Looking for Lorraine Read online

  For her brilliance

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION Lorraine’s Time

  CHAPTER ONE Migration Song

  CHAPTER TWO From Heartland to the Water’s Edge

  CHAPTER THREE The Girl Who Can Do Everything

  CHAPTER FOUR Bobby

  CHAPTER FIVE Sappho’s Poetry

  CHAPTER SIX Raisin

  CHAPTER SEVEN The Trinity

  CHAPTER EIGHT Of the Faith of Our Fathers

  CHAPTER NINE American Radical

  CHAPTER TEN The View from Chitterling Heights

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Homegoing

  CONCLUSION Retracing, May 2017

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  Lorraine’s Time

  For some time now—I think since I was a child—I have been possessed of the desire to put down the stuff of my life. That is a commonplace impulse, apparently, among persons of massive self-interest; sooner or later we all do it. And, I am quite certain, there is only one internal quarrel: how much of the truth to tell? How much, how much, how much! It is brutal in sober uncompromising moments, to reflect on the comedy of concern we all enact when it comes to our precious images!1

  —Lorraine Hansberry

  FOLLOWING HER LEAD, I too am putting down “the stuff” of Lorraine Hansberry’s life. In my hands, the narrative comes from the sketches, snatches, and masterpieces she left behind; the scrawled-upon pages, published plays, and memories: her own and others from people who witnessed and marveled at, and even some of those who resented, her genius.

  But why did I believe this book, less a biography than a genre yet to be named—maybe third person memoir—had to be written? The obvious answer is Lorraine Hansberry was the first Black woman to have her play produced on Broadway and the first Black winner of the prestigious Drama Critics’ Circle Award. That first play, A Raisin in the Sun, is the most widely produced and read play by a Black American woman. It is canonical, not just in Black American literature but also in American arts and letters. She is an important writer. And Lorraine Hansberry is an important writer who has had far too little written about her, about her other work, about her life. Hers is a story that remains in the gaps despite the fact that she was widely influential. Her image in the public arena has a persistent flatness, even now as more people know about the details of her life. Knowing only two dimensions is our misfortune. She sparked and sparkled. Now, in the digital age, to so easily hear her voice, to look at the many photos that pop up on Google Images, to search newspaper archives for her incisive comments and her teasing wit is to feel the crackling excitement of her persona. Her eyes are alight. Her voice veers between the studied artifice of elocution and the drawled vowels and rhythm of the Chicago South Side to, finally, the slurring speech of the terminally ill. Elegance in one photo gives way to the boyish charm and mussed hair of another. It isn’t hard to see there was a great deal of there there.

  Lorraine died young. That is undoubtedly one reason we know too little. The life cut short has cast a pall over remembrance. The question “What if she had lived?” echoes. What else wasn’t done? Poor remnants of an unfinished life lie dormant, at least that is what many critics have told us. And then there is the way the play itself, canonized neatly as the story of a Black family fighting Northern segregation, is set into the narrative drama of the twentieth century United States, the march toward freedom. Like Selma, like Washington, A Raisin in the Sun sits static.

  Static things don’t breathe. Or live.

  But Lorraine did. Deeply.

  I call her Lorraine rather than Hansberry because she is just one of a number of Hansberrys whose names you ought to know. I can’t just call her Hansberry—the surname of her uncle, her mother, her father, her grandfather—because I might mean any one of those notable figures. In thirty-four years, the briefest life of the great Hansberrys, she left a lasting impression. She was an artist and an activist. She was strident and striking, an aesthete, and, as John Oliver Killens called her, “a socialist with a black nationalist perspective.”2 Born at the dawning of the Great Depression, she was one of those great artists whose life rode the wave of some of the most pivotal and complex moments in American history: World War II, McCarthyism, civil rights. Lorraine was right in the thick of it, trying to make sense of it all.

