CHAPTER FOUR

Bobby

I do wish we were closer in some matters so that there were no aspects of my problems that we could not share. [. . .] We are really terribly different kinds of people.¹

—Lorraine to Bobby

IN A LETTER TO HER FRIEND EDYTHE, Lorraine wrote about her life in New York:

See only foreign movies, no plays hardly, attend meetings almost every night, sing in a chorus, eat all the foreign foods in N.Y., go for long walks in Harlem and talk to my people about everything on the streets, usher at rallies, make street corner speeches in Harlem and sometimes make it up to the country on Sundays. [. . .] Write stories and articles for all the little journals of the working class around. Supposed to get married about September.²

I have thought about that last sentence: “Supposed to get married.” It might just be that Lorraine didn’t go for conventional “feminine” frivolousness, and for that reason it sounds flip. Maybe they’d talked about her betrothed, Robert Nemiroff—or as she called him, Bobby—many times before, and this was just quick information. Perhaps she was afraid to tell Edythe, so she wrote like she was ripping off a Band-Aid. Or maybe Lorraine was ambivalent.

Lorraine and Bobby met early in 1952 at a protest against racially discriminatory hiring practices at New York University. He was a graduate student there. Bobby was just under a year older than Lorraine, Jewish, and a native New Yorker. They were different from one another. But both were, as Lorraine’s friend Douglas Turner Ward would describe it, on the rebound. Bobby had been briefly married before. Lorraine had been engaged to a “Harlem slickster” named Roosevelt “Rosie” Jackson. Rosie was gorgeous, a leader of the Labor Youth League, urbane, and very working class—of the milieu Lorraine admired. But in addition to all those appealing traits, Rosie was enamored of all the bourgeois trappings that Lorraine had put behind her. More devastating, Rosie became a heroin junkie, and his addict’s profligacy got Lorraine evicted from her Harlem apartment. So that ended that.

When Bobby came around, different as he was from her ideal, and from her, he and Lorraine did share a great deal: they were both members of the radical left, intellectuals, and artists. Bobby would become something much more than just her husband. He was a friend until her death, a caretaker, one who encouraged and facilitated her writing, and after her death the one who ensured her legacy.

Lorraine wasn’t nearly as sure about Bobby as he was about her that first year they were dating. She was honest about it. In a letter, written the day after Christmas in 1952 from her family home in Chicago, however, she declared her love for him. And her intentions:

My Dear Bob,

Once again I wrote you a very long letter—the important simple things which it said were that I have finally admitted to myself I do love you, you wide-eyed immature un-sophisticated revolutionary.

She claimed to have thrown away that sentimental piece in favor of “this breezy little missle [sic].”³

The letter proceeds oddly and yet sweetly into a list of assertions about her life, and his, and their relationship. About her work she said:

1. I am a writer. I am going to write.

2. I am going to become a writer.

3. Any real contribution I can make to the movement can only be the result of a disciplined life. I am going to institute discipline in my life.

4. I can paint. I am going to paint.

The END⁴

The declarations that she already is a writer, is going to write, and will become a writer are at once, it seems, a literal fact (she had begun publishing here and there) and a statement about both her ambition and her identity. In contrast, while she asserts that she can paint and is going to paint, she doesn’t call herself a painter. It’s not even clear whether “I can paint” is a declaration of skill or simply a statement that nothing is keeping her from doing something she loves.

But her weakness on both matters and more, by her own judgment, was a lack of discipline. Lorraine was restless, seeking, searching, and interested in dozens of things. She was always doing, never lazy or indulgent, but not disciplined. At least not yet.

Following her statement about vocations, she shared her feelings about Bobby. She declared her love for him, “problems be damned,” and her need for him. They would, she said, struggle together. He is what she wanted in a man. The words are humorous, sweet, and clinical at once. She sounds removed but convinced:

My sincerest political opinion is that we have reached a point in a truly beautiful relationship—where it may become the fullest kind of relationship between a man and a woman. I want it that way (stop blushing).

. . . That it is possible that our sharing a life together would be a rather beautiful thing.

. . . Pilar was wrong—the earth doesn’t “move.”

