CHAPTER SIX

Raisin

Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked “For White People Only.”      —W.E.B. Du Bois¹

IT TOOK PHILIP ROSE fifteen months to raise the money to put A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway. Backers, even those who were sympathetic to his enthusiasm, didn’t believe that a play featuring Black people “emoting” would draw crowds. And, so, the Raisin cast and crew did tryouts in Philadelphia and New Haven, traditional places to test a production’s future prospects on Broadway. The play was a great success in both cities. The Chicago show, which caused Lorraine a great deal of anxiety, was also successful. Raisin’s extraordinary cast, including the already-established Sidney Poitier, and a brilliant though untested young Black director, Lloyd Richards, rendered Lorraine’s words with vigor and depth. With those stamps of critic and audience approval, A Raisin in the Sun made it to Broadway on March 11, 1959. It was a very big deal. Broadway audiences had never before seen the work of a Black playwright and director, featuring a Black cast with no singing, dancing, or slapstick and a clear social message. Here was a family living in the Chicago South Side ghetto. Armed with a $10,000 life insurance check after the death of the father, they hope to move out of their tiny kitchenette apartment and into a house in a segregated white neighborhood. The adult son, Walter Lee, dreams of becoming a businessman. His sister, Beneatha, aspires to become a doctor. The matriarch, Lena, and her daughter-in-law are most of all hoping for a home of their own. Despite the early misgivings of financiers and skepticism from many quarters, A Raisin in the Sun played at the Ethel Barrymore Theater for nineteen months before transferring to the Belasco Theatre for another eight. Lorraine would win the Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play with this, her first stage production. She was only twenty-eight years old, yet already had an imposing presence and powerful intellect. The theater world was forced to reckon with her.

Ruby Dee, who played Ruth Younger in the play, described feeling anxious around Lorraine because of her impressive mind. And yet Lorraine was still young and hopeful and more than a little insecure. Though she had not followed the expected course for a good, bourgeois young Negro lady, Lorraine wrote to her mother, Nannie, a bit shyly, that she hoped the play would make her mother proud.

It had been a long time in the making. From her first publication, “Flag from a Kitchenette Window,” with its gesture to Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Kitchenette Building,” she’d shown signs that the source of her father’s wealth would become the substance of her art. And she’d kept rewriting versions of her childhood encounter with white mob violence when they moved out of the boundaries of the ghetto. The details of her play were different from those of Lorraine’s family, but squarely within the life she knew and lived.

A Raisin in the Sun used her mentor Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” as an epigraph and the source of its title. Hughes’s poem is a meditation on deferred dreams. The consequence, he suggests, might be explosive outbursts, woundedness, depression, or as Lorraine took up, sweltering and defeated people barely clinging to parched hopes, dried up like a raisin in the sun.

But we also ought to read Lorraine’s play alongside Gwendolyn Brooks. In Brooks’s “Kitchenette Building,” the poet asks if dreams might exist in the kitchenette apartment, despite all the constraint and the pressure. Hughes asks what happens to them when they do. Lorraine enters the interior of each of her characters, members of a family with a dead father’s insurance money and the choices it brings, and she answers Brooks’s question by finding all their dreams, the dreams of Black people trapped in the ghetto, and she depicts the barriers—the harrowing prospect of deferral—that Hughes anticipates. Her answer to both literary predecessors—and Lorraine was quite explicit about this in her interviews about the play—is that stepping toward something, or what she called the “affirmative” deeds of her characters, and stepping away from the limits imposed by a society bent on your destruction, was a revolutionary and liberatory move no matter what was bound to come. She had finally figured out how to answer Ellison’s “Harlem Is Nowhere” fully: racism was everywhere in Black America, but so was the human constitution necessary to fight it.

A Raisin in the Sun was received with acclaim and became wildly popular, though a few of the reviews were condescending and vaguely racist. There is a photograph of Lorraine taken by Gordon Parks from the cast party at Sardi’s opening week. Her eyes are glassy—probably she’s had a little wine—and at once stunned and joyful. Her skin glistens, her hair is rumpled. She is elegant in a black dress (her go-to choice for formal gatherings) as she watches musicians play. Such delight was preceded by years of loss and restlessness, failure, depression, loneliness, and also persistent seeking and experimentation and reading, learning, and most of all a commitment to what she took to be right, good, and meaningful. She was young, but so much had been packed in the previous eleven years. This was not a Cinderella story.

