by Imani Perry
CHAPTER TWO
From Heartland to the Water’s Edge
green land. Dark land.
Land of the no winter
My father dreamed of you
—Lorraine Hansberry1
THE COEDS OF LANGDON MANOR were gathered together to talk about Lorraine, or rather, about the problem of her Blackness. Langdon Manor, a women’s dormitory at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was directed by Ann Miller, who was described by one of Lorraine’s peers as “a thin and hypertensive chain-smoking middle aged widow.”2 In 1948, when Lorraine enrolled at the institution, the population of Langdon Manor was already diverse, including Jewish and Hawaiian students in their number. But a Black girl, of course, was a different matter entirely.
At the house meeting, Mrs. Miller told the residents that “a Negro girl from Chicago, who wanted to enroll in the university, had trouble obtaining a room in what the university administration considered ‘approved housing.’” 3 Mrs. Hansberry wanted Lorraine to live in a residence hall rather than in off-campus housing, as previous Black students had been forced to do. The question at hand was whether the Langdon Manor coeds would be amenable to the presence of a Black girl. The process Mrs. Miller devised to answer it was to invite Lorraine to dinner to meet the young women residents, and following that, they would decide together whether they approved.
JoAnn Beier, one of the students, described the dinner as a rousing success: “We met Lorraine Hansberry, we ate with her, we talked with her—the entire group was won over by her warmth and charm at that first meeting. She spread her own brand of fairy godmother’s dust upon us, which fell like the first light snow of a winter’s evening, the kind you want to keep and save.” Lorraine was stylish and smart. The women also felt rather self-congratulatory about welcoming the “first” of her kind. Lorraine defied stereotypes that her peers likely held of Black girls from Chicago’s South Side. She was bourgeois and erudite. Her physical beauty—a lithe body, conventional prettiness, and a creamy and not too rich, brown skin—likely helped ease any potential worry. Lorraine was undoubtedly aware that she was being tested. Such an evaluation must have given her a feeling of, at the minimum, bitter irony. In her childhood, Lorraine was attacked by white ruffians for occupying a property her family rightly owned. Now she was called to perform with sophistication, despite her Blackness, to prove herself worthy of living with white people. Notwithstanding her charm and grace, something must have roiled within.
Later that evening, the women of Langdon Manor voted unanimously to allow Lorraine to become a resident.
Lorraine enrolled in the distinguished public research university with a declared applied arts major. She was a talented visual artist, although she later demurred on the matter, and doodled and sketched everywhere. And, consistent with that artist identity, she entered into college life passionately. One wonders what took her from a declaration that she wanted to be a journalist to art so quickly. Perhaps it was just the fickleness of youth. But maybe it was also the freedom of being away from home. She didn’t have to name a “responsible” profession.
Lorraine took courses in stage design and sculpture and fully embraced becoming an artist. On Friday nights, when many of her classmates were going on dates, she turned her room into an art studio. She and her friends tacked their canvases on the walls, in lieu of easels, and experimented with oil paints. Lively and playful, Lorraine enchanted those around her with her personality and wit, according to her friend JoAnn Beier, who described her as “sly, sagacious, and [one who] used sarcasm in a most delicious way—never to harm but to amuse. She would delight in chiding, gently, humorously, and seemed to relish a giggly, off-guard response. . . . I admired her cultured lackadaisical attitude.”4
But JoAnn could also sense a depth of feeling below the surface of Lorraine’s charms. She reflected, “Later, as I came to know her better, I realized that this served as a good cover for much deeper emotions, and sometimes her eyes would take on a far-off daydream look, and I knew she was in the private world of Lorraine Hansberry. I, nor others, did not trespass. . . . I discovered that the superficial personality, frosted with sardonic wit, concealed an extremely sensitive and concerned feeling.”
In Lorraine’s serious and reflective moments she was contemplating so many things. Among her thoughts were questions about race and racism, war, a general concern about the state of the world, and a desire to do something about it all. It was in college that her sense that art might enable her to do something meaningful for the world emerged. At that crossroads of purpose and creativity, she began to attend and then dabble in theater. Lorraine saw a modern-dress campus performance of Antigone that she intensely disliked. In classes, she read and was affected by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. She performed in Federico Garcia Lorca’s three-act tragedy Yerma, a proto-feminist story about the title character’s suffering due to her infertility, which was an indictment of conservative Catholic morality. In the play, Lorraine played Maria, a young wife who is pregnant yet filled with anxiety and doubt about what, according to the expectations of the day, ought to have given her joy. In contrast, in Aristophanes’s Lysistrata she portrayed a Theban woman who very reluctantly refuses to have sex with her husband as part of a general strike the women had undertaken in order to end the Peloponnesian War. In other productions Lorraine inserted herself into the action behind the scenes.