The END⁵

Lorraine moved rather matter-of-factly through the case for their union. She said she loved him; there were problems, but she believed in the possibility of fulfillment and beauty. And yet she concluded with a reference to the characters in Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. In the relevant scene, Hemingway’s two protagonists, Robert and Maria, have just made love for the first time. They encounter their friend Pilar, who insists upon knowing “how it was.” Maria finally responds, under pressure, by saying that “the earth moved.” Pilar is at once mystified and expert, declaring that the “earth moves” only three times in a person’s life.

Lorraine made a joke of the fact that their intimacy wasn’t one that made the earth move, at least for her. Yet she believed a life together would be a beautiful thing. She might have been honest to a fault, or felt a bit of bittersweetness about the whole thing, or was just bitingly teasing. In any case, their love affair proceeded. It was a union that in a sense represented the avant-garde of a particular time and place. They were left-wing bohemians, an interracial couple dedicated to radical social transformation who, after Lorraine moved out of Harlem, settled in Greenwich Village, made art, and attended protests.

They scheduled their wedding for earlier than Lorraine anticipated in her letter to Edythe. It was held on June 20 in Lorraine’s hometown. The Chicago Defender reported gleefully on the marriage of a princess of the Negro elite with a photograph of a grinning and gorgeous Lorraine. But what ought to have been a joyful occasion was overcast by tragedy. In the days leading up to their wedding, Lorraine and Bobby learned that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, two Jewish American communists who were convicted of being spies for the Soviet Union, had exhausted all their appeals and were sentenced to death. The Rosenberg case had become an important cause for the Left, a sign of how far the anticommunist hysteria would go. The answer was, so far that circumstantial evidence would condemn the parents of young children to death. President Eisenhower made a statement, along with his refusal to grant the clemency that thousands across the world begged for. He said, “I can only say that, by immeasurably increasing the chances of atomic war, the Rosenbergs may have condemned to death tens of millions of innocent people all over the world. The execution of two human beings is a grave matter. But even graver is the thought of the millions of dead whose deaths may be directly attributable to what these spies have done.”⁶

On the afternoon of Saturday, June 19, Lorraine and Bobby picketed in front of the federal courthouse in Chicago for the Rosenbergs. Julius was executed that night at 8 p.m. He died after one shock in the electric chair. Ethel was next. They electrocuted her once, twice, three times. But her heart was still beating. The executioner administered two more shocks. Smoke rose above her head and through her ears and nostrils. Five shocks, and she was finally dead.⁷ Lorraine was devastated. She wrote:

We had come to a wedding. We had come to Chicago to lose our selves in the Bridal Song. And then there were those moments when the news came. And we spoke of it quietly to one another—our voices soft under the discussion of where the cake would be placed and when the photographers would arrive. [. . .] Our voices above the champagne glasses, our eyes questioning one another between the fresh fragrant flowers in their gleaming pots on the coffee tables of the wedding house, festive flowers. The Chicago heat in the vast living room suddenly overpowering the senses, some grim terrible fire within suddenly making it more awful, more stifling—the desire to fling the glass into the flowers, to thrust one’s arms into the air and run out of the house screaming at ones country men to come down out of the apartments, down from the houses, to get up from the television sets, from the dinner tables. [. . .] The bride sits a moment in a corner alone to herself—she thinks

And what shall I say to my children? And how shall I explain such a thing to them?⁸

Lorraine wouldn’t have children and didn’t appear to want them. But she mourned the world and felt the shame of celebrating in the midst of such heartbreak. One can’t help but think about the Rosenberg children, ages six and ten, orphaned by the hysterics of the Cold War. Lorraine wondered, what did the bride and groom owe them and others of their generation?

Bobby described the day succinctly, yet also poignantly: “We spent Saturday night picketing the courthouse in Chicago and we were married on Sunday . . . and they were executed Saturday night. And we had no heart for the wedding.”⁹

But they retained their heart for art and politics. Lorraine resigned from Freedom but continued to write and organize locally with the same sense of passion. Lorraine’s mother, who had written angrily the prior year that she was worried and insisted that Lorraine must come home, was likely assuaged that Lorraine was finally a married lady. Respectable.