  There are enticing details: She was a Black lesbian woman born into the established Black middle class who became a Greenwich Village bohemian leftist married to a man, a Jewish communist songwriter. She cast her lot with the working classes and became a wildly famous writer. She drank too much, died early of cancer, loved some wonderful women, and yet lived with an unrelenting loneliness. She was intoxicated by beauty and enraged by injustice. I could tell these stories as gossip. But I hope they will unfold here as something much more than that.

  Legacies and traditions are funny matters. They are so often pruning devices. For example, to write about Lorraine is to write about the remarkable legacy of Chicago, and more broadly the Midwest, in the history of Black art in the United States. She followed in the footsteps of so many greats: Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ralph Ellison. She set the stage for so many more, like August Wilson and Toni Morrison. When I say that, I imagine what comes to mind for some readers are those laminated posters of famous Black writers. This one might read “Great Black writers of the Midwest” and have elegant photos with their names written in cursive. But to write about Lorraine in the way I intend to here, and to think of her as part of the tradition, is not that kind of gig. Like the ones who came before, she lived an artist’s life, a flesh and blood life, with a great deal of difficulty and little in the way of respectability once she committed fully to who she was. She did things that were politically dangerous. She was brave and also fearful; experimental and superb. She failed and hurt. Her tradition, then, cannot be reduced to the picture of greatness. It has to entail the vagaries of imagination and the many circumstances that excite it.

  By the mid-twentieth century, Chicago Black artists, working in the shadow of the University of Chicago, which had decades of studying poor Black people as one of its many validating archives, had been grappling with what could be called “sociological conditions” for a very long time. Poverty, racism, segregation, mob violence, overcrowding, so many people in such little space—for Black Chicagoans these things existed amid factory smoke and meatpacking plants, entrails on the ground, and grime in the cracks. The exploration of big human questions about love and meaning always had material conditions as a backdrop. That was the Chicago tradition into which Lorraine was born. She too struggled over the social and political meanings of dreams and their deferral, rejecting absolute bleakness and anything too romantic or abstract. Instead, she looked for what was real about the human experience under captive conditions.

  Lorraine’s searching was one for her own life and also for her art. She stood in the collective tradition of the Black artist, but also in a family tradition of the Black activist and public servant. Her father’s father, Elden Hansberry, was a history professor at Alcorn College. Her father, Carl, an Alcorn graduate, was a civil rights activist and a real estate entrepreneur. Her mother, Nannie, was a teacher and a ward leader. Her uncle William Leo Hansberry is known as the father of African Studies and worked as a professor at Howard University. She grew up surrounded by their interlocutors: lawyers, physicians, activists, intellectuals, businessmen. Their expectation was that all their children would grow up to do something of significance that would not just be a sign of personal excellence but also achievement for the race.

  That was a huge expectation. And it was one that Lorraine exceeded. Not only would she distinguish herself
among artists of her generation, she would also think her way into the vanguard of issues that would come to the fore of American and global thought in the years after her death: feminism, postcolonialism, LGBTQ rights and lives, Black nationalism and liberation. She was before her time, and it is also fair to say she died before her time. I hope to capture that here. The title of this book is an homage to Isaac Julien’s impressionistic 1989 memorial film Looking for Langston, which was dedicated to Langston Hughes and to the queer Black Harlem Renaissance world. As he looked for Langston in footage, language, and imagination, I look for Lorraine in words, ideas, and imagination.

  Although this is not a traditional biography, it is close enough to admit the truism that all biography is autobiography, at least in part. My own connection to Lorraine began with my father. He, a Jewish man, born into the Brooklyn working class in 1943, adored her. He often bragged that he shared her birthday and that of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh. He was born under the sign of the bull and the freedom fighter. That man who loved egg creams, long walks, Karl Marx, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Cuban revolution also loved Lorraine.

