CHAPTER SEVEN

The Trinity

We had that respect for each other which is perhaps only felt by people on the same side of the barricades, listening to the accumulating hooves of horses and the heads of tanks.

—James Baldwin about Lorraine¹

We never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk.

Nina Simone about Lorraine²

ON MAY 12, 1959, Studs Terkel interviewed the newly famous Lorraine at her mother’s apartment for his radio program. Lorraine described her time with the writer and working-class hero in a letter to Bobby: “Studs came out and did a tape last night and stayed for hours—because we liked him very much. He is a very wonderful and very interesting man and we got to drinking and eating and talking with Mamie and Carl and Perry and Vince up front and it was really good. . . . I asked if he had met Beauvoir when she was here and he said yes and that she is a wonderful woman who strictly knows what the hell she is about.”³

In the midst of the interview Terkel asked Lorraine what she thought about the scene of contemporary young Black writers. She responded by saying there wasn’t much happening. Not much at all except for a young exile who had come back, along with some other writers, from places like Paris and Rome. From what she’d read of this young man, she said he was “undoubtedly one of the most talented American writers walking around. . . . If he can wed his particular gifts, which are just way beyond most of us trying to write on many levels—with material of substance, we have the potential of a great American writer.”⁴

He was James Arthur Baldwin. Jimmy, as she called him.

The friendship that grew between Lorraine and Jimmy is storied. It was both an intellectual and a soulful partnership. Less often described, but no less significant, was her relationship with the singer Nina Simone. The three of them formed a sort of trinity. Geniuses, they produced enduring work at the cusp of the great social transformations of the mid-twentieth century. All three were, according to early twenty-first-century terminology, queer, though only Jimmy’s sexuality was publicly known. They struggled together at the crossroads of social, familial, and parental legacies with the tide of revolutionary action and deed. Jimmy and Nina are still everywhere in the public eye and popular culture. Their archives are widely shared. Books about their lives are numerous. Everyday people know their faces and voices. Lorraine remains in their shadows, but she was key to them and they to her.

Jimmy first saw Lorraine in 1958 at the Actors Studio, in Manhattan. She was there to see a theatrical workshop production of his novel Giovanni’s Room. She sat in the bleachers. But when the lights came up and luminaries of American theater expressed how much they disliked the play, little and unknown Lorraine argued with them intensely. Jimmy was grateful. “She seemed to speak for me; and afterward she talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten. A small, shy, determined person, with that strength dictated by absolutely impersonal ambition: she was not trying to ‘make it’—she was trying to keep the faith.”⁵

Lorraine’s advocacy for Jimmy’s play was likely born of a number of feelings. The kinship of queerness, though silent, was undoubtedly one element. This work, she knew, was important. And then she shared his persistent questioning of the rules of patriarchy and religion. After all, the character most like her in Raisin is famously slapped in the face for questioning the existence of God. There was also the matter of Lorraine’s constant racial solidarity. She took up for Black folks, as it were, and often felt herself to be at battle against the racism they experienced at the hands of white critics who frequently pointed fingers at them without introspection. She’d also already seen the potential in Jimmy. And Lorraine never hesitated as a critic, despite her youth, to make assessments of promise and possibility. Not only that, she also hoped to steer his promise.

Jimmy wasn’t completely correct in his assessment of her, however. Lorraine did want fame, she wrote as much in her diaries. But he was right, she wanted to produce meaningful art far more than fame, and wasn’t willing to compromise.

Lorraine and Jimmy met again when A Raisin in the Sun was in tryouts in New Haven and he came to see it. That was when their friendship really began. About a month before their reencounter he’d had a dream “in which he was joined by a beautiful, very young black woman who, after performing a song and cakewalk with him, seemed to merge with him ‘her breasts digging against my shoulder-blades.’”⁶ Jimmy prophesied Lorraine.

Jimmy would refer to her as Sweet Lorraine. Sometimes her mother did, too, in letters. “Sweet” is a lesser-known archetype of Black American culture. White Americans generally know sassiness and chops-busting Sapphire. They do not know sweet. Sweet is not, as it might seem if one attends only to the mainstream rules of American gendering, a diminishing word. Among Black Americans it describes a welcoming and caring disposition and a way of being cherished. Those women who are called sweet can be and often are steely and strong. This was how Jimmy saw Lorraine. Plus he was passionate about music. And I believe she called to mind the pop standard “Sweet Lorraine,” probably the Nat King Cole version, in which he sings about her beauty, her brilliance, and leading her “down the aisle.”