To make a living, Lorraine occasionally worked as a waitress at the restaurant owned by Bobby’s parents, for whom she felt great affection (his mother was described by the FBI as fanatical communist), and took a variety of other jobs, mostly unsatisfying. The shortest was a four-day stint at a department store. She quit because the women working the floor were ordered about with a ringing bell. And for six months she put tags on fur coats in a clothing shop. Lorraine’s barely remunerative work as a member of the Left intelligentsia also continued. In 1954, she became an associate editor for the pocket-sized youth magazine New Challenge. A publication of the Labor Youth League, New Challenge featured punchy articles and eye-catching covers. Bobby also wrote for them, under the pseudonym Bob Rolfe. In standard McCarthy era fare, New Challenge was publicly attacked in a pamphlet released by the right-wing publication The New Counterattack. The authors accused New Challenge of corrupting American youth and referenced Lorraine by name. She was on the radar of conservatives, even as a struggling young artist in New York. But she wouldn’t stop.

For Black American political life, 1954 was a watershed year, though Lorraine wasn’t entirely in step with the rest of Black America. In May, the US Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. The decision declared mandatory public school segregation unconstitutional and provided an important impetus to the civil rights movement and its militant integrationists. Lorraine’s mind was elsewhere. Several weeks before the opinion was reached, Lorraine was involved in activism to support Jacobo Árbenz de Guzmán, the democratically elected socialist president of Guatemala. But by June, Árbenz would be ousted by a US-supported coup d’etat.

Earlier in 1954, Lorraine wrote publicly about a trial, though not about Brown. It was in a letter to the Reporter magazine regarding the trial of Jomo Kenyatta. Kenyatta, an independence movement leader in Kenya, had been arrested in October of 1952 for being affiliated with the Mau Maus, a group of radical anticolonialists who advocated armed revolution. Though Kenyatta was not in fact affiliated with the Mau Maus, he was sentenced by the colonial courts to seven years at hard labor. His subsequent appeal was denied.

Lorraine’s letter was a response to a previously published article that described Africans as backward and underdeveloped, and attributed the actions of the Mau Maus and Kenyatta to that condition. Lorraine asserted that attributing cultural deficiency to the Mau Mau and Africans generally was a red herring intended to distract from the primary issue, which was “stark, brutal colonialism in one of its most ruthless expressions.” The previous author’s failure to acknowledge the details of British repression and domination, “the mass arrests of Africans; the destruction of entire villages; executions of great numbers of persons and various other methods of ‘retaliation’ which have even caused Englishmen to cry for investigation from the floor of parliament,” was to Lorraine a travesty.¹⁰ She went on to defend Kenyatta’s intellect and courage. In conclusion, Lorraine spoke specifically as a Black American woman who saw that the right side of the cause must be “with the courageous and heroic Black African men and women of Kenya and their great leader, Jomo Kenyatta.”¹¹

Lorraine claimed that a fundamental connection existed between the oppressed across the globe, and specifically between those of African descent wherever they were in the diaspora. She spoke in this moment not only as the pupil of Du Bois and of her uncle, Leo Hansberry, but also as a child of the expansive 1940s, as James Forman described it, one who had not been chastened by the repression of the Cold War. Lorraine’s international concerns were not entirely unique. Black newspapers also reported on the trial of Kenyatta, though the coverage paled in comparison to the Brown case. The content of Lorraine’s letter was a sign of her political orientation and where her primary attention lay, even as Black politics were heating up at home. Just two days before Lorraine’s twenty-fourth birthday the Brown ruling was front page news, in all American newspapers, Black and mainstream. But she didn’t have much to say about it. Of course, being a native of Chicago, Lorraine was well aware that even without segregation by law, segregation in fact could be quite violently maintained. She almost certainly anticipated the massive resistance that followed the Brown ruling. But still, the case signaled a sea change, a new terrain on which her generation’s organizing would unfold. It would be a case that mattered for her work, though she wasn’t particularly focused upon it at the time. In truth, Lorraine’s politics were increasingly on the margins of the Black political mainstream. The major civil rights organizations had largely separated themselves from the radical left in the late 1940s in the fever of postwar liberalism, symbolically and literally evidenced by Du Bois’s excommunication from the NAACP, an organization he cofounded and for which he was once a key figure. Lorraine’s political labors as a young adult had grown entirely within the structures of the Far Left, not the civil rights mainstream middle. For example, in a 1954 rally to restore Robeson’s passport, she delivered a speech that at once reflected his influence on her own work and life as an artist and also the internationalist political vision she embraced. In the speech, she made clear that she believed the US government had placed itself in opposition to the cause of freedom and liberty. This perspective encouraged her to continuously keep abreast of developments across the globe, to resist Western chauvinism, and to maintain a global set of politics.

