I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and—I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.…
If anything should happen—before ’tis done—may I trust that all commas and periods will be placed and someone will complete my thoughts—
This last should be the least difficult since there are so many who think as I do—
—LORRAINE HANSBERRY
The second excerpt of Lorraine Hansberry’s above comes from an undated journal entry, presumably written near the end of the playwright’s life. The first, however, was written not at the end, but at the beginning of her career. These thoughts were delivered on March 1, 1959, before an audience of her peers at a conference on “The Negro Writer and His Roots.”
Two weeks later, her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, opened on Broadway. Two months following that date, she became the youngest American playwright, the fifth woman,* the only black writer ever to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of the Year.
Six years later, at age thirty-four, she was dead of cancer.
We are indebted to the late Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry’s former husband and literary executor, to whom she entrusted all her works, as the person most singularly responsible for perpetuating her legacy. He was not alone: actors, directors, other stage professionals, journalists, critics, and, above all, audiences have kept the playwright’s works alive. But Nemiroff spent the twenty-six years that he survived Hansberry meticulously placing the “periods and commas” necessary to provide the living evidence that the artist who died too soon was a major American writer.
My Foreword here is a tribute to them both. For if in her short life the prolific Hansberry created far more than her now-classic first work, A Raisin in the Sun, and her second, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window—which was playing on Broadway at the time of her death—the very richness of her output deserved the commitment of one equally dedicated to effecting wide recognition of the extent and range of her legacy.
Shortly after the playwright’s death, Bob Nemiroff began the process of making her works widely known by creating—in dramatic and literary form—a portrait of the artist drawn entirely from her own words. He called both the play and the book To Be Young, Gifted and Black (YGB)—a phrase of commendation taken from Hansberry’s last speech, delivered to young winners of a United Negro College Fund writing contest.
The collection of the artist’s range and genius provided in YGB was drawn from her unpublished plays in progress and from completed essays, speeches, fiction, and poetry as well as from the play through which she first gained recognition, A Raisin in the Sun, and the one that closed on Broadway on the day she died, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.
Among the plays Hansberry left were several incomplete versions of Les Blancs, the title play of this new Vintage edition of The Collected Last Plays. Les Blancs is the only Hansberry work that Nemiroff adapted into a final version; its dramatic life continues to evolve as the values of the play are directorially realized on stage through successive productions. In her comprehensive Introduction to this Vintage collection, Margaret B. Wilkerson, Hansberry’s biographer, provides a history of each of the works as part of her critical treatment of each; Robert Nemiroff earlier provided “A Critical Background” that includes invaluable personal accounts of the emergence and development of each work in the playwright’s consciousness.
The background notes that Nemiroff wrote for Les Blancs serve virtually as a prologue for the play. Through his exposition, the realization can be gained of a key aspect of Hansberry’s life that is germane to all her writings.
Lorraine Hansberry walked in dazzling history—was a creature of it, a portrayer and interpreter of extraordinary times. Her works—in keeping with her philosophy of the obligation of the artist—illuminate her world and ours, and chart directions. Hence the frequent critical references to this playwright’s “prophetic voice.”
Next year (1995) will be the thirtieth anniversary of Hansberry’s death. In this year (1994) of the new edition of Les Blancs, the sun has just risen on the installation of a black President of South Africa following more than a century of turmoil, blood, and agony in that exquisitely beautiful country.
This playwright was one of the first African American dramatists to create a major work addressing the issues at stake in colonial Africa and what surely lay ahead for colonizers and colonized in the inevitable struggles for liberation. She remains one of the handful of playwrights in any country outside Africa who have, to date, addressed this subject matter.
Nemiroff began his notes on Les Blancs and its author with an account of Lorraine Hansberry’s immersion in African history from an early age. These were not experiences shared by most African Americans—and certainly not by Americans in general.
But it is her own direct exposure to major participants in the United States that was most remarkable. As a very young woman, she served first as a reporter and then as an associate editor for Paul Robeson’s newspaper, Freedom. The staff shared offices with brilliant African Americans involved in the liberation struggles of Africa—involved at high cost. Several, like Robeson, were cruelly Red-baited before, during, and after the McCarthy period; some went into exile.