Jimmy wasn’t going to marry Lorraine. But he did lead her down an aisle of sorts. And she did the same for him. He was already famous when they met. His semiautobiographical novel Go Tell It on the Mountain had been published in 1953 and Giovanni’s Room in 1956. The latter had stirred up quite a bit of controversy because it portrayed a tender and tragic love affair between two men. Lorraine was six years his junior and new to fame. And yet he treated her as an intellectual peer, a confidant, and at times a friend whom he implored for help. In the spring of 1959 he wrote her a letter asking for assistance with his play The Amen Corner. Jimmy wrote,

Out here on a sand bar, working and taking walks by the ocean, which seems to be my particular brand of therapy . . . back at the end of the month. This is a begging letter. I wish you’d make a point of giving Lloyd Richards the script of Amen as soon as possible. . . . I think I’d like to try to explain to him that my reluctance—or something—about handing him the script had only to do with a certain, treacherous shyness, and with my reservations about my script.⁷

He was vulnerable and playful at once. “Begging,” that simple word, has a particular Black vernacular ring. It is often issued as a complaint about somebody who asks for too much. He wrote this word, and writing was of such importance for the two of them, and it cued their common ground, the soulfulness in these highbrow thinkers. Both Lorraine and Jimmy tended toward the speech affectations that public figures routinely adopted in those days. They enunciated and sounded almost haughty in public. Yet the rhythm of everyday Black speech is there in their private communication. She answered on her birthday, May 19, teasing him:

Jimmie Dear—Got your “begging” note yesterday. Been out of form myself for a week. Here is Lloyd’s address. . . . Have fun on your sand bar and work very hard. I shall try to get the manuscript to Lloyd—though I ordinarily see him seldom. Haven’t read it myself yet—haven’t even read a newspaper since I last saw you. Love, Lorraine.⁸

It wasn’t the only time Jimmy would ask her to help him with his nervousness about writing. But most of the time their interaction was simply that of a raucously good friendship. As the writer Gene Smith described, “She and James Baldwin were great friends, although at times a passerby might believe that they were about to slug it out at a party or at his place or hers. They yelled at each other, ranted and raved, drank. They also laughed.”⁹

Jimmy would, in several places, try to describe their bond. There were other figures, like Medgar Evers or Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X, about whom he also wrote retrospectively, and loved, but that was always quite different from his memories of Lorraine. It might have had to do with her gender. When he wrote about the assassinations of these other friends, men, he tried and charged the nation. He also autopsied it, exposed its festering innards. But about Lorraine he wrote intimately, though he also insisted upon her genius, power, and righteousness. In describing her as “Sweet Lorraine,” Jimmy said:

That’s the way I always felt about her, and so I won’t apologize for calling her that now. She understood it: in that far too brief a time when we walked and talked and laughed and drank together, sometimes in the streets and bars and restaurants of the Village, sometimes at her house, gracelessly fleeing the houses of others; and sometimes seeming, for anyone who didn’t know us, to be having a knock-down-drag-out battle. We spent a lot of time arguing about history and tremendously related subjects in her Bleecker Street, and later Waverly Place, flats. And often, just when I was certain that she was about to throw me out as being altogether too rowdy a type, she would stand up, her hands on her hips (for these down-home sessions she always wore slacks), and pick up my empty glass as though she intended to throw it at me. Then she would walk into the kitchen, saying, with a haughty toss of her head, “Really, Jimmy. You ain’t right, child!” With which stern put-down she would hand me another drink and launch into a brilliant analysis of just why I wasn’t “right.” I would often stagger down her stairs as the sun came up, usually in the middle of a paragraph and always in the middle of a laugh. That marvelous laugh. That marvelous face. I loved her, she was my sister and my comrade.¹⁰

Full of drink and mirth, he left her place enchanted by her marvelous face and laugh. And they shared something profound: loneliness. He wrote, “Her going did not so much make me lonely as make me realize how lonely we were. We had that respect for each other which is perhaps only felt by people on the same side of the barricades, listening to the accumulating hooves of horses and the heads of tanks.”¹¹