In describing Robeson, she said,

This man is an American citizen, his forbearers fought tyranny on three continents, so that he might draw breath as a free being. His is a sacred heritage. When you infringe on his liberty you tamper with the labor and lives of generations of freedom seekers. We charge you with this responsibility. [. . .] We demand that [. . .] he be permitted once again to travel to the capitols and villages of the world so that his presence and his art and his humanity will again refresh the peoples of other lands and remind them that there remains still in this America of ours a people of dignity and courage and decency.¹²

While still beloved by audiences, Robeson was, like his dear friend Du Bois, out of favor with the major civil rights organizations. But for Lorraine, he was still a beacon on a global stage. In the same gathering, speakers decried South African apartheid, which they accurately charged was modeled on US segregation, and the McCarran Act, which targeted “subversives” like them. Hers was a community that insisted upon fighting against unjust exploitation and economic domination and for racial justice all over the world as well as at home. They didn’t separate these concerns. Perhaps this is why it took some time for the change in US politics to come to the fore of Lorraine’s concerns. Her gaze was global.

In the meantime, she had a full, though unsettling social and political life. In the summer of 1954 she took on a job at a multiracial communist summer camp called Camp Unity in upstate New York. Camp Unity, founded in 1927 and self-described as the “first proletarian summer colony,” was located in Wingdale, New York. A good deal of its appeal was due to its event programming each summer. Lorraine was director of the outdoor lawn program and responsible for organizing musical and theatrical performances. Her friend Alice Childress served as the director of drama, and other friends and acquaintances were fellow employees or guests. It should have been a task for which she was perfectly suited. But Lorraine’s restlessness returned. And with it came depression.

She wrote to Robert:

My Own Dear Husband,

I am sitting here in this miserable little bungalow, in this miserable camp that I once loved so much, feeling cold, useless, frustrated, helpless, disillusioned, angry and tired. The week past that I spoke to you about was the height of all those things to the point where I didn’t care too much a couple of times whether or not I woke mornings.¹³

She recovered in her own letter, at least in word, from such depths of sadness by focusing on the beauty around her. She meditated on the land: “hills, the trees, sunrise and sunset—the lake the moon and the stars / summer clouds—the poets have been right in these centuries darling, even in its astounding imperfection this earth of ours is magnificent.”¹⁴

She then moved on to trifles: her frustration about the finances of the camp and that it means that some staff will be fired (and how it angered her to be asked to do the dirty work of dismissing them). In contrast to her irritation with people, nature almost seems medicinal in her account: a balm that doesn’t remove her suffering but gives her some refuge. It is somewhat ironic, however, that at this place called Camp Unity that it wasn’t other people but rather inanimate living things that eased her suffering, at least a little bit.

In another letter written that summer, she complained vigorously to Bobby about the disorganization of the camp and the many failures of her coworkers. Lorraine’s hypercritical and impassioned complaints and her fussiness, depression, and aestheticism ebbed and flowed. An irrepressible confidence in her own intellect always stood alongside, and in dramatic contrast to, her uncanny ability to be deeply self-critical. And the depression remained. She wrote: “A couple of days I have been feeling so miserable that I didn’t want to do anything but build myself a tree house and forget it. You know what I mean—there are times when you are sure that peace in symphonies, and grass and sunlight and mountains is not to be found in life—and honey that is a desperate feeling.”¹⁵

