This piece was written for Tone magazine as a rebuttal to a negative piece written by Chicago writer Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1949).
Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965), a native of Chicago, was an acclaimed African-American author and playwright. She is best known for her landmark play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), which was the first play on Broadway written by a black woman and the first directed by a black man (Lloyd Richards). The leading male role was played by Sidney Poitier, who revived it for the 1961 movie version. Hansberry and Baldwin became good friends.
Interestingly enough, Baldwin had a rather contentious relationship with Richard Wright (1908–1960), author of the award-winning, best-selling novel Native Son (1940), upon which the play of the same name was based, a dramatic collaboration between Wright and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Paul Green. Orson Welles directed the first incarnation back in 1941. Wright had been Baldwin’s first big literary mentor—his hero, in fact—but Baldwin later would attack Wright’s work in print, accusing it of being a prime example of “protest fiction,” something Baldwin viewed as agitprop and inferior to high art. After Wright’s death Baldwin would lament their lapsed friendship and claim that he had only been trying to impress Wright by being a “good student.”
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BOTH Native Son and A Raisin in the Sun are flawed pieces of work, though this is clearly not the point of Mr. Algren’s argument. I do not place Native Son as highly as he does, and he claims too much for Richard Wright, who never found out many of the things Mr. Algren authoritatively speaks of him as “knowing.” Neither do I think that A Raisin in the Sun is the meretricious creation he takes it to be. Furthermore, unlike Mr. Algren, I find a profound connection between the two works, and even certain rather obvious similarities.
This, naturally, has everything to do with the difference between my point of view and Algren’s. Only politically, for example, does his rhetoric about being “rightful members of company of men” make any sense to me. Personally and artistically, it seems to me that this problem presents itself in ways which make the use of the word “rightful” rather questionable, if not rather terrifying.
In my own reading of Native Son, it seems to me that where the polemic is most strong, the novel is least true; and, conversely, that the real fury of the novel tends to complicate and compromise and finally, indeed, to invalidate the novelist’s social and political attitudes.
A Raisin in the Sun is not nearly so massive and it would seem to be far less angry. But this last is not the case. It is a very angry play indeed, and to say that it is angry about real estate is like saying that Native Son is angry about airplanes. Bigger Thomas, you will remember, stands about on Chicago’s street corners watching the airplanes flown by white men, wishing to rise into that sky. There are long exchanges between himself and his buddies, in which they pretend to be powerful, rich, white tycoons—“one of America’s bald-headed men” is the way the sister in Miss Hansberry’s play puts it, taunting her ambitious and conceited brother. The great flaw in Native Son is, it seems to me, involved with Wright’s attempt to illuminate ruthlessly as unprecedented a creation as Bigger by means of the stock characters of Jan, the murdered girl’s lover, and Max, the white lawyer. The force of Bigger’s reality makes it impossible to believe in these two; though one can, of course, protect oneself against Bigger’s reality by clinging to these shadowy and familiar figures; which is, indeed, in the event, what happened.
And the flaw in Raisin is not really very different. It involves the juxtaposition of the essentially stock—certainly familiar—figure of the mother with the intense (and unprecedented) figure of Walter Lee. Most Americans do not know that he exists. From the point of view of someone who knows that he exists and how bitter his life is, I could wish that the role of Lena Younger had been written with greater ambiguity. Part of the corrosive ambiguity of his mother’s role in his life. This brings up the whole question of the role of the mother in Negro life, and the peculiar and horrible problems of the Negro woman. This theme is never overtly stated, but it runs throughout the play. Each of the women, the mother, the wife, and the daughter, are, on their own levels, grappling with the problem of how to create a haven of safety for Walter, so that he can be a man, play a man’s role in the world, and yet not be destroyed. It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things. Every Negro woman knows what her man faces when he goes out to work, and what poison he will probably bring back. There is no guarantee that she will always be able to suck the poison out of him; the more particularly as the male’s aspirations, and his failures, are so thoroughly bound up with herself. And if he is living where Walter lives, with a “dream” of buying a liquor store, flying an airplane, buying pearls for his wife, hitting the number—the entire family teeters on the edge of disaster. With every move he makes to bring the dream closer, disaster becomes more probable. On the other hand, should the dream fade, he fades with it; so do they, the women: and disaster has overcome them.
This is the reason that Walter’s wife wearily tells him to eat his eggs. It is the reason his sister is so quick to turn on the brother she loves: she does not dare to trust his manhood, for it has no power in the world, and cannot protect her. And it is the reason, of course, that the mother plays so dominant a role in all their lives. She has been able to work when her husband could not find work. (All over the nation, at this moment, white matrons are extolling their maids and deploring their “no count” husbands). She has known what waited for Walter since his eyes opened on the world, and has tried to protect him from it. How can he fail, then, at the age of thirty-five, with his wife aging, and his son growing up, to flail about him like a man in a trap? For he is in a trap. And why, may I ask, and how, should his dreams be more noble than those of anyone else in this sad place? He is not presented, after all, as exceptional, merely as struggling—which is, perhaps, all things considered, quite exceptional enough.
I am not myself terribly worried about color TV and split-level houses, etc., since I consider my life to be already sufficiently compromised by the garbage of this century. My own rather melancholy feeling is that as long as people want these things, they will do everything in their power to get them; when they want something better, they will make it; all I can do in the meantime, it seems to me, is attempt to prove, by hard precept and harder example, that people can be better than they are. I see no point in railing against the American middle class as such. They are a pretty sorry lot, God knows, but they are suffering here in their tawdry splendor. What one has to do, I think, is undermine the standards by which they imagine themselves to live. As for the rise of the Negro into the middle class, I am not certain that what is happening in this country can be summed up quite so neatly. It doesn’t look much like a rise to me; it looks more like an insane rout, with white people fleeing to the suburbs of cities, hotly pursued by Negroes. In any case, by the time anything we can comfortably speak of as a “rise” has occurred, this country will be, for better or worse, unrecognizable.
Well, I think I may be running out of space. But I do not know what Mr. Algren has in mind when he speaks of the right of the Negro to be himself. What, exactly, is this “self” of which Mr. Algren speaks so boldly? How does Raisin in the Sun deny the Negro this right? There are a great many Negroes in real estate, for example, and there are even a few in advertising. Are they or are they not claiming their right to be themselves? What are the wellsprings of Negro life?
No, I cannot agree that Miss Hansberry has written a play about real estate. Perhaps the real difference between her play and Wright’s novel is that twenty-one years have passed and very little, for most of the Negroes in this country, has changed. Bigger died in his trap and Walter walks out of his, into the greater one. There is no other place for him to move. If he has left behind him something of value, it is up to those of us who know what value is to make certain that it is not entirely lost.
(1961)