Their retreat into “down home” talk, the echo of the South in both of these second-generation migrants in apartments and bars in the Village, was essential. It beat back loneliness of a personal sort, which both of them carried everywhere. It also must have been a relief to cast off the burdens of being in the public eye. And yet, when they were in the public eye, together, they could function like a marvelous tag team, their ideas bouncing back and forth, rapid-fire. They both participated in a roundtable titled “Liberalism and the Negro,” hosted by Commentary magazine, a publication that vaulted the literati of the 1950s and 1960s into the sphere of public intellectualism. This discussion consisted of a group of writers: Langston Hughes (Lorraine’s mentor and Jimmy’s sometime nemesis), Alfred Kazin, Nat Hentoff, Emile Capouya, and Lorraine and Jimmy. At one point, Jimmy responded to a question from Hentoff, who wondered whether Black writers had sufficiently questioned the value of assimilation.

BALDWIN:	I feel that there’s been far too little.
HENTOFF:	In other words, equal for what?
BALDWIN:	Equal for what, yes. You know, there’s always been a very great question in my mind of why in the world—after all I’m living in this society and I’ve had a good look at it—what makes you think I want to be accepted?12

Then Lorraine jumped in:

HANSBERRY:	Into this.
BALDWIN:	Into this.
HANSBERRY:	Maybe something else.
BALDWIN:	It’s not a matter of acceptance or tolerance. We’ve got to sit down and rebuild this house.
HANSBERRY:	Yes, quickly.
BALDWIN:	Very quickly, and we have to do it together. . . . You know, in order to be a writer you have to demand the impossible, and I know I’m demanding the impossible. It has to be—But I also know it has to be done. You see what I mean?

In the same discussion, they echoed each other another time, this time with Jimmy responding to Lorraine’s calls. In considering the failures of Southern white writers Carson McCullers and William Faulkner when it came to racial matters, Lorraine said:

William Faulkner has never in his life sat in on a discussion in a Negro home where there were all Negroes. It is physically impossible. He has never heard the nuances of hatred, of total contempt from his most devoted servant and his most beloved friend, although she means every word when she’s talking to him and will tell him profoundly intimate things. But he has never heard the truth of it. . . . The employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house. You see, people get this confused. They think that the alienation is equal on both sides. It isn’t. We’ve been washing everybody’s underwear for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean.¹³

And then Jimmy said Lorraine’s point was very important, and remarked that Carson McCullers’s treatment of Black people “doesn’t reveal anything about the truth of Negro life, but a great deal about the state of mind of the white Southern woman who wrote it.”¹⁴

This call and response between Jimmy and Lorraine would also move throughout their written work. At the beginning, it was in the way they both struggled with the legacy of Richard Wright. He was the great Black literary father. Wright had taken an early interest in Jimmy as a young writer, but Jimmy turned on his mentor and attacked Wright’s Native Son. He considered Wright a nihilist who diminished the full humanity of Black people. Lorraine agreed, although she thought the way Jimmy upbraided Wright gave fodder to racist white people (despite her own rather aggressive criticisms of Wright in Freedom). With A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine made her criticisms of Wright’s messages more oblique than Jimmy’s. Like Native Son, Raisin begins with the sound of an alarm clock, alerting the viewer or reader that one is waking up in the ghetto. In Native Son, the protagonist Bigger’s first duty is to kill a rat that has entered their cramped apartment. Lorraine rejected Wright’s analogy between rats and Black people. When Lena Younger has chosen the new house, her daughter-in-law Ruth refers to their soon-to-be departed kitchenette apartment as a rattrap. The description gives Lena pause, and she responds by telling Ruth a story about Walter Lee’s and her dreams. The message is they are not rats; they are human. The most dramatic rat reference of the play comes after Walter Lee has been swindled out of their money, including that which would send his sister, Beneatha, to college. Beneatha refers to Walter Lee not as a man but rather a “toothless rat.” Lena Younger angrily lectures Beneatha. She tells her, when you measure a man, measure him right, meaning she must have sensitivity to his experience when evaluating him. Yet again, through the voice of Lena Younger, Lorraine says: we are not simply what circumstance has made of us, we are more.¹⁵

Lorraine also worked on a novel, All the Dark and Beautiful Warriors, which was a response to Native Son. Her character Son (that is, not somebody’s nigger but somebody’s child) is an answer to Wright’s Bigger Thomas. Son was not rendered in naturalist form (Lorraine despised literary naturalism) and a mere product of his environment like Bigger. Son attempted to shape it. As she was wont to do, she reinterpreted her literary father, and Jimmy’s, to suit the world as she saw it.

