Looking for Lorraine

by Imani Perry

  And yet, like the vast majority of their skinfolk, they were shuttered into the ghetto. The Great Depression had cast an already poor community into desperation. The waves of migrants from the South slowed, and the people relied on each other even more intensely. Lorraine would remember her early years in this way:

  The honesty of their living is there in the shabbiness: scrubbed porches that sag and look their danger. Dirty gray wood steps. And always a line of white and pink clothes scrubbed so well, waving in the dirty wind of the city. [. . .] Our south side is a place apart . . . each piece of our living is a protest.2

  Living on South Parkway and Forty-Fifth, the Hansberry family was knitted within a fabric of migrants. They occupied the same building as their tenants. Many of the adults worked in the stockyards of the smoky industrial city that was at once a center of global exchange and a site of intense segregation. Chicago was known for business, from gangsters to gilded captains of industry, and the hard-scrabble lives of its laboring residents. The Black migrants from Southern farms traded terror and cotton fields for crowded units with hallway toilets and a slightly greater taste of freedom.

  Lorraine, though a bookish and interior child, was part of the throng of children playing on those wooden back porches of Chicago apartment buildings and on the burning concrete of Chicago blocks. Her recollections of childhood were often sweetest when she remembered summertime:

  My childhood South Side summers were the ordinary city kind, full of the street games and rhymes that anticipated what some people insist on calling modern poetry. . . . I remember skinny little South Side bodies by the fives and tens of us, panting the delicious hours away.

  A favorite game was the childhood classic Mother, May I, the choreography of which Lorraine described tenderly:

  One drew in all one’s breath and tightened one’s fist and pulled the small body against the heavens, stretching, straining all the muscles in the legs, to make—one. . . . giant . . . step . . . Why was it important to take a small step, a teeny step, or—one giant step? A giant step to where?3

  Some steps Lorraine was expected to take as a child of the Black middle class, in particular, isolated her. They discomfited her, and even made her suffer. In one of the most poignant recollections of her youth she recalled the terrible error her parents made in sending her to school in a lavish white fur coat in the middle of the Great Depression. Wearing it, Lorraine thought she looked exactly like someone wearing one of those dreadful rabbit suits meant to entertain children. She detested those big human rabbits. Her parents thought it was lovely. Lorraine explained their delight, in part, by saying that she was the only child who did not come from the “Rooseveltian atmosphere of the homes of the thirties.” Her parents had not yet defected like other Black folks from the traditional Black Republican Party affiliation that reached back to Reconstruction. President Franklin Roosevelt’s social safety net was not entirely in line with the Hansberrys’ politics. Carl was a capitalist. When Lorraine showed up at school in that fur coat, her classmates gave her a good walloping. She understood why. She too reviled the fancy coat and soon all symbols of affluence. Her providential birth became a source of shame. Though a little girl, she knew, as someone intimately connected with her people, people who had so little in comparison to her family, that her classmates had good reason to resent that coat when food was often scarce and both work and housing were hard to come by.

  The gap between Lorraine and her parents was pronounced in other ways. From her perspective, Carl and Nannie approached parenting in a utilitarian fashion. All four children were well fed, clothed, and provided for. But there was no coddling. When sick, the children were nursed back to health with appropriate remedies and attention, but not much affection. The Hansberry children were expected to be good and were matter-of-factly taught clear values:

  We were also taught certain vague absolutes: that we were better than no one but infinitely superior to everyone; that we were the products of the proudest and most mistreated of the races of man; that there was nothing enormously difficult about life; that one succeeded as a matter of course.4

  Carl and Nannie’s parenting style might have had something to do with class or generation, or merely disposition. Even though her parents were good parents, for Lorraine the emotional distance hurt. She yearned for affection. That, along with her being the youngest and a bother to her older siblings—Mamie was seven years her senior and Perry and Carl Jr., nine and ten years older respectively—contributed to an early sense of loneliness.

  Though Lorraine rebelled from her parents’ politics and, as far as she was concerned, the coat incident was one of those early signposts of such rebellion, and she resented their emotional distance, the lessons about race and racial loyalty that she learned from them took root. Most of all: one must never betray the race. Notwithstanding their status, Carl and Nannie’s striving was not primarily self-aggrandizing. They were “race people” in the old-fashioned sense of the word: respectable representatives who believed that every success and every failure was either championing the race or shaming it. Carl’s entrepreneurialism was consistently connected to fighting against Jim Crow practices. His greatest fight began in 1937, the year Lorraine turned seven years old. Carl set his sights on a brick building for purchase at 6140 South Rhodes Avenue. This one was different from his previous purchases. The home was covered by a racially restrictive covenant, a private land agreement in which neighbors in the area had agreed to not sell to African Americans and other “undesirables.” Such agreements covered the majority of Chicago real estate at the time. But a personal dispute between one homeowner who served on the board of the Woodlawn Property Owners Association and the rest of the board led him to sabotage the neighborhood by selling his home to a Black purchaser, Carl Hansberry. Carl was well aware that his purchase would lead to a legal battle. He enlisted the support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in advance and received a mortgage from the Supreme Life and Liberty Insurance Company, a Black-owned outfit that was often involved in Black politics in the city.