One play, however, struck the deepest chord with Lorraine in her college years. It was the second work in the Dublin trilogy of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey: Juno and the Paycock. Juno depicts Dublin tenement life and broken intimacies in the midst of the upheavals of the Irish Civil War. Lorraine described the effect the sound of the production had upon her:
I remember sitting there consumed as that wail rose and hummed through the tenement, through Dublin, through Ireland itself, and then mingled with seas to become something born of the Irish wail that was all of us. The play was Juno and the Paycock, the writer Sean O’Casey—but the melody was one I thought might have been sung in a different meter . . . a melody that I had known for a very long time.5
O’Casey’s use of the everyday music and sensibility of the Irish brogue resonated deeply with Lorraine. It was familiar to her, not in a genealogical sense (there is a world of difference between Ireland and Chicago’s South Side) but in the sense of also coming from a people for whom there was poetry in everyday expression. She could have easily said the same of Lorca, who wrote with deep fidelity to the poetry of the everyday lives of Spanish peasantry. For whatever reason, she wasn’t nearly as affected by any of the other playwrights as she was by O’Casey.
Years later, after her landmark play A Raisin in the Sun had made it to Broadway, Lorraine would say, “I love Sean O’Casey. He is the playwright of the twentieth century using the most obvious instrument of Shakespeare: the human personality in its totality. I’ve always thought this was profoundly significant for Negro writers, not to copy, but as a model, a point of departure.”6 She was enchanted by O’Casey’s full appreciation of the complexity of his subjects’ hearts and minds. They were not tidy and proper. Some were drunks, some were revolutionaries, some were cowards. According to Lorraine, heroism could emerge only from such universal truths about humanity. We are a messy bunch.
From O’Casey, Lorraine also got a taste of realism. He wasn’t concerned with making sure the Irish looked good or countered stereotypes. He freed her from a sense that as a Black writer one had to constantly be worried about depicting characters who were “credits to their race,” as the commonplace saying went; or to put it in contemporary terms, she didn’t have to think about positive and negative representations but rather simply true ones. Furthermore, O’Casey provided a model of an artist who did not have to choose between a faithful reproduction of social realities and social commentary and the pursuit of beauty. He embraced it all.
Just because O’Casey captured young Lorraine’s artistic imagination, doesn’t mean she was follow
ing in his footsteps just yet. She wasn’t a playwright, not even a nascent one at Wisconsin. If her journals are any indication, she leaned much more, at least as an artist, toward the exploration of beauty than toward social criticism. For example, one of her journal entries from her time at Wisconsin celebrated sunlight and the natural landscape:
In a house where there is much beauty and color and shapes that are free and casual and then . . . sunlight.
How can men exult shadow and night
When there is for the earth, the radiance that is sunlight . . . sunlight wafting through blinds now in a cold city . . . just for a few seconds and then the long hours of darkness and coldness before the dreary sunshine can come again.
Sunlight full and glorious on a plain somewhere.7
Her words are melancholy. They capture the cool, pale darkness of Wisconsin in every season save summer, and the unquestionable desire of any lover of sun and sea, while stuck in the cold plains, to imagine something, somewhere, else. The yearning is also a form of judgment. She asks, “How can men exult shadow and night?” when light can be found in another time and place. Her lines only narrowly avoid melodrama solely because they are unself-conscious. Even in such personal reflections Lorraine was direct about what appealed to her and what dragged down her spirits. Honesty, sometimes brutal, was a trait she admired and cultivated. One example she witnessed, and delighted in, was offered by Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the many artistic geniuses she would encounter in her youth, who delivered a lecture at Wisconsin. The campus was excited for his arrival. Wright arrived with an entourage of men with long hair, skinny ties, and caps. When the esteemed architect took the stage he insulted everything about the campus, “foremost among them, the building he was standing in for its violation of the organic principles of architecture; he attacked babbitry and the nature of education, saying that we put in so many fine plums and get out so many fine prunes, each like the one before.”8 Though the faculty laughed nervously, Lorraine and her peers loved Wright and cheered him on.
Lorraine was inspired by his complete disregard for the rules of politeness in order to say something true, and also found his ability to retreat into the hills after such disruption compelling. Lorraine was “scary,” according to the Black English of her era, meaning she tended to be nervous and worried, an unexpected character trait with her political boldness. That is probably why she admired Wright’s ability to cause an uproar and then depart. And she was ambitious. Here was another model for her. Wright was the greatest American architect, and he wasn’t forced to perform graciousness precisely because of that greatness. His opinions were strong and he celebrated individualism. Wright wasn’t so inclined to the assumption that universities were the best places to be educated. Neither was Lorraine. All this had to have been intriguing as Lorraine was figuring out who she would be, and looking closely at the work of many artists as she sought that path. That Wright scandalized the administration must have also excited Lorraine. Because although Wisconsin was a progressive place compared to many institutions, this was the McCarthy era, and Lorraine was becoming known on campus as a passionate leftist.