But it would become a story of illusion, or perhaps fantasy. Maybe a more straightforward word like misperception is warranted. The point is that as popular as the play was and is, it was woefully misunderstood if one believes that the author’s intent matters. In 1958, J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, directed the special agent in New York to determine whether Lorraine’s play was communist in content. The bureau collected reviews and playbills, and even sent agents to view the play. One said, “The play contains no comments of any nature about Communism as such . . . but deals essentially with negro aspirations, the problems inherent in their efforts to advance themselves, and varied attempts at arriving at solutions.”² Though their worry regarding the message of the play was diminished once FBI agents saw it, the popularity of the play once it hit Broadway also chastened the bureau. They had planned to interview Lorraine, but decided against it. The note about this decision read, “In reconsidering an interview with subject it is to be noted that the subject and her play have received considerable notoriety almost daily in the NY press. In view of this it is felt than an interview with her would be inadvisable at this time since the possibility exists that the Bureau could be placed in an embarrassing position if it became known to the press that the Bureau was investigating the subject and/or the play.”³

Lorraine, though unwaveringly a member of the Far Left, had written a play that wasn’t overtly political, didactic, or heavy-handed. She had chosen to write characters who were true, who were oppressed, who sought freedom, and who were also shaped by the society in which they lived. Her craft had grown too nuanced to read as propaganda.

Lorraine found herself in an inversion of the quandary her mentor Langston Hughes described in the 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Hughes protested the demands from white Americans that Black artists produce exotic images, and from Blacks that Black writers produce respectable ones. According to him, both sets of pressures limited creativity. Lorraine was caught between one strand of Black politics that advocated for assimilationist respectability and another that consisted of Black Nationalist commitments and leftist critiques of the bourgeois. The way the mainstream interpreted Raisin placed it squarely within integrationist-assimilationist respectability. For example, Lorraine was quoted in an article as having said, “I told them this wasn’t a ‘Negro play.’ It was a play about honest-to-God, believable, many-sided people who happened to be Negroes.” But in her scrapbook, beside a clipping of this interview, Lorraine wrote these words: “Never said NO such thing. Miss Robertson [the interviewer] goofed—letter sent posthaste—Tune in next week.”⁴ Her letter of correction was never printed. The misquote was repeated and even changed to “I’m not a Negro writer—but a writer who happens to be a Negro.”

James Baldwin, with whom Lorraine became friends in 1958, got to the heart of the matter, however, when he talked about the impact of A Raisin in the Sun, writing in reflection, “I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater. And the reason was that never in the history of the American theater had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage. . . . But, in Raisin, black people recognized the house and all the people in it.”⁶ The popularity of her play with Black audiences provided a vision of what the theater could and should do for Black communities consistent with the aspirations and values of the artistic community she belonged to in New York. Ossie Davis, who would replace Poitier in the role of Walter Lee when Poitier left the production, also understood what some other Black leftists didn’t:

I have a feeling that for all she got, Lorraine never got all she deserved in regards to Raisin in the Sun—that she got success but that in her success she was cheated, both as a writer and a Negro. One of the biggest selling points about Raisin . . . was how much the Younger family was just like any other American family. Some people were ecstatic to find that “it didn’t really have to be about Negroes at all!” . . . This uncritical assumption, sentimentally held by the audience, powerfully fixed in the character of the powerful mother with whom everybody could identify immediately and completely, made any other questions about the Youngers, and what living in the slums of South Side Chicago had done to them, not only irrelevant and impertinent, but also, disloyal.⁶

But this was incorrect, according to Davis. And she did right not to hit the audience over the head with the politics because, as he said, “Lorraine’s play was meant to dramatize Langston’s question, not answer it.”⁷

Many years later, one of her harshest critics, Amiri Baraka, wrote:

We missed the essence of the work—that Hansberry had created a family on the cutting edge of the same class and ideological struggles as existed in the movement itself and among the people. What is most telling about our ignorance is that Hansberry’s play still remains overwhelmingly popular and evocative of black and white reality, and the masses of black people dug it true. . . . It is Lorraine Hansberry’s play which, though it seems conservative in form and content to the radical petty bourgeoisie . . . is the accurate telling and stunning vision of the real struggle.⁸

Although much of the critique from the Black Left was unwarranted, and I think incorrect, it was curious that the public so easily embraced the play. Broadway aesthetics entail certain ethical commitments. Why didn’t A Raisin in the Sun trouble them? It might have something to do with how in the play Lorraine mastered the strategic art of appeal—the use of comfortable conventions for the sake of political argument and subversion. Given that the civil rights movement protest itself was so often a highly aestheticized performance of respectable citizenship, Lorraine’s play was consistent with the energy of struggle in that moment. In other words, by making a family that was conventional in some ways, Lorraine invited her audiences to identify with them as they struggled with the depth and breadth of American racism and inequality. The danger was, however, that people could stop at their comfort with the characters and never push themselves further on the question of racial injustice.

