fall of
1956: she thawed a chicken for dinner; a “very dull” friend came
over; she “smoked cigarettes and longed to be quite dead.” She was
unmoored, unable to finish her play. In a beautiful and harrowing
passage, she writes, “Outside it is already deep autumn again and I
am twenty-six and somehow there are leaves, the brown, unhappy,
useless ones on the sidewalks of the streets outside—even though
there are no trees. . . . If such emptiness only had a shape.”
The anguish generated by her torpor calls ahead to the fear of a big
nothing that threatens to consume Walter Younger, Jr.

Only two years before “Raisin” opened, Lorraine gathered all her
material for the play in the fireplace and prepared to burn it.
Nemiroff took the pages away. A few days later, he put the script in
front of her and she went back to work.

Success tends to make itself seem inevitable, but at every stage “A
Raisin in the Sun” was an unlikely prospect. The initial producers
were record-label owners who knew little about developing a Broadway
show. Fund-raising stalled, and there were disputes over who should
direct. In January, 1959, after stops and starts, the play premièred
in New Haven, with Sidney Poitier starring as Walter Younger, Jr. On
March 11th, it opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, in New York.

“Raisin” is a naturalist drama, sliding coolly between despair and
hope, often by way of bitter jokes. In the opening act, when the
life-insurance check arrives, Walter, Jr.,’s wife, Ruth, tells Lena
that she ought to go to Europe. After all, she points out, “rich
white women . . . don’t think nothing of packing up they
suitcases and piling on one of them big steamships
and—swoosh!—they gone, child.” Lena simply laughs: “Something
always told me I wasn’t no rich white woman.” It’s a funny
retort, but Hansberry lets the meaning hang in the air. Her entire
play revolves around that “something”—the forces that withhold
simple dignity from Black Americans.

For some critics, the play was a triumphant story of overcoming these
forces. In the final scene, Lena says proudly, of her son, “He
finally come into his manhood, today, didn’t he?” The seemingly
happy ending, which some audiences considered a quasi-revolutionary
act, was easy to rally around. One critic applauded the show for
displaying Black people’s ability to “come up with a song and hum
their troubles away.” It no doubt helped that all the Youngers want
is to own a business and a home. Walter is not staging a sit-in,
staring down the police, or seizing the means of production. He wants
to get rich. He wants to own property. And who out there beyond the
stage lights didn’t?

For starters, Black radicals even younger than Hansberry. Amiri Baraka
later recalled thinking that the play was “middle class”; the
Youngers’ fixation on “moving into white folks’ neighborhoods”
looked like an endorsement of an assimilationist agenda. But this was
never Hansberry’s intent. Of the critic who understood her
characters to be carefree, she wrote, in the _Village Voice,_ “It
did not disturb the writer that there is no such implication in the
entire three acts.” Hansberry’s play is a masterpiece because it
pushes ideas until they mutate; what might read at first as a moral
triumph is too complex, too enmeshed in the compromises of American
life to be so easily summed up.

Reducing “Raisin” to the standoff between the Youngers and their
bigoted neighbors ignores the play’s clashes within its Black
world—between genders, generations, and classes. The class conflict
is perhaps best captured by Walter’s sister, Beneatha, and her rich
suitor, George Murchison, whom she insists she’ll never marry. The
Murchisons, she explains, are “honest-to-God-real-live-rich colored
people, and the only people in the world who are more snobbish than
rich white people are rich colored people.” When her mother
admonishes her not to hate the rich for being rich, Beneatha responds
that plenty of people hate the poor for being poor.

Hansberry admitted that her family was more like the Murchisons than
the Youngers. When “Raisin” premièred in Chicago, what should
have been a momentous homecoming turned into a fiasco. The city had
doggedly pursued the Hansberry company over unpaid fines and the poor
living conditions at its properties, issuing arrest warrants for all
proprietors of the business, including Lorraine. On opening night, she
had to flee Chicago—shadowed by the very class divide that her play
so sharply portrays.

Shields holds up this apparent contradiction as proof of Hansberry’s
inconsistency. How, he wonders, could she endorse “economic justice
for Black Americans that would give them access to better
opportunities and a standard of living consistent with the pursuit of
happiness” and also oppose capitalism, which had made her
family—and then her—rich? “She never seemed to understand the
complex ways aspiration, democracy, and an advanced market economy can
go hand in hand,” Shields writes.