Jimmy preferred literary patricide. He wrote of Wright’s best-selling novel Native Son:

Below the surface of this novel there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy. Bigger is Uncle Tom’s descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle. . . . Bigger’s tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human.¹⁶

Jimmy’s criticism, ironically, was not unlike that of those who called Lorraine a social dramatist for having an explicit set of politics. Jimmy called Native Son “a protest novel.” The difference was, Wright denied the humanity of the oppressed. Recognizing the full humanity of Black folks was, to Jimmy’s mind and to Lorraine’s, necessary in the fight for freedom. Jimmy believed they had to tell the truth about the dangers of Wright-like thinking regardless of how white audiences might take it.

That said, Lorraine’s and Jimmy’s politics were different. He wasn’t ever going to call himself a Marxist, communist, or nationalist. He was just committed to honesty, ideology be damned. Lorraine was insistently though creatively ideological. Lorraine leaned more toward social theorist, and Jimmy was to his core a critic, truth teller, and doer. And Jimmy didn’t refer to himself as gay, he just happened to “fall in love with a boy” a number of times, whereas Lorraine, though closeted, embraced the words lesbian and homosexual to define herself.

However, the spirit of their work was always mutually sympathetic. Jimmy called A Raisin in the Sun a play in which Lorraine served as a witness to Black America. He did too. In perhaps his most famous book, the 1963 epistolary text The Fire Next Time, he answered Walter Lee’s climactic action. In Raisin, standing before his son, Walter Lee insists upon moving into the white neighborhood and rejects the offer of a lot of cash in exchange for maintaining segregation and abdicating his dignity. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin testifies to his nephew about his late father. Jimmy wants his nephew to see how his father (like their father before him) had been crushed by the forces of white supremacy in his life. He issues an appeal to his nephew’s generation to make use of their righteous anger rather than be distorted by it. Jimmy, a former child preacher, preaches to the Walter Lees of the world and to the others. He makes plain the wages of white supremacy.

In the second essay of the slim book, Jimmy echoes Beneatha, the character in Raisin whom Lorraine based upon herself. Beneatha, headstrong and sophomoric, questions Christianity and the existence of God. Mrs. Younger responds by slapping her across the face. As long as she is in Lena Younger’s house, Beneatha learns, she is required to believe. Jimmy, too, questions American Christianity and the way in which it inures people, Black and white, to a vile order. Instead, he says, Americans ought to move beyond the status quo of their fears, beliefs, and oppressions. That was precisely what the young Beneatha, sometimes in a silly way, was trying to do. And what Lorraine and Jimmy tried to do in their lives also.

The literary dialogue between Lorraine and Jimmy continued in their other work. James Baldwin’s play Blues for Mr. Charlie, which was completed in 1964, and Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs, which she worked on for years, were a sort of call and response. They both referenced “white folks” in the title. “Mr. Charlie” was a general term for a white man, and Les Blancs (The Whites) was Lorraine’s play on Jean Genet’s The Blacks. Lorraine’s play takes place in a fictional African country at the dawn of its independence movement, and Jimmy’s is set in the heat of the Southern freedom movement. They both explore interracial intimacy, even love, and how it coexisted with violence and racial domination. They both confronted the question of whether violent resistance to white supremacy was a necessary course for Black people to take. In Jimmy’s play, a white man is put on trial for the murder of a Black man. This is the second Black man he has murdered (the first being the husband of a Black woman he loved). The killer is found not guilty, and the play concludes with a protest march joined by the only white man who has cast his lot with the Negroes in town. Though the people are despondent, their protest is the resolution and hope of the play. In contrast, Lorraine’s play puts the colonizers on trial, as it were, and issues them a death sentence for the cause of emancipation, even those for whom the Africans feel affection. Madame Nielsen, a British transplant who understands the African cause, is killed in crossfire at the conclusion.