The skepticism of some members of the Black Left was heightened precisely because of the way Lorraine became a darling of the theater world. In that process, she was placed into categories that were familiar American archetypes, ones that lay in contrast to her politics as a leftist, a feminist, and a believer in global anticolonial, antiracist politics.

Oftentimes Lorraine was described in the press as a sort of ingénue. Her physical beauty and grace added to their confusion about who she actually was, politically speaking. Lorraine cut a striking figure long before her fame, as evinced by one FBI agent’s physical description in 1956: “5′4″ 105–110, Negro, Italian hair cut, no glasses, light brown, yellow shirt and black toreadors.”⁹ Several years later, as she became famous, it seemed journalists couldn’t help but mention her appearance. Vogue magazine described her as a woman still dressed in the “collegiate style.” The article about her in the June 1959 issue was accompanied by a full-page photograph taken by David Attie. All the images from that shoot were staged yet gorgeous. Attie captured her intellectual confidence, armor, and remarkable beauty. In some she wears a textured French-style boatneck top, chinos, thick white socks, and laced shoes and poses at her desk, or with crossed legs with a pen in hand, or leaning on her typewriter. The other set is more serious. She poses in front of a bookshelf and behind flowers in a dark blazer and pearls, arms crossed with a knowing smile. Her hair is freshly hot-ironed and her lipstick is conservative. She is glamorous in a manner that seems at once studied and casually self-assured.

The journalist Sidney Fields described her as “slight, small, pretty with a soft voice and a skyfull of life and ideas for opera librettos and new plays.” He also mentioned her penchant for self-deprecation and playfulness when speaking of her Ping-Pong game. “At the start I look devastating. At the finish everybody beats me badly.”¹⁰

Ted Poston, another journalist, referred to her as a “tousle-headed gamin” and “the comely but strong-minded lass,” and commented in a way that indicated he was both amused and taken by Lorraine:

There’ll be no rags-to-riches moving, for instance, from the third floor walk up apartment in Greenwich Village where she lives with her husband Robert Nemiroff and her happily neurotic collie, Spice. She seemed horrified at the idea the other day as she sat half curled in a living room chair, her black-sweatered arms clasped around slim legs clad in rumpled brown corduroy trousers.

“I’m a writer,” she said rather indignantly (an opinion endorsed by every first string drama critic in town), “and this is a workshop. We’re not celebrities or anything like that.

“But I am going to get the landlord to paint that hall. We’re not bohemians. They can’t carry us that far.”¹¹

While some critics couldn’t get enough of her charm and beauty, others failed to see her as anything but one of the stereotypes of Black experience. It was as though the very word Negro conjured up images that overtook all evaluation. One wrote,

Miss Hansberry says that her many years of living in a squalid Negro ghetto inspired her to write the play depicting the plight of a typical Negro family who much like herself is trapped by housing discrimination, forced to live in tenement jungles. . . . Miss Lorraine Hansberry, twenty-eight-year-old authoress of the play, drew heavily upon her own background as a child and a young woman raised in the slum section of Chicago to produce this supreme effort.¹²

Of course Lorraine was raised on Chicago’s South Side, but her upbringing was far from squalid. Other critics overemphasized her middle-class status, as though the life of the Black working class was a wholly separate realm from Lorraine’s life. One wrote, “Her Chicago family was, unlike the family in the play, comfortably middle class.”¹³ Her middle-class background formed the basis for her dismissal by many Black leftists who ought to have known better, both because of her history of political activism and because they, like she, certainly knew that class distinctions in the Black community were often more theater than substance.