Above all, the budding young playwright experienced the excitement and stimulation of taking courses on Africa under William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, father of Pan-Africanism and one of the most brilliant scholars America has ever produced. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and educated at Fisk University, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois produced more than twenty volumes of work over a lifetime spanning almost a century (1868–1963), beginning just after the Civil War of one century and continuing into the years of the Civil Rights Movement of the next. Few fields of knowledge in the social sciences, humanities, and literary world were exempt from the prolific pen of this intellectual giant, while the measure of his organizational skills on behalf of Africans, African Americans, and Africans of the diaspora is incalculable.*
In her library, on the inside flap of Du Bois’s Black Folk Then and Now (1939, begun as The Negro in 1915), the playwright-to-be left a handwritten description of the man as seen from her classroom seat: “Freedom’s passion, organized and refined, sits there.” She was an anguished observer during the McCarthy years, when the political attempt was made to disgrace the esteemed senior spokesman, to cries of dismay and protest from around the world. At ninety-three, undiminished, Du Bois left the United States for Ghana and a setting made available to him by head of state Kwame Nkrumah to work, with other scholars, on his monumentally conceived Encyclopedia Africana.
Two years later, he died in Ghana on the very eve of the March on Washington, during which tens of thousands of his fellow Americans vindicated his vision and long years of commitment to the freedom of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora and of human beings everywhere. Given all that he had known and experienced over so long a lifetime, the message of hope and optimism that he left behind as his letter to the world is one that his former pupil also profoundly understood.
At the 1959 conference of writers where Hansberry addressed her peers, she listed all the dismaying factors (the list was long) that characterized the world into which she was born. The list completed, she continued:
I have given you this account so that you know that what I write is not based on the assumption of idyllic possibilities or innocent assessments of the true nature of life—but, rather, my own personal view that, posing one against the other, I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars.…
Hansberry began working on Les Blancs (The Whites) in 1960. (Responding to a fan letter from a Chinese woman professor at the University of Peking after the success of A Raisin in the Sun, she parenthetically used the title The Holy Ones, perhaps facetiously, in referring to Les Blancs among the works she was planning to write.) Nemiroff states that the impetus that sent her into deeper involvement was her immediate “visceral response” to the U.S. production of Jean Genet’s powerful play Les Nègres (The Blacks).
The African American playwright felt that the Frenchman’s treatment of European oppression in Africa took refuge in a romantic exoticism superimposed upon the Africans, which permitted the artist, in fact, to evade the real issues at stake. She had seen at firsthand too much of both the strength and the cost of human commitment to accept Genet’s thesis that power, whether in white or black hands—metaphorically in The Blacks, with a simple change of masks—operates the same way, which is to say ruthlessly.
Always where human beings oppress each other, she felt, that which is central to the oppression can be defined and confronted. Only in the recognition and confrontation is there any chance of defeating the enemies of humankind. She abhorred any suggestion—as she felt permeated Genet’s drama—that life is “absurdist” and that man (in the words of one of William Faulkner’s despairing characters) “stinks the same no matter where in time.”
Hansberry walked in history, I have said, particularly in the intermingled history of Africans and African Americans. The threads run throughout her works. In A Raisin in the Sun, Walter Lee Younger, Sr., and Lena, his wife, were among the great body of Southern black migrants from South to North before World War I, making their way to what they hoped would be better lives for themselves and their children and children’s children.
Walter Lee Younger, Jr., the Chicago chauffeur who dreams of being a Chicago tycoon, holds in his consciousness the powerful, throbbing sounds of African drums and the shadowy shapes of African freedom fighters. During a poetic scene in which he is intoxicated with liquor and his younger sister, Beneatha, is intoxicated with life, the brother leaps onto the family’s kitchen table, shouting “FLAMING SPEAR! … OCOMOGOSIAY … THE LION IS WAKING …”
The playwright tells us that on his summit—as below him Beneatha dances a dance of welcome to warriors returning to the imaginary village—Walter “sees what we cannot, that he is a leader of his people, a great chief, a descendant of Chaka, and that the hour to march has come.”
In Les Blancs, the hour to march comes unmistakably for Tshembe Matoseh, Africa’s son returning home for his father’s funeral from his new life in London, only to find himself irrevocably enmeshed in the liberation struggle of his people.
Readers and viewers should take care not to impose stereotypical thinking on Hansberry’s work; the vision of this artist is global. When Tshembe confronts his brother, Abioseh, who has chosen to forsake his African ways in favor of becoming a Catholic priest, the one brother scorns the choice made by the other not only because Abioseh believes in a white man’s God—but also because converting to the new faith offers a route, he hopes, to some degree of power sharing with whites.