Lorraine was not only more ideologically driven than Jimmy. She was also more militant. But they weren’t really at odds in these literary conversations. As though theirs was a dialectical union, they looked at the matters from different angles: it was a waltz or, better yet, like the twist, rocking back and forth and side to side. Jimmy tended to focus upon what Americans must do in order to confront white supremacy inside oneself. He sought an exorcism and challenged Americans to become otherwise. Lorraine tended to focus upon social relations and the injustice of the political order and what that suggested about who people must be for one another. Neither of these descriptions is absolute, but they mostly hold. Lorraine was an ensemble thinker; Jimmy was a soul-centered one.

In 1963, Jimmy wrote to Lorraine in a bit of a tizzy about his novel Another Country:

My dear Lorraine: a very particular favor but please don’t do it if you don’t want to. Some people can be read to and others can’t, so I’ll understand.

But I am finally really reaching the end of this monstrous opus of mine. And I am so weary and have already received such dire warnings as to my probable fate when it is published—and even I can see that it’s not a very pretty novel—that my mind and soul might be somewhat steadied if I could read a couple chapters from it—from the beginning, from the end. I pick on you. I’m afraid, because I respect you as a writer and value you as a friend and because, as a Negro, you can call me if I have—as I certainly pray I have not—falsified my grim interracial drama—which is also something more than that.¹⁷

He proposed that the group reading include Lorraine and whomever she might want to bring, his brother, and “the girl to whom the book is dedicated, Mary Painter.” Mary was a dear friend of Jimmy’s, a white American economist, famous for working on the Marshall Plan, who lived in Paris. He continued in his appeal to Lorraine, “This note is probably more symptomatic of panic, that panic which always attacks me near the end of any long endeavor, than of anything else.”¹⁸

I do not know if Lorraine heard him read from Another Country, but I know she heard him. They both were at once fearful and truly courageous. Like Lorraine, Jimmy was afraid of heights, bridges, elevators, and planes. They both were afraid that their writing might not be good. Published in 1962, Another Country was, characteristic of Baldwin, a courageous book. It treated the counterculture of Greenwich Village that they both often occupied. Its protagonist, Rufus Scott, is a jazz musician who has a romantic relationship with a Southern white woman. As the novel progresses, their relationship grows violent, and ultimately Rufus commits suicide. In the aftermath of his suicide, the novel follows the people who surrounded Rufus. His friend Vivaldo, who is white, has a romance with Rufus’s sister, then also has an affair with Eric, who had been Rufus’s lover. These are just two of a series of partnerings among the grief-stricken and conflict- and guilt-ridden group trying to make sense of the death of Rufus.

Another Country was controversial. Between the interracial and same-gender sexuality and the partner sharing, the novel alarmed the public. Jimmy finished it while living in Istanbul, perhaps because it was one of those works that was easier to get into without the puritanical American landscape surrounding him. And even though it was a Village novel, and the Village had become a recognized center of the cultural vanguard, in depicting it, Jimmy nevertheless pushed readers to the very edge of America’s willingness to see itself.

An intellectual friendship can take many forms. It can consist of long conversations into the night about books, arguments, and art. Intellectual partners read together and write together. They also, and this is really my point, can swim in each other’s imaginations. Neither one imitating the other, but after bathing in the other’s words they return back to the shore, to the work, shaped by the beloved’s waters. That is what I see, what was so special, about these friends.

Lorraine responded to Another Country with The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. Her play also treated the Village counterculture, queer sexuality, interracial intimacy, and a suicide. But in her play, it is a white woman in love with a Black man who commits suicide, rather than a Black man in love with a white woman. Though Lorraine received mixed reviews for her play, it is, according to my own critical judgment, a more effective work of art than Baldwin’s novel. Lorraine worshiped at the altar of clarity and organization in her writing. She didn’t care for obscurity or cluttered story lines and found Jimmy’s fiction, generally speaking, not nearly as good as his essays, which she considered among the best in the history of American writing. But the point is that the consistent thread between these two works of theirs—how the politics of race, gender, and sexuality are always at work, even in the closest of relationships—placed each of them well ahead of their time. Neither saw the struggle for freedom as limited to fights for laws and full citizenship. Freedom dreams led to complex questions about humanity and existence, about who we are and might become. They asked and tried to answer them. Their explorations took them both beyond the United States, though Jimmy was far more traveled than Lorraine ever would be, and beyond their time period. For example, they shared a criticism of the queer writer André Gide that suggested their layered approaches to ideas of freedom. Baldwin, in his essay “Male Prison,” and Lorraine, in her notes about Gide’s life, both argued that while Gide’s sexuality was transgressive, his indecent commitment to patriarchy and disdain for his wife were persistent. Neither felt warmly toward Gide for this reason. Though they were both most passionately focused on the question of race, it was a question that was never posed in isolation from other structures of difference and domination such as gender, class, and sexuality. And neither of them subjected race to monolithic interpretations. Jimmy and Lorraine understood that people, in all their messiness, had complex architectures inside and among them.