Lorraine’s responses to the class-based dismissals of her work were nuanced rather than defensive. These people, thinking abstractly rather than empirically, misunderstood the position of the Black middle class and its distinction from its white counterpart. Lorraine saw this ignorance as the inevitable outcome of a segregated society. While white elites might not find themselves in the thrall of their working-class brethren, Black elites lived in the thick of the segregated ghetto. She described how her “two best friends in high school regarded themselves as much of the ‘middle class’ as I. Yet, one of them was the daughter of a postal clerk and the other the child of a chauffeur. Our dress habits, recreation and, in most ways, aspirations were virtually indistinguishable.”¹⁴

Lorraine was frustrated by some critical evaluations of the play, even as she understood them. She was particularly frustrated that Walter Lee’s “ends” were read without complication. They were deliberate and clearly shaped by Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, the WPA Negro in Illinois project’s publication Black Metropolis, and Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, which she considered an essential companion to the writings of Karl Marx. Walter Lee’s yearnings were a manifestation of Veblen’s theory of desire in a capitalist society, one that cut across class and caste. Her mastery of full characters, her sensitivity to speech and personality so that the characters never read as types, made the politics invisible to so many. But Lorraine intended to correct that.

In May of 1959 she wrote a letter to Bobby about a lecture she delivered at Roosevelt University. In it, she compared Arthur Miller’s classic character from Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, and her Walter Lee Younger and argued that Walter Lee had more heroic potential. The audience responded with a standing ovation. In an essay from the New York Times based on that talk, “Willie Loman, Walter Younger, and He Who Must Live,” Lorraine argued that Loman, that iconic figure of American drama, was a sign of the crisis provoked by the closing of frontier. He is “left with nothing but some left over values which had forgotten how to prize industriousness over cunning; usefulness over mere acquisition, and above all humanism over success.”¹⁵ Walter Younger, though wholly American, according to Lorraine, possessed a typicality that was different because he is Black and at every turn denied. His actions might affirm life rather than be caught in the death cycle of manifest destiny and consumerism.

This was in the tradition of Black Americans, according to Lorraine, a people who she says “have dismissed the ostrich and still sing ‘Went to the rock to hide my face, but the rock cried out: No hidin’ place down here!’” quoting the traditional Negro spiritual “Sinnerman,” which her dear friend Nina Simone would record six years later. Walter Lee’s assertion that they will move into the house despite the resistance of the white neighbors does not change the basic social order, according to Lorraine. It is not revolutionary. But it nevertheless matters a great deal, because it puts him at cross-purposes with “at least certain of his culture’s values” and he draws “on the strength of an incredible people who historically have simply refused to give up.” He has “finally reached out in his tiny moment and caught that sweet essence which is human dignity, and it shines like the old star-touched dream that is in his eyes.”¹⁶

Even while defending her play, she accepted that in some quarters any critical judgment of it was attacked as racist, and she found that amusing. And yet “the ultra sophisticates have hardly acquitted themselves less ludicrously, gazing coolly down their noses at those who are moved by the play and going on at length about ‘melodrama’ and/or ‘soap opera.’”¹⁷

Though she said some critics got the play terribly wrong, Lorraine admitted her own failures. The problem was just that Raisin’s critics had failed to actually ascertain what was wrong with it. She instructed them that the real problem with Raisin was it lacked a central character who anchored the play. She said that while some saw that as an inventive choice, it was a consequence of her indecisiveness and the limits of her skill. I am not sure Lorraine was correct. Mastery of the ensemble form was perhaps her greatest gift. But regardless of whether one takes her position or mine, her confident reading of her own work is unusual in its sharp assessment. It often amounted to quite brilliant ways of saying “they have no idea what they’re talking about.”¹⁸ In particular, and this became a recurring point of hers, she was highly critical of those who believed obscurity, total uniqueness, and inscrutability were markers of artistic sophistication. They attacked her play’s simplicity and use of convention or what she called “old bones,” but she believed more meaningful discussion tended to “delve into the flesh which hangs from those bones and its implications in mid century American drama and life.”¹⁹

Then she commented that though people made comparisons between her work and that of O’Casey and Chekhov, only one critic had noticed the connection between Raisin and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. (She noted this is partly because the ensemble overwhelms Walter Lee so he doesn’t stand out the way Willy Loman or Hamlet do.) But she also thought people failed to see Walter as like Willy because they couldn’t help but see Walter as an exotic character of the sort previously imagined in American drama in “‘Emperor Jones’ or ‘Porgy,’ . . . the image of the simply lovable and glandular ‘Negro.’”²⁰ That figure of emotional abandonment and joyfully tolerated poverty, according to Lorraine, acquitted white viewers of their haunting guilt about American racism.