But this was exactly what Hansberry did understand. Walter, Jr., is
sick with aspiration and capitalism, and all that democracy talk
flitting around the country isn’t helping him get well. “Raisin”
punctures the American Dream, but takes seriously the question of why
it has such power in the first place. Lena puts it starkly:

L_ena_: Son—how come you talk so much ’bout money?
W_alter_: Because it is life, Mama!
L_ena_: So now it’s life. Money is life. Once upon a time freedom
used to be life—now it’s money. I guess the world really do
change . . .
W_alter_: No—it was always money, Mama. We just didn’t know about
it.

Absent a political education, Walter demands the best thing he can
imagine, which is the right to be a boss. Who can say that he is
wrong? Money _is_ life. People die for a lack of it every day. Yet
Hansberry puts the line into the mouth of a man descended from people
who were made into capital. _Money is life_ has historically been a
reality too literal to bear. Walter thinks that he’s taking a step
up, but listen closely and it sounds like he’s giving in to a darker
idea. Hansberry knew that dreams like Walter’s were lodged deep in
the breasts of their dreamers. What she doubted was whether they were
worth it. She had always had what the Youngers wanted. It did not keep
the despair at bay, nor had it set the world free.

Hansberry had been intoxicated by the idea of public renown long
before she achieved it. When she was twenty-five, she wrote, “Fame.
It has become a sweet promise, hiding, whispering to me
daily. . . . I shock myself with such thought and shake my head
with embarrassment—fame!” “Raisin” depends on the tension
produced by such a shock. It admits a fact denied by people of many
races and politics: what a particular Black person wants may not
always be consonant with freedom. American history has placed such
weight on the meaning of those wants that it can be hard to look at
them straight on. Hansberry didn’t turn away.

After “Raisin,” writing was still a struggle; depression was still
stifling. Even as the play received widespread acclaim—or perhaps
precisely because it did—Hansberry considered it dramatically
flawed. When adapting it for the screen, she set about trying to make
improvements, adding new scenes with more obviously political
material. They never made it into the film.

Her next play—she didn’t know it would be her last—was “The
Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” about Village intellectuals
whose artistic careers are floundering and whose love lives are a
mess. In the opening scene, Sidney, a pretentious newspaper editor,
advises a protégé to “presume no commitment, disavow all
engagement, mock all great expectations”—a succinct summary of the
kind of writing that Hansberry despised. The play opened to
unenthusiastic reviews. One, Shields notes, deemed it “an unresolved
chaos of liberalistic political and sexual ideas.”

Through it all, Hansberry was sick and getting sicker. She had ulcers,
anemia, and calcium deposits. She visited doctors and underwent
exploratory surgery. The truth was that she had pancreatic cancer, but
she was never told; Nemiroff concluded that it would be better if she
didn’t know how dire the state of her health was. Their friends took
up a collection while she was in the hospital, not to pay for her care
but to keep “Sidney Brustein” running. The play closed on January
12, 1965, the night Hansberry died. She was thirty-four years old.

In a speech a few weeks before “Raisin” débuted in New York,
Hansberry said it was a Black writer’s duty to join “the wars
against one’s time and culture.” One can barely imagine what she
would have achieved had she been able to stay in the wars longer,
through the terrible, astonishing years that followed. Instead, she
was drafted into the culture in ways that likely would have
discomfited her. She became a star—bright but distant.

Years ago, in my first Brooklyn apartment, I cut out of a magazine a
photograph of Hansberry and taped it to my wall. In the picture, she
is twenty-nine or thirty, her hair high and tousled. A cigarette hangs
between her fingers. Her eyes are fiery, focussed just beyond the
frame. Her mouth is open, but her jaw is set. She appears like a dream
of this city: a writer in pitched combat over ideas. Many of us have
tried to look like this and failed.

This vision, of course, doesn’t capture her in full. Her passion
could be countered by inhibition, her tenacity by trepidation. The
year before she died, she questioned whether her success had made her
too comfortable. She worried about having “sold my soul.” All her
pretty words paled in comparison with what was being done at lunch
counters, on buses, and in streets around the country. In her journal,
she made a note: “I think when I get my health back I shall go into
the South to find out what kind of revolutionary I am.”

_BLAIR MCCLENDON
[[link removed]], a writer, an
editor, and a filmmaker, is based in New York City._

_THE NEW YORKER.  Winter Sale. Get 12 weeks for $12 $6, plus a free
tote. Cancel anytime._

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]