One suspects that in her choice of Christian sects—Catholicism instead of Protestantism—to bestow on Abioseh, Hansberry remembered (from the age of five) her mother telling her never to forget the invasion of Ethiopia by Italian soldiers blessed by the Pope. But the playwright’s choice in this instance should never be confused with a condemnation of Catholicism. Had she lived, without a doubt Hansberry would have been particularly conscious and admiring of the role of Catholic priests and nuns in freedom struggles in South America and would have seen in that participation the affirming forward sweep of history.
Of Hansberry’s two other plays in this edition, What Use Are Flowers? goes beyond Les Blancs in exploring a world in which human failures turn into catastrophe and the world is destroyed by a nuclear blast. In the play, which Margaret B. Wilkerson discusses in detail, the plot turns on an old hermit who emerges from a forest remote from civilization and discovers that the only survivors are wild children whom he, nearing the end of his life, has to teach all the wonders that humankind had produced.
This “fable” was originally conceived for television, then reconceptualized for the stage. As of this writing, I have just witnessed the first staged reading of What Use Are Flowers? in which the directorial periods and commas were inserted by Harold Scott, who directed the award-winning twenty-fifth anniversary production of A Raisin in the Sun and the 1988 and ’89 productions of Les Blancs for Washington’s Arena Stage and Boston’s Huntington Theatre, respectively. Shortly (also in 1994), a full-fledged production of What Use Are Flowers? will be presented.
Viewing it, as it begins to emerge on stage for the first time, one is struck again by Hansberry’s creative powers: the quality and force of her language and the playwright’s intuitive grasp of what makes for heightened dramatic action.
One is also reminded of the timeliness of this artist’s vision. In the interaction between the hermit—who, in fact, is the world’s last teacher—and children to whom he must impart sensibilities of beauty and truth, there is a particular poignancy for our time, when the world’s children are not being served well by their elders and the world teeters precariously as a result. In this play, the artist as humanist was never more strikingly revealed.
The Drinking Gourd, originally commissioned for television to celebrate the centennial year of the American Civil War, has not yet been produced on film or stage. The reason, I think, is simple. The subject matter is American slavery; the nation has not yet come to terms with the terrible system of human bondage that has left us with so weighty a legacy still to be resolved.
A journal entry from Hansberry on this subject is uncompromising:
Some scholars have estimated that in the three centuries that the European slave trade flourished, the African continent lost one hundred million of its people. No one, to my knowledge, has ever paid reparations to the descendants of black men; indeed, they have not yet really acknowledged the fact of the crime against humanity which was the conquest of Africa.
But then—history has not yet been concluded … has it?
The record of whites in South Africa goes almost as far back as that of the presence of black and white peoples on American shores; hence the magnitude of the announcement of reconciliation from across the seas—and the promise.
In this soon-to-be thirtieth anniversary of Hansberry’s death, history has moved from the independence of Ghana in 1957 and that of Kenya in 1963 (Jomo Kenyatta was on Hansberry’s mind in the writing of Les Blancs), to the rise of the new republic of South Africa as a phoenix from ashes in 1994, a testament not merely to human struggle but to the human will to triumph.
Hansberry once said in an inteview that her goal as a dramatist was to “reach a little closer to people, to see if we can share some illumination about each other.”
It will be interesting to keep Les Blancs within our purview for another thirty years, an ultimate milepost that will take us well into a new century and millennium to measure how far we and the world have come in sharing illuminations. Perhaps within this time frame, many more periods and commas will have been placed to shape the kind of world that Lorraine Hansberry in her brief life emphasized again and again was possible.
—JEWELL HANDY GRESHAM NEMIROFF
May 1994
* Women who preceded Hansberry: 1941, Lillian Hellman, Watch on the Rhine; 1950, Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding; 1956, Francis Goodrich (with Albert Hackett), The Diary of Anne Frank; 1958, Ketti Frings, Look Homeward Angel.
* In 1994, David Levering-Lewis’s W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race won the Pulitzer Prize. Of few other African American figures—with the exception of Frederick Douglass in the nineteenth century and perhaps, in his short life, Martin Luther King, Jr., in the twentieth—would it be possible to entitle the record of one man’s life also a biography of his people.