These observations were all part of Lorraine’s effort to show why so many people couldn’t really understand Walter Lee, and his motivations, as distinctly American. She ended that section of the article with a joke about a critic who remarked “of his pleasure at seeking how ‘our dusky brethren’ could ‘come up with a song and hum their troubles away.’ It did not disturb the writer that there is no such implication in the entire three acts. He did not need it in the play, he had it in his head.”²¹ This is funny, but it is no laughing matter. Lorraine identified a problem that persistently dogs Black artists. How does one navigate racial perceptions that overlay everything, that obscure and cast such that they effectively become part of the production no matter what the artist does? For Lorraine the answer was to become a critic.

It was unusual for a playwright to function as a critic. And in her critical assessments Lorraine eviscerated many of those who diminished her characters. That was even more unusual. Shortly after the publication of the Willy Loman essay, Lorraine ran into Brooks Atkinson, who had refused to publish it in the New York Times precisely because it was so strange for a playwright to write her own criticism. Years later, Philip Rose recounted this meeting. It took place in a theater, shortly after Atkinson announced his retirement from the New York Times after thirty-five years. At the intermission Lorraine walked directly up to him and introduced herself: “‘Mr. Atkinson, my name is Lorraine Hansberry.’ She reached out and held his hand as she continued to speak. ‘I have just read and been saddened by your announced retirement. I have admired and respected for years your contribution and love for the theatre and its playwrights. Your leaving will be a tremendous loss for all of us.’”²² Rose believed this encounter had quite an effect on Atkinson, because a few days later he sent a note of apology to Lorraine, explaining he had been suffering from personal problems when he declined her essay.

She was just so unusual. Lorraine was not a typical figure of the New York theater establishment because of her gender, race, and politics but also because of her relation to art as an intellectual. She pushed against all sorts of barriers and seemed to often captivate people despite their disinclinations.

By 1961, once Lorraine was firmly situated as a great playwright and audiences were waiting for more from her, her voice had grown firm and her eyes steely in her social and artistic criticism. It was as though the mischaracterization of her play had straightened her backbone and she was insistent upon making her positions widely known. Lorraine was invited to deliver the Martin Weiner Distinguished Lecture at Brandeis University that year. In her address, she used her biting sarcasm to retaliate against some critics: “I have discerned from conversation and published thesis alike that it is only bad artists who load their statements with a point of view and that they shall be known forever more in hell as something called ‘social dramatist.’”²³ In fact, she believed that label has some nefarious purposes. Certain rules that served to control the content of art created a situation in which a person who accepted all standard social and political conventions was not considered to be someone who was taking a position, but rather simply an artist. But the person who challenged dominant values was routinely reduced to being nothing more than a political extremist. She found this practice reprehensible, because whether one followed the status quo became a standard of artistic evaluation, rather than the quality of work and its composition, elaboration, or ideas. In an elegant turn, Lorraine criticized dominant ideology and the normative assumptions that went along with it a generation before postmodernists would issue the same criticisms. Further, she argued that the casting of her art, and that of many others, into narrow confines was an anti-intellectual gesture at best.

Later in the same address, when talking about Bertolt Brecht’s theater of the absurd, she said, “I have heard it said even that it is the mysteries remaining in his plays which excite us rather than that stunning illumination and revelation which I had always thought to be the most special mark of his genius. It is as though we cannot bear the light.”²⁴ She persisted in her belief that great art emerges through the imagination of an alternative social order, the kind of imagining that comes about only through shifting the frames that we assume. Hence, there was no necessary tension between art and politics, according to Lorraine. She believed, instead, that great art required one to say something about society.

In an address at Swarthmore College that same year, she again rejected the label “social dramatist” while also arguing that great art necessarily deals with the social. In the process, she criticized the critics who classified poetic drama (good) on one side and social drama its opposite. According to Lorraine, the social dramatist was dismissed as one

who plots out the dreary course of life as it is lived: continuing all action—and all possibility of man into the little “peep-hole” proscenium of highly representational productions; imposing the unilluminated prosaic and pedestrian lives of his character on audiences who have innocently and hopefully come expecting and deserving the stimulation and release of Dionysius.²⁵

Especially interesting for a writer who was so concerned with the domestic arena, Lorraine strongly criticized Walter Kerr for his ideas in the essay “How to Write a Play,” because in it he asserted that the best dramas were the most intimately concerned. He believed that drama grew larger if the scope of concern was reduced and that a tangle with society made for consistently mediocre plays. Lorraine found this argument specious at best. Lorraine’s Left politics are clear in this criticism of Kerr, but also her investment in the social architecture of her own play in which intimate relations are tied to the fact of racial segregation, economic exploitation, service labor, and private property. It was not either-or in her work. She knew quite well that we live and love and desire within the economic and racial regime. We are of the ether.