  My father informally adopted me in my infancy, when he was partnered with my mother. He was a New Yorker who migrated to Chicago (with a brief yet life-changing time in my birthplace, Alabama). Lorraine was a Chicagoan who migrated to New York (with deep meaningful roots in Mississippi and Tennessee). Lorraine was a Black woman who loved and left, but still held close, a Jewish communist named Robert Nemiroff. My father was a Jewish communist who loved and was left by a Black woman. I am her daughter by birth, his by love, one whom he held close until his last breath. Robert watched Lorraine die. We watched my father die.

  My dad adored Lorraine for her radicalism, for her unflinching truth telling, and for being a seeker. My dad was also taken by beauty and poise. From the time I was young, he would take me to see productions of A Raisin in the Sun. And we watched the film versions together. He built her into my coming of age.

  I lived in a kitchenette apartment for part of my youth, although it was in Harvard graduate student housing, not the South Side of Chicago. (In our apartment in Chicago we had a galley kitchen, though other details were reminiscent of the Younger family’s place in A Raisin in the Sun.) I am deeply familiar with the interstices of Lorraine’s life: the rare air of higher education and leftist intellectuals, and yet also up close to working-class, salt-of-the-earth living, a life bohemian and migratory, yet deeply Southern. It resonates with my own. When I was in school, she was one of the few Black women who everyone seemed to know once existed. Lorraine provided a bridge between my riotous collage of a private life and the larger white world I occupied, a world that failed to account for, or even recognize, the complexity of my identity. She was seen, even when I wasn’t. And that mattered. I always had her, even when I knew relatively little about her, as someone who was at least a little bit “like me.” Maybe that was part of my father’s gift too. Role models are important, notwithstanding how trite it sounds.

  A 1977 yearbook—it belonged to one of my aunts—has been sitting on my grandmother’s shelf in Birmingham, Alabama, for as long as I can remember. Now, many years after her death it remains. In it are several pages devoted to photographs of a student performance of To Be Young, Gifted and Black, Robert Nemiroff’s experimental posthumous play about Lorraine Hansberry’s life, collaged from her own writings. In the yearbook, most people are wearing large Afros, with some beehives thrown in. Hot pants, leotards, and bellbottoms are the style. Unapologetic Blackness, ostentatious even, is all over the pages. They’ve always made me happy. Though I can only faintly remember the sounds of that time, back in the recesses of my memory, I spent enough hours listening to Nina Simone’s ode to Lorraine, “Young, Gifted and Black,” that I hear it when I open the yearbook.

  What I’m looking for in the pages is something of my past and Lorraine’s legacy. The exercise is bizarre and exquisite. Writing about her now, many years past my childhood encounters, is a temporal oddity. She died at thirty-four; I am forty-four as I write these words. I will always be older than she ever was. She was born in 1930, I was born in 1972; she will always be generations ahead of me. As a woman of my generation I look to her to understand the historic past and the bloom of lost youth at the same time.

  Even though I read all her published work as I came of age—To Be Young, Gifted and Black, A Raisin in the Sun, Les Blancs, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window—and was therefore more familiar with her writing than the vast majority of readers, I would guess, Lorraine’s life remained largely invisible to me until I was well into adulthood. But then in 2007, while a fellow at Princeton, I began spending afternoons in the microfiche room, reading Paul Robeson’s Freedom newspaper. Lorraine’s name all over the paper caught my attention.

  My father was still alive then. I started a little project about Lorraine, really about the community of thinkers who mentored her and made her work possible, but I didn’t tell him about it. I’m not sure why, beyond the fact that this discovery was something private for me: I reveled in her words, words that I was fairly sure people I knew hadn’t read. A talk that later became an unpublished essay led me down a road that other scholars had also begun to take, to begin to fill out the details of Lorraine’s life. Scholars Cheryl Higashida and Mary Helen Washington have written brilliantly about her role in the Black Left. Judith Smith has compellingly placed her work in the context of mid-twentieth-century civil rights. Kevin Mumford has written powerfully about her queerness. The eagerly anticipated comprehensive biography by the preeminent Hansberry critic Margaret Wilkerson will settle so much that is unsettled about Lorraine, and Tracy Strain’s 2017 documentary Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart is a visual masterpiece of a composition that brings Lorraine to life. Soyica Colbert and Monica Miller will bring their brilliance to Lorraine’s corpus. This list isn’t comprehensive. There are more, all building her story.