And yet, she left the countryside. Sometime that summer she went from Unity back to the city: not to New York but to Chicago. Lorraine and Robert spent most of the summer of 1954 apart, her handful of letters my sole evidence of their partnership in those days. In September, Lorraine wrote Bobby from Chicago, addressing him playfully as “Hello Bookie,” but between the lines were sadness, tension, and also a persistent depression. Her restlessness had completely overtaken her mood by then: “I am still a little nervous, smoking too much and remarkably restless and fidgety as I indicated on the telephone. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me. I haven’t called a single friend—my mother has been urging me to, But I dread seeing people—I am not being dramatic this time, I dread it something fierce.”¹⁶

Her words are ones of yearning, for him, but also of ambivalence. She is wanting for something they don’t have, and she’s not afraid to say so. But at the same time she is passionately attached to him. He is her confidant, intimate, and friend.

She writes, “I do wish we were closer in some matters so that there were no aspects of my problems that we could not share—and I get this is not the case. We are really terribly different kinds of people.” In one sentence, she tells Bobby she desires him; in another, she confesses she is troubled by things in their marriage.

And then, Lorraine pivots suddenly from the difficulty in their relationship to the problems in her writing, which seemed to be an easier terrain for connecting, and an assessment of her own work ethic:

I have re-read my play a couple times to my disgust. Had a new idea—a libretto. John Henry—“An original American folk opera” By Serge Hovey (sp) Libretto by Lorraine etc.

This of course is why I don’t produce a goddamned thing—I am too full of dreams! I have quietly resolved—yes I will piddle around with a Libretto after My play is finished—my novel is well under way—I mean it! And according to that schedule and God knows what else between—it should take me 3 years to get around to the research—! Of course it will take Serge 3 years to really learn anything about Negro music.

And then of course there is this tendency towards distraction—Lorraine the Actress . . . Lorraine the journalist, etc.¹⁷

Her deep confidence is amusing and fascinating. For example, she judges how long it would take noted composer Serge Hovey to learn something or “anything” about Negro music, and yet she has an unfailing self-criticism about her own work as an artist. The vacillating, one surmises, is what made space for what would eventually be such a bold artistry, and yet one that was also sensitive and even tender.

The letter reveals another side of her personality. She was a keen and sensitive reader, one for whom books were an aid for self-recognition. And at that moment, what she was reading was especially self-referential. She wrote, “I have been re-reading ‘You can’t go home again’ by Thomas Wolfe. There are things to be said for that boy! And some rather crushing things to be said against him, I’m afraid (with regard to the standard 3 Negroes, Jews and Woman). Anyhow it is especially fitting that I am reading it just now. I will tell you about it all frightfully profound I assure you—Don’t you wish rather desperately that your wife was a little less full of horse manure?”¹⁸

Beyond her endearing self-deprecation, these words illuminate Lorraine’s deepest aspirations, anxieties, and emotions. The Wolfe novel is one about a celebrated writer who returns home to find that the community that he depicted in his most recent novel is unhappy with how they have been cast. They reject the writer for the way he has stripped them down and exposed their warts. He is forced to leave home again. The writer seeks his purpose in various corners of the globe and finally gives up and returns to the United States. Despite Wolfe’s flatfooted treatment of others, the “Negroes, Jews and Woman,” the story resonated with Lorraine. She was raised with the precept that one must never betray the race or the family. And yet, in her persistent habit of observation and dissection, she was finding things about the family worthy of examination and criticism of the sort that would of course provide useful literary fodder. She just had to work up the gumption to use it.

Of particular irritation to her was her sister’s husband, Vincent Tubbs, whose politics she abhorred. She especially bristled at his criticisms of Paul Robeson’s “failure to act as a good American.”¹⁹ Tubbs was a real American-type American, not unlike her father, Carl. Lorraine excitedly took him on in political debate. She reported to Robert with great exasperation that despite her brother-in-law having been a war correspondent and traveling in Africa, Europe, and Asia, he had the nerve to repeat the cliché “This is the greatest country in the world” without any historical reflection or criticism.

In her jousting with Vincent, who would eventually become the president of the Publicists Guild of America, and therefore the first Black man to head a Hollywood film union and the first Black publicist at Warner Brothers, she admitted that she had likely killed any possibility that Vincent might help her be hired at a newspaper. Yet, after their fight, she was more self-satisfied than anything. While generally frustrated that her family hadn’t been discussing politics at all, Lorraine relished confronting and eviscerating Tubbs’s uncritical patriotism and patriarchal posture.