It was on this point, specifically as it regarded race, that Lorraine had a particular beef with the Beat writers, her fellow Greenwich Village–dwelling, counterculture artists. The Beats had offered themselves up as outsiders to the mainstream who could provide insightful interpretations of Black people, who could even be likened to Black people, according to Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay “The White Negro,” which incensed Lorraine. In it Mailer described the white hipster, lover of jazz and Black style, who “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro,”²⁶ a man who had adopted the Black man’s code of existentialist living in the face of the ravages of capitalism and violence, finding like Black people that “the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”²⁷ Of these hipsters, Lorraine said at Brandeis, “They have made a crummy revolt; a revolt that has not added up to a hill of beans. I am ashamed and offended by their revolt because they have had artists in their number and they have produced no art of consequence and they have proven no refuge for true revolutionaries. I accuse them of having betrayed Bohemia and its only justification.”²⁸

And specifically, with respect to race, she found them no more righteous, responsible, or thoughtful than the rest of white America. In an essay titled “Thoughts on Genet, Mailer, and the New Paternalism,” published in the Village Voice on June 1, 1961, she decried their romantic racism and traced the roots of it to Mailer. He and his ilk had also dismissed her work. She wrote, “Nelson Algren agrees in print with Jonas Mekas that ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ is, of all things, a play about ‘insurance money’ and/or ‘real estate.’ This particular absurdity, it is true, is rendered a little less frightening only by the knowledge that there are people who sincerely believe that ‘Othello’ is a play about a handkerchief.”²⁹

Despite the sense of personal affront, the bulk of Lorraine’s problems with the Beats didn’t have to do with her ego but their arrogance. In the essay, she focused the bulk of her attention on Jean Genet’s play The Blacks, a play within a play about the inversion of racial stereotypes and filled with Black subjects. Mailer, in his accounting of the play (and Genet admitted this), noted that it was, among other things, a conversation among white men about themselves. Lorraine said that that was all it was. And it certainly had nothing to do with Black life and thought. Genet’s projection of white desire upon Black people might have been liberatory for the hipster, but was, according to Lorraine, simply racist: “He fabricated his own mythology concerning certain ‘universals’ about 20 million ‘outsiders’ and rejoiced because his philosophy fit his premise. . . . The new paternalists really think, it seems, that their utterances of the oldest racial clichés are somehow, a demonstration of their liberation from the hanky panky of liberalism and God knows what else.”³⁰

She then catalogued some things that hipsters truly failed to understand about Black perceptions of white Americans, including how Black Americans generally thought white people, especially white women, were dirty and inherently cruel; thus revealing the silliness of their argument that Black people were either nihilists or desired whiteness. Black aspiration, Lorraine instructed them, did not pivot around love or desperation regarding whiteness.

Lorraine speculated that perhaps Black writers had aided the misperceptions of Black feelings that these paternalists had run with: “We [Negro writers] may have carried the skin-lightener hair straightener references too far for a climate where context is not yet digested. Pride of race is not alien to Negroes. The Lord only knows that what must be half our institutions seem to function on the basis of nothing else.”³¹ She was bold and courageous in her criticism of the Beats. She was also ahead of her time. She attacked the racial essentialism that the Beats so heavily trafficked in. She wrote, “Of course oppression makes people better than their oppressors, but that is not a condition sealed in the loins by genetic mysteries. The new paternalists have mistaken that oppression for the Negro.”³²

Lorraine’s friends were thrilled by this piece that put the Beats in their place. Langston Hughes wrote her, playfully and admiringly, “Wonderful piece of yours on ‘The New Paternalism’ in the ‘Voice.’ I could read you all night long—and stay awake! I hope you will write books as well as plays—and lots more articles and commentaries in lots more places. I sure do!”³³ He recognized the power of her critical chops, ones that arguably equaled her creative ones.