  The case that resulted from Carl’s bold move sits somewhat dully in constitutional law textbooks today. But behind it was a harrowing story for the seven-year-old Lorraine. As an adult, she described the event in an unpublished letter to the New York Times. Carl, she said, spent a great deal of money and time working on the case with the NAACP. She, her mother, and siblings occupied the home and lived under siege. Outside their door a howling white mob lay in wait. She and her siblings were hit, spat upon, and cursed out as they walked to school. In the evenings, her mother protected the home with a German Luger pistol while Carl was often out of town working with the team of lawyers, fighting for their right to be there.

  In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Lorraine’s sister, Mamie, recalled that a chunk of cement was thrown through the window by a member of the mob. The cement almost caught Lorraine’s head. It was thrown with such force that after it shattered the glass, and nearly hit the seven-year-old girl, it landed at the living room wall and lodged itself tightly into the plaster. “That was a grotesque sight to see that lodged in the wall,” Mamie told the Tribune. “You know that somebody doesn’t like you, doesn’t want you there.”5

  Any reader familiar with Lorraine’s most famous play, A Raisin in the Sun, will sense that this episode, and Lorraine’s near-death experience in the midst of it, is an undercurrent of Raisin‘s story of a Black family that buys a home in a white neighborhood in Chicago. But in truth, the Hansberry experience was not unique. There were literally hundreds of cases across the Midwest of white mob violence in response to individual efforts to integrate. The consequences were destroyed property, lost homes, trauma, and sometimes death. Unlike the South, in which the racial hierarchy was marked in a plethora of other ways, from segregated train cars to lynching, in Northern cities real estate was the border of racial status.

  Before writing A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine r
eflected on her own childhood experience multiple times in fictional form. Lorraine habitually worked through her ideas, memories, politics, and passions by writing vividly imagined fictional scenes. They are a key to revealing her interior life.

  Unlike in Raisin, the violence in these creative vignettes was always immediate. In one, the protagonist is a migrant from Macon, Georgia, a working-class man who has tired of fighting rats in the ghetto and simply wants to give his wife a little house. “What the hell is a Negro suppose to do? [. . .] I have fought rats til I’m all but crazy and I said by the time my baby came I was going to have some kind of little house for her and I am.”6 His peers, however, are worried about him leaving his pregnant wife, Clarise, at home to face the white mobs while he’s at work. Clarise, he says, sits at home with a German Luger on her lap, like Nannie Hansberry did. When one of his coworkers suggests getting police protection, he scoffs, “Police don’t mean nothing. They white ain’t they?”7

  The failure of police to protect Black residents in the face of white mobs was to be expected. What Lorraine meditated upon, with some frustration, was gender. In her not too thinly veiled critique of her father, and in the words of her fictional protagonists’ peers, she was troubled by the burden upon her mother, or any Black woman for that matter, who had to face bloodthirsty violence. Her disposition reflected her era, in which the masculine ideal was one of protector and provider, but it also reflected her sensitivity to the general reality that Black women were not afforded protections from the meanness of the world but rather called to face them up close.

  In another experimental vignette, which Lorraine wrote in 1950, a white mob attacks a group of Black people getting into a car in front of their home. In this one, the Black people fight back. A person in the mob smashes their window; they retaliate by calling her a “whitebitch.” Twenty people surround the car, the Black driver attempts to drive into the crowd. The fantasy of retaliation and what satisfaction it might afford is disrupted again by a police officer who attacks.

  The girl is dragged from the car. An officer, whom the girl calls with bitter sarcasm “a good uncolored,” stands above her and spits, “Get up, nigger.” She spits back, “Who, your mother?” He pulls her up and kicks her face, breaking her nose and knocking out a tooth. The girl says, “I wondered if the good uncolored was smiling. If he had gaps.”8

  Lorraine’s impressionistic renderings of the violence of the “good uncolored,” an ironic turn of phrase if ever there was one, tells the reader that the “coloreds” were the human ones, the normal and decent ones. But the “uncolored” were a haunting other, devoid of morality or decency. And that is, of course, how they must have seemed to a young Lorraine.

  She repeated the trauma in fiction, sometimes impressionistically and sometimes realistically. In the most intimate of the vignettes in which she conjured up her childhood terror, Lorraine herself appears in the first person as the little girl named Sarah who is almost hit by a brick. She is surrounded by her mother, her aunt, and a family friend named Mr. Rector, who is a World War II veteran. The kind, gentle, and disabled man feels a murderous rage. It is directed toward his racist fellow citizens, for whom he once killed in France. Then the rage turns to anguish: “Mr. Rector was calmer, the steel was gone from his eyes and there was water in them. I was seven . . . and men did not cry . . . but somehow there was water in Mr. Rectors [sic] eyes. . . . Bitter little Mr. Rector. He sat there and wept his soldier’s tears. No one tried to comfort him.”9

  When the police arrive, the sense of pained impotence felt by Mr. Rector is paired with their willful disregard. They examine the home and take notes. Though they touch the window with the gaping hole, they repeat that there is nothing to worry about because “no one was hurt.” It reads as though Lorraine was writing from memory.