And yet, her correspondence with her sister, Mamie, and Vincent throughout the 1950s was much more often tender and warm than not. She told them about her work; they encouraged her to avoid anyone who would exploit her and anything that would create too much distraction. They kept Lorraine abreast of their brother Perry’s frequent misadventures and their mother’s health and well-being. Lorraine often wanted to hear from them, and she sent them clippings, hoping that they would be proud of her. In short, like most families, the relations were complicated yet loving.

That fall, Lorraine returned from Chicago to the bustle of New York life. While politics were a central part of her day-to-day living, she enjoyed a full counterculture Manhattan life. Jazz impresario Art D’Lugoff remembered those days with Lorraine fondly, particularly the way she helped him put together early shows. He said, “Lorraine wrote my first leaflets, typed them up, and took them around to the coffeehouses. I got to know her husband, Bob Nemiroff, at NYU. They became close friends of mine, and I worked with her at her in-laws’ restaurant—called Potpourri, on Washington Place. . . . Lorraine and I waited and bused tables.”²⁰

This is a life we’ve seen before. Not so much that it is a cliché, but familiar enough that we can imagine it. Midcentury interracial couple, activists, bohemian, artistic—it falls apart, but something remarkable always comes of it: brilliant children or great art. That’s how the story goes. What lies underneath is always more particular and complicated. Lorraine and Bobby thought together, and also separately. In either case, her genius overtook the substance of the relationship. It was its center. He worked to keep her on course, chastised her when she was distracted, pushed her. She criticized him too, but that was on matters of personality, not his music or writing.

Feminist criticism has taught us that life for men artists is usually different from life for women artists. Men artists have often had an architecture of support behind them: people labor and resources. In contrast, women artists have often snatched at time and space between a legion of responsibilities. That wasn’t Lorraine’s fate. While indeed she faced racism and sexism and patriarchy, Robert, as Lorraine’s provider, interlocutor, and facilitator, gave her a foundation that few women artists had.

She tried to write, but didn’t really get anywhere. On the other hand, Alice Childress was at work on a play that would have bearing on Lorraine’s future. Childress was already a role model for Lorraine in some sense. She’d had three plays produced. The first was a one-act play she’d starred in, titled Florence, about the thoughts and experiences of a Black woman domestic. That was in 1949. Then, in 1950, she wrote an adaptation of Langston Hughes’s short stories Simple Speaks His Mind, which was produced in Harlem, and, in 1952, a work titled Gold Through the Trees.

Trouble in Mind was Childress’s new work, its title borrowed from a blues standard. The play itself was about a play within a play. In it, the characters’ efforts to put up an antilynching production are hampered by tension between the Black actors and the white director. The theme of racism, particularly in the world of theater, was sharply captured. The writer John Oliver Killens described Trouble in Mind as follows: “In this play Childress demonstrated a talent and ability to write humor that had social impact. Even though one laughed throughout the entire presentation, there was, inescapably, the understanding that . . . one was having an undeniably emotional and profoundly intellectual experience.”²¹

The play debuted off-Broadway in November of 1955. It was a tense year. Emmett Till had been murdered that August. The Montgomery bus boycott began on December 5. And on December 7, Claudia Jones, a powerful presence in the world of the New York Black Left, who had been held in detention centers and prisons off and on since 1948, was deported. Three hundred fifty people gathered at Harlem’s historic Hotel Theresa to honor and thank Jones before her departure.

In Trouble in Mind, Childress’s indictment of racism, and specifically racism in the theater world, was both timely and well received. And yet, when she was offered the opportunity to have the play produced on Broadway, Childress declined. The changes the producers sought would have muted criticism of white figures in the theater industry.

Her refusal to change the message of Trouble in Mind left the door open for Lorraine to become the first Black woman playwright to have her work produced on Broadway. But one wonders too, what did Lorraine take from this moment of deportation, death, and the demand to compromise? And also, what hope did she glean from the promise of resistance that had appeared in Montgomery?