Others, mostly white critics, accused her of being too angry and of alienating her allies. Some Black ones did too. Baraka responded to her in a letter in which he suggested that her bourgeois background made her hopelessly alien from real Black struggle, though ironically he made that charge in defense of white critics. He wrote, “I read your ‘exchange’ with Norman Mailer with a great deal of interest . . . and I thought you might be willing to take Mr. Mailer’s suggestion seriously that the two of you along with Jimmy Baldwin . . . along with W. E. B. DuBois, and either Max Lerner or Roy Wilkins to go at it at some kind of forum.”³⁴ Apparently she rejected his suggestion, because his next letter read, “I am extremely disappointed that you don’t think your differences with Norman Mailer are significant. Or, more baldly, how you can think that the differences which make for your such antithetical conclusions to Mr. Mailer’s socially as well as aesthetically can be of such little import to yourself as you say. I suppose it is as they say, i.e. talk is cheap.”³⁵

Then he really went for the jugular, at least it was the jugular for someone with Lorraine’s politics, which were much like his own (although at that point Jones was not as Far Left nor as deeply entrenched in Black life). He called her out of touch with the Black masses: “To my mind, the position you have made for yourself (or which the society has marked for you) is significant, if only because it represents the thinking of a great many Americans . . . black as well as white. Your writing comes out of and speaks of the American middle-class. . . . The critics . . . were joyful about Raisin for that reason. . . . The forum was designed, or is being designed, to at least straighten people out about the nature of your differences . . . not only with Mr. Mailer but with W. E. B. Dubois, Max Lerner and Jimmy Baldwin.”³⁶

Jones attempted to cast her out of the countercultural Left because of her middle-class origins and the success of her play. He also concluded she was at odds with two of the most beloved people in her life, Du Bois and Jimmy. It was a mean-spirited jab, but there was nevertheless some insight in the midst of it. Although he miscast Lorraine, her politics, her values, he was correct in some regard about how so many critics saw Raisin, and how that allowed them to celebrate it. Their misunderstanding of the play haunted her from the beginning. It seems to be the case that she resisted ever running the risk of writing in a way that her politics might be misunderstood again. She had written a masterpiece, but its meaning had been excruciatingly submerged by the admiration of so many. When Amiri Baraka reflected on his youthful dismissal of the play (back when he was named LeRoi Jones) he said, “We thought Hansberry’s play was ‘middle class’ in that its focus seemed to be on ‘moving into white folks neighborhoods’ when most blacks were just trying to pay their rent in ghetto shacks. But it should be placed in context.”³⁷ It was pretty common for Black communists and socialists to critique their less radical peers who were assimilationists in a fashion that often verged on vitriol. For example, even Freedom, which was rather ecumenical in terms of Black activism, if at times deeply frustrated with the civil rights establishment when it failed to support the Black Left, published an absolutely demeaning review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And Lorraine, as noted earlier, hadn’t been too kind to Richard Wright in its pages. Lorraine became, in a sense, a victim of her own tradition and deeds.

Over the next decades some members of the Black Left would continue to reject Lorraine as a symbol of assimilationist politics, none more virulently than Harold Cruse in his book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. He described A Raisin in the Sun as being filled with middle-class sensibilities poured into working-class figures; a sort of class-based blackface. Even though she presented the noble working class in line with a socialist-realist doctrine, according to Cruse she couldn’t get past the blinders that came from her own bourgeois roots. He questioned the entire premise: How would they get an insurance check? he asked. He was incorrect in his doubtfulness. In fact, the insurance check was an important reflection of Black working-class economic behavior in midcentury Chicago. For Black Chicagoans, life insurance provided an important old age provision, especially for the millions excluded from Social Security benefits because they, like Mrs. Younger, worked as domestics. In the 1950s, at least a half-dozen insurance companies were crucial institutions in Bronzeville, the majority-Black Chicago neighborhood. The largest was Supreme Liberty and Life, owned by a Hansberry family associate and which provided life insurance to thousands of working-class Black Chicagoans.