  When Sarah’s mother asks the police to stay until her husband arrives, the cop, a large man, responds,

  Look lady I don’t care about your husband, I’ve got to take the brick to headquarters. [. . .] I don’t give a damn about none of this. I’m here because I was sent. [. . .] I don’t know what you folks are all excited about anyhow. [. . .] Some people throw a rock in your window and you act like it was a bomb. [. . .] Jesus, these people wouldn’t have bothered you noways, if you was in your own neighborhood.10

  Her maternal rage belies a steely insistence. She tells the officer that despite the fact that her baby was almost murdered by the racist mob, “we are not moving.” Lorraine wrote two different endings to this story. In both, the father comes home. In one, the girl falls asleep listening to the Southern accent of her father; in the other it is her mother’s voice, “The soft slurring made crisp in places by association with those who spoke in sharper accents. I went to sleep with his voice in my ears.”11

  The South was never far from Lorraine’s consciousness. People were always coming from “down home” and telling stories about down home, and she even traveled to her mother’s birthplace in Tennessee around the time of the brick incident. Along the ride Nannie directed her children, from the car, to look at the hills of Kentucky. She told them that her father, their grandfather, had escaped to them when he was a boy. A runaway slave as a child, he was protected by his own mother. She kept him alive by wandering into the forested hills in the middle of the night, leaving food and other provisions. Lorraine found the hills beautiful.

  As a motif in her life, the South was a reminder of the struggle her parents had undertaken and how much labor remained. It was also her “root” and the source of her people’s routes, as it were. Once they arrived in Tennessee, Lorraine intuited that her grandmother’s tender and aged posture bespoke something that slavery, Jim Crow, and all the ills the migrants fled, had never been able to arrest or beat out of them. She was old, wrinkled, and resilient. She made teacakes and rocked in her rocker and talked about the past, about slavery, constantly. Lorraine’s grandmother died soon after their visit.

  Migrants are rarely spoken of in the same manner as immigrants, but they share a great deal, particularly when it comes to the obligations of the second generation to make sense of how they came to be there, among those who spoke in sharper accents, becoming one with a sharp accent.

  Lorraine described her fictional character Sarah dreaming about playing with the brick, turning the near-death object into a toy. A feature of trauma is repetition. Lorraine made the event into art. It is perhaps an understatement to say that this childhood event traumatized her. Of course it would. But in particular it shaped her ideas about gender and race. As her father was embarking on his respectable and righteous crusade, she, a girl of seven, was beginning to understand the world. In the North, like the South, they were at once fugitives from injustice and resilient and insistent Americans.

  As white mobs illegally threatened the Hansberry family, the Woodlawn Property Owners Association went the legal route with their racism and filed a claim in circuit court to force the Hansberry family to leave the property. The Hansberrys were soon evicted from the property they owned at 6140 Rhodes Avenue. But Carl would not be defeated. With the legal support of Truman Gibson Jr., he spent three years in the courts arguing for his property rights. Their case reached the United States Supreme Court, and Hansberry v. Lee was decided on November 12, 1940, when Lorraine was approaching ten and a half years old. The resolution was bittersweet. The Hansberry family prevailed. They could take possession of the property. Several more blocks of the city were opened up to Black residents. But the court reached this decision only because the racially restrictive covenant had been improperly executed as a contract. It hadn’t had enough signatories to be binding. The Supreme Court refused to take up the issue as to whether racially restrictive covenants violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It would be eight more years before the court would tackle that question.

  In reflection years later, Lorraine would describe her father as a “real American type American” who believed in strugg
ling for equality “the respectable way.”12 And yet it was clear to her, as a child, that such efforts were rarely rewarded in kind. Her encounters with the forces of Jim Crow were hardly ones in which white Americans demonstrated themselves to be respectful or “respectable” when it came to their Black fellow citizens. Their public life as a family—and they had a more public life than the vast majority of American families of any race—was demanding, taxing, and even in victory shaped by the rules of a Jim Crow society.

  But when Lorraine was immersed in life “behind the veil” (to borrow a term from her future mentor W. E. B. Du Bois), a great deal of society’s ugliness receded from view and the world of Black Chicago was an extraordinary place. In the 1930s, Chicago was in the midst of a Black Renaissance. It was the center of the blues and gospel music industries. The greatest acts and choirs resided in or came through Chicago, and the records were pressed and distributed in the city. The Chicago Black press was robust. Newspapers and periodicals, including the Chicago Defender, the Chicago Sunday Bee, Negro Digest, and Negro Story Magazine, were all published in the city. These periodicals provided local, national, and international news of the Black world and also a venue for a crop of young writers to publish their work. Groups of writers working in collectives also flourished. These groups had emerged in Chicago in two primary ways: the Communist Party had established them as part of their cultural policy efforts, and the Works Progress Administration had too. Perhaps the most important project in the 1930s for Black Chicagoans was the Negro in Illinois project of the WPA, which enlisted dozens of workers to study the world of Black Chicago under the directorship of Black sociologists Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake. Among the writers who worked on the Negro in Illinois project were future literary luminaries Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, and Margaret Walker.