She’d soon have the time and space to explore such questions.

Bobby had a job in promotions at Avon Books. But he was a songwriter too. In early 1956, he and Burt D’Lugoff, Art’s brother, came up with the idea to use the music of a song frequently sung by Black dockworkers on the Georgia Sea Islands and match it with pop love-song words. They designed their composition to fit into the current calypso craze, a fantasy-driven flurry of watered-down versions of Trinidadian music. They titled it “Cindy, Oh Cindy.” The song was a hit; first for Vince Martin and then for the heartthrob Eddie Fisher. Suddenly the struggling artists Bobby and Lorraine had a great deal of royalties money.

“Pay me my money down,” the lyrics of the dockworker song, were originally sung to the owners and investors. Now, in “Cindy, Oh Cindy,” the money went not to laborers but at least to someone who politically cast herself with them. The money was earned through the fantasy image of Trinidad, shortly after Lorraine’s Trinidadian friend Claudia Jones was deported to England (because Trinidad wouldn’t accept her). It was a strange intersection of race, politics, entertainment, and consumption. But in the middle of all that, Lorraine finally had time and resources to simply write. She searched for stories to tell, tried and failed, and read, and tried.

Lorraine returned to Chicago in the summer of 1956. The letters to Robert this time, frankly, were more sad. In one from June 29, she describes tending to her sick mother and then intimates their brokenness: “Every one asks about you. I have told them nothing. It is all very difficult.”²²

Despite what is suggested—a distance and perhaps an ending, to their marriage—he was still her interlocutor. She brought ideas to him. About her hometown, which she continued to see with new eyes, she wrote: “Chicago continues [to] fascinate, frighten, charm and offend me. It is so much prettier than New York. And so proud of its provincialness. There are no shows at all running—save summer stock. People—not just Negroes—but the radio commentators; the papers, remain as aggressively ignorant as I left them eight years ago.”²³

Lorraine was out of sorts, frustrated by Chicago’s lack of cosmopolitanism, frustrated by life. We shouldn’t read her ever-ready hyperbole as a lack of love for the city, but more as a sense of rudderlessness and isolation. She described the vagaries of her life to Robert, one about an encounter with two Chinese women about literature and the benefits of Maoism that made her feel a bit less alone, a bit more like her New York self.

Chatter. Politics. She was Robert’s wife, whatever the state of their relationship. They were still intellectual companions. He provided the money that was necessary for her to explore her writing. Whatever the relationship had become, it is clear she was feeling even more alone than usual. The words she wrote to herself were even more revealing on that count than those to Robert. In her diary for October 19, 1956, she writes:

Days like these are the worst again. Yesterday I rose at eight and brushed my hair and rushed out to the car before I should get a ticket. I returned and watched Robert wash and shower and shave and listen to disk jockies at that strange hour. . . . Then I vacuumed the rug and the corner of the house where the dog hair collects in pounds between times when I am finally moved to clean. . . . And then I scrubbed, not well at all, the bathroom and the kitchen and spread paper on the floor. . . . I did not answer the telephone, except once before ten thirty, that was Joan about an apartment²⁴ . . . and then I read Simone in frustration again and slept.²⁵

She recorded the acts and feelings of her sadness: The chicken she ate was awful. A friend who visited was dull. The dog hair collected in mounds and she couldn’t keep up with the vacuuming. Reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was a bittersweet respite and ritual for Lorraine. She wrote when she felt able, through the depression. Lorraine always worked on multiple pieces at once, and you get a sense from reading them of a mind that is both racing and probing. One was a story called “Arnold” that was rejected from the New Yorker. The editor was encouraging, writing, “‘Arnold’ comes so near to being successful that I’m going to give a much more detailed version of our criticism than we can usually manage. The piece has real backbone—a sound theme and a definite point of view on the writer’s part toward that theme. Your point, that pride, or self-respect to every one, and dormant perhaps, in every one, comes from living and has an eloquent sincerity.”²⁶ At the end is a handwritten note: “And please let us see this again if you can do more with it.”