Cruse also questioned the daughter Beneatha’s attendance at college, asking who would have paid for it. I imagine that Lorraine imagined Beneatha as a student at the University of Illinois’s Navy Pier campus, which had a two-year program that served first-generation college students who, upon successful completion of the program, could go on to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A significant number of Black female students were there in the early 1950s, and they had a Negro heritage club that studied African history and culture of the sort Beneatha was fascinated by. Many of the students at the Navy Pier campus studied the biological sciences, because the university had recently purchased a medical school, a dental school, and a school of nursing in the city, and therefore had the faculty and resources to support that branch of academic study. So Beneatha’s path did in fact make sense. Lorraine’s attention to detail was painstaking yet wholly neglected by some of her most aggressive critics.

Lorraine spent years trying to correct the misunderstandings of Raisin in various ways, including rewrites of the play and a more explicit elaboration of politics in her later artistic work. Her letters to the editor, essays, and other written corrections of the misunderstanding of the play reflected a practice she adopted about everything. She obsessively and insistently wrote down her complaints about how she was mischaracterized and misconstrued, and how often critics generally misunderstood art and politics.

A glimmer of the source of her urgency can be found in a letter she wrote to the New York Post in 1959. She praises Billie Holiday’s biographer, William Dufty, for an article he’d written about the recently deceased singer. There is a sense of yearning and admiration in the letter. She wrote,

There is a bold and ungarnished, yet sweet humanity in the writing which is undoubtedly the right, the incredibly right kind of tribute to what was apparently her true greatness as an artist and human being. I never knew her. William Dufty makes it possible. I am, from his account of her life, much moved. I mention greatness above because of the way it haunts Mr. Dufty’s testimony, in the things he selects to remember: her appraisal of Louis, her pronouncements of the world race question, and what the Spanish speaking people call her on the street.³⁸

One gets the feeling that Lorraine was already contemplating what it meant to be understood well and remembered fully. She wanted the same for herself.

A Raisin in the Sun was such a rousing success on Broadway that there was soon buzz about it becoming a film. Lorraine was hesitant at first about doing a movie. She was fearful of the “glossy little paws of Hollywood.”³⁹ But she gave in because of the much larger audience that could see the film, asking herself, “How could a writer who literally took pride in what some intended as an epithet, the label of ‘popular writer’ not see it. The popular writer in me did see it.”⁴⁰

In writing the screenplay, Lorraine took the Youngers out of the kitchenette and into the landscape of Chicago. She displayed the racism the Youngers faced day in and day out: scenes between Lena Younger and her employer, Lena going to the grocery store in her neighborhood and seeing the poor quality of produce, and then traveling out to white neighborhoods to shop, where there was better food but where she was mistreated. Lorraine also included a scene in which Walter Lee, George Murchison, and Joseph Asagai listen to a street-corner Black nationalist. Additionally, she wanted the film to begin with a view of the South Side of Chicago in all its ghetto realism. Though the film crew shot three hours of footage with these additional scenes, all the overtly political revisions ended on the cutting-room floor.

In one of her journal lists of likes and hates, the producer of the film, David Susskind, took a hit. So did the politically moderate Sidney Poitier. Privately she felt less warmly about the film than the Times article she wrote about it suggested. But the movie was, notwithstanding her ambivalence, enormously successful. Lorraine was nominated by the Screen Actors Guild Awards for the best screenplay of the year and won an award at Cannes. Perhaps it was the time. Perhaps it was the fame. There was only so much she could do with Raisin. But in her deeds in the following years, there would be no more mistaking her politics at all.

Lorraine’s artistic desires sharpened. In a prospectus she wrote on December 13, 1962, for what she imagined would be a theater devoted to Black drama (she called it the John Brown Community Theatre), she envisioned an institution that rejected the rules of markets and money and was wholly devoted to Black Americans. She described it as

a theatre dedicated to, and propagated by, the aspirations and culture of the Afro-American people of the United States.

. . . a theater wherein the cultural heritage of that people, which owes to their African ancestry, will find expression and growth.

. . . a theater which, at the same time, will readily, freely and with the spirit of creativity of all mankind, also utilize all and any forces of the Western heritage of that same people in its arts.⁴¹

Lorraine wanted hers to be a theater neither bound by commercialism nor the snobbery or self-congratulatory postures of the avant-garde or arts establishment.

Lorraine believed in art, and she also believed in struggle. She dreamed about what her people might do, and what she might do, constantly. Though she had yearned for fame, it was a bitter pill. Perhaps this is why as she encountered fame, her melancholy and her need for meaningful community grew deeper. As she stepped into celebrity, she found friends who shared her yearnings and dreams. Though they never quite filled the void, they illuminated and loved one another. They dreamed and created together.