Jimmy was six years Lorraine’s senior, and Nina Simone was three years her junior. At their ages, these differences mattered, though they didn’t impede. While Jimmy spoke of Lorraine as a girl and also a peer, Lorraine is generally talked about as Nina’s elder and teacher. This is largely because of the way Nina recounted their relationship. Nina, who with her rendition of the Gershwin tune “I Loves You Porgy” became famous merely a year before Lorraine did, described Lorraine as the person who politicized her. Case in point: on the evening of Nina Simone’s debut at Carnegie Hall, May 21, 1961, Lorraine called her not to congratulate her but to discuss Martin Luther King Jr.’s arrest in Birmingham and what Nina ought to do for the movement.¹⁹

Two months later, Nina, who hadn’t been explicitly political beforehand, was at a civil rights fund-raising meeting with Lorraine and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) officers at the apartment of the actor Theodore Bikel.²⁰ Lorraine had brought Nina into the movement, but they became really close in 1962, when they found they lived near each other in their vacation homes in Upstate New York. Nina described Lorraine’s influence on her: “It would take a special kind of friend really to pull me into the ideas of the Black Movement and force me to accept that I had to take politics seriously. That special friend was Lorraine Hansberry.”²¹ Nina said Lorraine took her out of herself and pushed her to see the bigger picture. She frequently visited Lorraine in the Hudson Valley. In September of 1962, Nina gave birth to her daughter, Lisa. Lorraine was named Lisa’s godmother and gave the baby “a beautiful silver Tiffany hairbrush and comb for her christening present.”²² This was characteristically Lorraine. She was gracious and cosmopolitan. She was also an aesthete, but didn’t care for trivialities. Nina wrote, “Although Lorraine was a girlfriend—a friend of my own, rather than one I shared with Andy [her husband]—we never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk.”²³

The time Nina and Lorraine shared wasn’t just political kinship; it also provided Nina with a refuge from Andy Stroud, her abusive husband. The poet Nikki Giovanni said about Nina and Lorraine’s relationship, “What is important is that she loved her and she was loved in return. She never had to watch her back. With Andy, she watches her back.”²⁴ Like Lorraine had with Jimmy, she and Nina shared an intimate retreat from the loneliness. But it was also a fertile ground for their imaginations and interior lives.

Nina described her further: “Lorraine was definitely an intellectual, and saw civil rights as only one part of the wider racial and class struggle. . . . Lorraine was truly dedicated; although she loved beautiful things she denied them to herself because they would distract her from the struggle, which was her life. She wore no makeup except lipstick and had only five dresses. “I’m pretty the way I am,” she’d say “I don’t need lots of clothes.”²⁵

This restraint, the effort to discipline herself, seems to have been at once a reflection of Lorraine’s values and also perhaps a bit of ascetic self-punishment for her voracious yearning for beauty.

I do not know whether Nina and Lorraine discussed sexuality. Nina was tortured by her own. She felt deep shame over her desire for women, and Andy’s rage about it made things even worse. Andy and Nina’s partnership was not like Lorraine and Bobby’s. It remained romantic. They were never friends, nor interlocutors. Andy drove Nina to work to the point of exhaustion, while Bobby encouraged and facilitated. And yet in a sense, Nina and Lorraine probably both felt trapped. Bobby was Lorraine’s protection from a profoundly homophobic society. And though Lorraine embraced her sexuality, sometimes begrudgingly, it was unquestionably difficult to do so. But the stuff of Nina and Lorraine’s intimacy in that respect is not in my hands, and cannot be read through their works the way it can with Jimmy and Lorraine’s intimate relationship. It is clear, however, there was shared passion. I imagine that their special affection for the name Simone entertained both of them. Lorraine loved Simone de Beauvoir, and Nina took her stage name (first intended to hide her bar singing from her religious mother) from the actress Simone Signoret, a favorite of Nina’s who would eventually translate A Raisin in the Sun into French.