In “Arnold” one can see that Lorraine was a keen observer of life. She noticed not only the small details of human beings, their tentativeness, their sense of purpose, but also how often these important details are so easily overlooked. She wrote the story in the voice of a nineteen-year-old young woman working in a restaurant called the Golden Leaf. The woman remembers a dishwasher whom she once worked with: “As I remember Arnold, I remember that certain things had become indelible in my mind about men like him. The way they walked, all of them, the walk of men without places to go. I do not only mean that they ambled slowly and vaguely along, which they did, but it was more than that, Something about the picking up and setting down of feet that implied indecision; as though the feet could not always count on the sidewalk to be there.”²⁷ Through Lorraine’s eyes, she saw another from the outside in and what it meant to be a man who couldn’t meet the ideals of man.

Looking back in time, she tells the readers that dishwashing is usually a temporary job occupied by men who couldn’t find other work. They would quit as soon as other jobs became available, or else if it just felt like they had been stuck too long in the “in between.” For most men, dishwashing became a humiliation, but Arnold took to it. Interspersed in the piece are subtle yet profound philosophical insights about living on the margins: “I think, and it is only what I think, it is difficult to accept the lost back into the fold of ordinary men. Maybe it is because we are afraid of them. Maybe it is because next to the dead themselves, we fear the living dead the most.”²⁸

One night Arnold doesn’t come to the diner. Weeks go by and he doesn’t return. They all wonder at his absence. And then, spontaneously, he returns. His face looks different. With his meager earnings as a dishwasher, Arnold had his rotten, painful teeth removed. For weeks, he couldn’t bear to have the narrator see him, toothless. Lorraine ended the story: “How can I tell it so that you will understand what all of us felt sitting at that table that night. How can I put it down, what one feels in the face of the pride of a man who comes back.”²⁹

Arnold is denuded, and ashamed, but returns. It seems surprising that the character Arnold came to Lorraine when she was so despondent. But he did, and that might be because even when she felt hopeless, a Melvillean glimmer of possibility persisted. In her writer’s disposition one can feel Melville’s words “Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts gathers her most vital hope.”³⁰ And if faith is anywhere, it is in the work.

A similar sense of vocation and belief is evident in a vignette Lorraine wrote in 1956, this one called “Annie.” Annie is of an indeterminate age and adorned in a long-decayed fancy purple dress. It was a garment that once suggested the temptress, but now the dress is merely serviceable. Barely. But the wearer is not defeated: “The woman, however, herself is somewhat cheerful of departure and carries herself as though life were merely beginning and that tomorrow may hold forth the most delicious of prospects.”³¹

In these two remarkable pieces, one finished and one just a sketch, Lorraine was moving into a synthesis. There were her politics, centered on the poor, the marginal, the oppressed and outsiders, and there was her grasping at the interior life, especially its great disappointments with which all of us have to live.

In the same period Lorraine’s critical intellectual life, her politics, and her art reveal a growing synthesis. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was her textbook. What she found in the book she kept returning to, calling it like a girlfriend; “Simone” was both a testimony to her suffering and a shaft of light. Among de Beauvoir’s readers, Lorraine says in one of her third-person moments, “There is the twenty three year old woman writer closing the book after months of study, thoughtfully and placing it in the most available spot on her ‘reference’ shelf, her fingers sensitive with awe . . . her mind afire at last with ideas from France once again in history equalite, fraternite, liberte—pour le tout monde!”³² In the marginalia of The Second Sex, Lorraine poured her ideas and engaged in a conversation with de Beauvoir, one that was passionate and enduring for the remainder of her life. She was a critical though captivated reader of de Beauvoir, and as was characteristic of Lorraine, her criticism was a sign of how seriously she took the work. She disagreed with de Beauvoir’s existentialism, preferring a materialist worldview. And yet she saw the book as essential. The resonances between these two women, who rejected conventional expectations and found themselves desperately alone at times as a result, were profound. De Beauvoir gave Lorraine space to articulate a feminism that did not separate out sexuality and sexual desire for other women and also the inspiration to build a feminism that did not exclude race but treated it as a necessary part of understanding race, and race as necessary for understanding gender.

Unbeknownst to the multitudes that would come to celebrate her, it gave shape to the work that would make her both famous and a first.