  And then there is this book, something that fell into my consciousness, a percolating surprise. I want to honor her labors. I was always given the impression that, because Lorraine died so young, so much of what she was supposed to do was left undone. But the archive, appropriately housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, tells a different story, the one that journalist Izzy Rowe shared at her death: “Though she lived but a few years in the full bloom of womanhood, she accomplished the full measure of living and left behind an immortality which will live out the life span of even generations yet to be born.”3 Joi Gresham, the executor of Lorraine’s estate, has given us the gift of its vastness. So much is done. And from it my story of her has emerged, the story of an artist and intellectual of a particular sort, no less passionate than she was probing, but consistently both. It is a story that disrupts her obscurity and the manner in which she has remained hidden in plain sight, not simply with expanded details of her life but as a portrait of the artist. This is more like composition than an archaeological dig (though a great deal of digging through thousands of pages was involved). I try to catch a likeness of her. The urgency with which she lived, especially in her final days when she was literally running out of time, was infused with a sense of the possible. Peace, justice, love, beauty—she believed they could all be achieved, and that we ought to reach for them. And so, in these complicated times, not only a time in which, were she alive or reincarnated, she could be an out lesbian and loudly unconflicted about her myriad identities, but also a period in which her impolitic and incisive tongue would likely have prevented her from a great deal of recognition, I think she has something to teach us. The portrait here is, then, as much homage to her as it is gift to myself, and to you. That we might see the stuff of our lives in hers. So much has yet to be done and she can help us do it.

  Time insists in a multitude of forms. The urgency of her time and its particularities must be understood within the deep sense of possibility that she maintained, a sense that characterizes youth in general and in particular those fo
r whom justice seeking is their life work. We are running out of time, the earth is ravaged, our bodies are indefinite; Lorraine reminds us to make use of each moment.

  This book is then also a portrait of the artist as a woman at that crossroads. Ahead of her time, Lorraine’s witness and wisdom help us understand the world, its problems and its possibilities. In her lonely reckonings, her impassioned reaching for justice, and the seriousness of her craft, she teaches us how to more ethically, more lovingly, witness one another today. There is something quieter but no less important too. In these pages I want to catch a likeness of her to give the reader a sense of the sweet and intimate parts of her: what made her smile and raised her ire, what drove her passions and how she loved.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Migration Song

  Why was it important to take a small step, a teeny step, or the most desired of all—one GIANT step? A giant step to where?

  —Lorraine Hansberry1

  THE WEATHER WAS COOL, blue sky and bluster. Lorraine was born in May. Her mother, Nannie Perry Hansberry, gave birth in Provident, the first Black owned and operated hospital in the nation. It was a fitting location. Carl and Nannie, like thousands of others, had departed from the Deep South decades prior and built their lives in the Windy City. Chicago was a destination of Black hope and aspiration. The Hansberrys were strivers. And Lorraine was the last of their four children. She came into something special.

  Their life, like that of most Black Chicagoans, was on the South Side. But Carl and Nannie were distinguished in their community: They were college educated. Carl had graduated from Alcorn State in his native Mississippi and Nannie, from Tennessee State University in her home state. Nannie was a teacher and a ward leader for the Republican Party. Carl was a successful real estate entrepreneur, a man known as the “kitchenette king” in the Chicago Defender. He earned this designation by routinely purchasing three-unit apartment buildings and chopping the units into ten smaller sections, each of them with a partial kitchen attached to the living room. The kitchenettes allowed Carl, and the other investors who followed suit, to provide housing for Black residents who, due to widespread housing discrimination, were squished into far too small a terrain. Quite simply: the South Side was bursting at the seams, and Carl found a lucrative solution to the problem. As a result, the Hansberrys were, at least in the eyes of the community in which they lived, wildly successful.