Nina’s husband, Andy, recalled, “Lorraine carried her over into high gear, put her on fire.” Neither Nina nor Lorraine was interested in accommodation or respectable liberal politics. They believed the fight for freedom was for all intents and purposes a war. Nina was definitely as militant as Lorraine.

When they were in New York City, Lorraine would go to the Village Gate to hear Nina play piano and sing. As a girl in North Carolina, Nina had trained as a classical pianist. She was a prodigy. However, when she came up North with the intention of attending the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, she was rejected. Devastated, she made a living playing piano and eventually singing in an Atlantic City nightclub. There she’d crafted a creolized sound of her own. Nina blended classical, jazz, pop, and blues tunes and cultivated a distinct genre- and gender-bending back-of-the-throat vocal sound. Lorraine heard the South in Nina’s voice like she did in those of her parents. Yet Nina was also the sound of her generation. Lorraine witnessed in Nina an artist who had no hesitation when it came to borrowing and blending from every tradition at her disposal. She did so both to craft her original artistic voice and to make something unapologetically Black. Nina was a model of extreme discipline, one who composed music in her head nonstop. But Nina’s discipline wasn’t about restraint and closing off the imagination or the ranging and raging desires, aesthetics, and interests. It was a discipline that allowed for creative expansion. Her discipline was vivid and on fire rather than punishing. For Lorraine, who had often castigated herself for having too many ideas and running in too many directions at once, Nina had to be inspiring. She proved that expansiveness didn’t have to mean failure. Even Nina’s rendition of “I Loves You Porgy,” from a show that Lorraine despised for its stereotypical rendition of African Americans, must have made Lorraine rethink her sense of the world. Nina changed some of the lyrics because she refused to sing a parody of Black English, and she reinterpreted it as a truly powerful and plaintive love song. She was an example of how creative one could be with the archive of art they had at their fingertips as Americans and as modern people, and how it all could be put into the service of freedom dreams.

In addition to going to meetings and fund-raising for the Southern freedom movement, Lorraine inspired Nina to compose and perform political music, including “Brown Baby,” “Mississippi Goddam,” and the haunting “Pirate Jenny,” which she recorded in 1964. “Pirate Jenny” was written by Bertolt Brecht for The Three-Penny Opera, a political “play with music” with a strong criticism of capitalism. It became one of Nina’s “show tunes.” She’d famously said about the 1963 “Mississippi Goddam,” “This is a show tune but the show hadn’t been written for it. Yet.”²⁶ When it came to “Pirate Jenny,” however, the show had been written and performed many times. In the original opera, it is sung by a character named Low-Dive Jenny, a hotel maid. She is treated with derision. Jenny sings her fantasy about a pirate ship coming to burn down the town. However, when Nina sang Brecht’s song, it took on an entirely different feeling.

As she cleans, Jenny plots an overthrow that teems with the fury of a thousand slave revolts. She is pirating the Middle Passage and claiming her freedom. On this ship, “the Black freighter,” Black people are not cargo but its vengeful captains.

Lorraine also used Brecht as a source for her revolutionary imaginings. However, hers were not about the moment of upheaval but rather its aftermath. Hers was a less passionate and more theoretical Brechtian exploration than Nina’s. In her short story “What Use Are Flowers?” Lorraine takes up Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children. Brecht wrote Mother Courage in the midst of the rise of Nazism but set it during the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century. It stars a woman who attempts to profit financially from the war, and yet all her children are killed because of it. Brecht’s criticism of war profiteering attacks both fascism and capitalism. Lorraine’s first version of her riff on Mother Courage also took place in Germany and was titled Gedachtnis. It opened with children fighting because one has eaten a rat that they all want, and it had a folksy old wise man as its protagonist. Later she changes the folksy old wise man into a stuffy professor.

In all the versions of Lorraine’s Brechtian story it is not the children but the mothers who are now gone. In this postapocalyptic world, the children have gone feral. They have no language and fight over scraps until they are found by the professor who tries to teach them civilization. He gives them language and cooking and building skills. He teaches them ethics, and in the poignant conclusion, moves them beyond a sense that the only purposes in life are utilitarian, by imparting the beauty of a flower. In the midst of all this, however, he imposes the rules of gender upon them. He teaches them that the girl, Lily, is “different” from the others and must be protected. He separates and categorizes and creates hierarchies among the boys and everything else in their midst. Lorraine raises the fear that the same mess might be made all over again, even if the revolution succeeds, if we aren’t careful. While Nina used Brecht to imagine Black revolt, and specifically a feminist Black revolt, Lorraine used him to expose patriarchy as something ideological, not natural.

Both Nina and Lorraine interspersed feminist messages throughout their movement-inspired art, putting them well ahead of their time since the mainstream feminist movement hadn’t yet begun. In another show-tune-style song, “Go Limp,” Nina hilariously mocked the sexual anxieties of the mothers of young women who were joining the Southern freedom movement. Liberalism on race, the song showed, was not the same as a belief in sexual freedom or gender liberation.

Likewise, in Lorraine’s final play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, she reveals the sexism of Sidney, who wants his wife, Iris, to look like a wild country girl. He is always undoing her tightly bunned hair and treating her like a fantasy. Sidney mocks the bourgeois sexual and racial conservatism of Iris’s sister Mavis, yet remains oblivious to his own sexism for most of the play. Lorraine and Nina’s ideas merged both at the level of formal experimentation, borrowing and reinterpreting and experimenting, and in their attentiveness to particular events and scenes. Just as Lorraine wrote complex characters, Nina did too, with stories embedded in songs. Theirs was a jazz practice, pursued with a sense of broad purpose combined with a penchant for drink and brooding.

Lorraine, Nina, and Jimmy were lonely, even though they had each other. They lived in a profoundly unjust society; they saw their people suffering North and South, and grew to understand that suffering in a global sense, felt by “their people” of so many sorts. Each carried the responsibility of the artist, as well as the passion, often in solitude. Strangeness is a feature of genius. It isolates even as it is acclaimed. Hence Lorraine’s famous quip: “The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”²⁷

This thing of being beloved and having true friends, and yet also experiencing profound loneliness, is important to recognize. It isn’t unusual. Jimmy wrote, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”²⁸ The grounds for friendship can be common wounds. And certainly, along with the art and the politics and the commitment, that was part of it. Nina sang her a song that day called “Blackbird” about loneliness, pain, and sorrow, about feeling unwanted and misunderstood. Lorraine echoed that feeling in a note to Nina titled “Alone, the Saturday evening before Easter 1962—7 pm”:

I would give my soul to be with someone whom I really and truly longed to please. That would be paradise. But there are no such . . .

Thus, I am alone. Very. Tonight. Seven o’clock. Spice, scotch and me. I shall wash my hair. No one will call—save some one whom I do not wish to see. . . .

But worst of all, I am ashamed of being alone. Or is it my loneliness that I am ashamed of? I have closed the shutters so that no one can see. Me. Alone. Sitting at the typewriter on Easter eve; drinking; brooding; alone.²⁹

She could not imagine things getting better.

Beloved but alone. The three—Lorraine, Jimmy, Nina—were apart more often than they were together, always somewhere with some long list of demands placed upon each one. Eventually that demand for Lorraine was her health. She wanted a more vital life, one that might have been possible were their lives not so far-flung. She imagined a company of friends with whom she would spend evenings, dancing and laughing. Soon after achieving it, she no longer desired fame; she just wanted a close community of people: “For money and fame I would make the exchange. But that has always been so; only now I could pay the devil his wage.”³⁰

They paid mightily for love, love of the people. James Baldwin died in 1987. Nina Simone, in 2003. Both were widely criticized after the 1960s for their declines. Illness and grief contorted their post-movement lives, but so did truth telling. The admiration couldn’t go on forever. Celebration waned the more Nina and Jimmy knew and said about the world. They made people uncomfortable with their vulnerabilities and rage. Their loneliness deepened. Lorraine haunted. Unexpectedly but appropriately, in the twenty-first century, after death, Jimmy and Nina were reborn as icons on posters and pillows and in books upon books. Lorraine has yet to be.