Tensions existed between the liberal and leftist circles at Madison on one side, and a more pervasive conservatism that characterized the university, the state of Wisconsin, and in some ways the entire nation on the other. The student population included a critical mass of World War II veterans, whose patriotism was readily apparent, as was the patriotic appreciation their presence elicited. A collective commitment to ensure the post–World War II global order was pervasive. The University of Wisconsin’s commencement speaker the year Lorraine arrived, General Omar Bradley, had spent his entire address warning the students of the danger posed by the spread of communism in Eastern Europe and Asia. Specific to their generational concerns, as with many campuses, anxiety ran high among students about the prospect of the military draft (though most students were exempted from it) and the even more ominous prospect of war, an anxiety that cut across political affiliations. The response to this anxiety that Lorraine and other young leftists embraced, however, was outside the political mainstream, of which they were made well aware. There were identity-based conflicts too. Although Wisconsin was less homogeneous than many universities, only a handful of Black students were enrolled. And while there was a critical mass of Jewish students, general animus against them was thinly veiled, in the form of complaints about the large number of “New Yorkers” on campus.
The conservatism of the era affected Lorraine’s relationship with her friend JoAnn directly. The two housemates planned to become roommates in what was Lorraine’s second year. However, when JoAnn’s parents were apprised of their decision, they were horrified at the idea of their daughter rooming with a Black person and refused to allow it. JoAnn was too ashamed to admit her parents’ racism to Lorraine, and so she had Mrs. Miller inform Lorraine that the intended arrangement had to be shuttered. JoAnn recalled that after the revelation, “Our friendship was never quite as deep as it had been after that, regrettably.”9 Lorraine had had enough experiences with racism by that time, much more harrowing ones, that she was probably neither shocked nor disrupted by JoAnn’s parents and JoAnn’s cowardice. But it had to sting, as these things usually do. And it likely fueled her quest to create a different world. Her personal life and her scholarly reading, witnessing, and experiencing were shaping the adult she would become.
Though Lorraine’s artwork wasn’t yet explicitly political, her political commitments developed and deepened in college. She became a member of the Young Progressives of America, the student arm of the United States Progressive Party, newly formed to support the US presidential candidacy of former vice president Henry Wallace. Wallace had broken away from the Truman administration, in part because of Truman’s aggressively anti-Communist stance. In the 1948 presidential election he faced off against Truman. The Progressive Party was treated suspiciously in many quarters because of its welcoming stance toward members of the Communist Party and their “fellow travelers.” Lorraine worked on Wallace’s campaign, much to the chagrin of her mother, who, like many members of civil-rights establishment organizations supported the far more viable candidate, Truman. But like many other young activist African Americans, Lorraine was drawn to Wallace because he had much stronger positions than Truman in support of civil rights and the rights of working people and the colonized world. Truman, on the other hand, made rather modest concessions to the civil rights establishment for its support. It was unsurprising that a young, critically thinking, and burgeoning intellectual and artist like Lorraine would support Wallace. It was also a sign of how in her young adulthood she stepped further outside her mother’s expectations and her father’s political legacy.
In the 1948 election, Wallace failed to win a single state, finishing fourth behind the Southern conservative breakaway party, the Dixiecrats. However, Lorraine was not defeated, and she continued to participate in progressive politics. She became the social chair of the Young Progressives of America chapter at Madison in the spring of 1949 and president that fall. Their chapter took public positions on matters of local, national, and international importance. On campus they opposed the plan to raise in-state tuition (which was about one hundred dollars) and spoke out against the ROTC program, Jim Crow hiring policies at the university, and the racial discrimination pervasive in student culture. They supported a national public-works subsistence wage for needy students and unemployment benefits of thirty-five dollars a week. The young protestors were also outspoken defenders of academic freedom who argued that the university must protect leftist faculty members who were increasingly targeted in the growing Cold War culture. They expressed national concerns by rejecting the Wisconsin governor’s opposition to a federal rent-control policy and supported a civil rights bill. With respect to international matters, they opposed the Marshall Plan and the Atlantic Pact and supported the formal recognition of Communist China. Lorraine even took it upon herself to write a pers
onal letter to Judge Harold Medina of the Federal Court of the Southern District of New York, who was presiding over the Foley Square Trial of eleven members of the US Communist Party who had been charged with treason under the Smith Act.
As with her presidencies of the Gadabouts and Ivyettes and the debate society in high school, Lorraine again emerged as a leader. But now she was part of a national political network, in a context in which women and African Americans were rarely at the forefront. Moreover, she was engaged in politics in a wide variety of forms. Some of these had to do with race, but most extended beyond matters having to do—to use a term of art—“with the race.” Being in a predominantly white university, while in some ways isolating, also somewhat surprisingly provided a space for her to find and exercise a political voice beyond the circumscribed set of issues, that is, advocacy of civil rights within its most common frame of that period—an anticommunist liberalism—to which women of her race and class were often resigned.
In the summer between Lorraine’s tenure as social chair and her presidency of the Wisconsin branch of the Young Progressives of America, she followed in her father’s footsteps to Mexico. He had been dead for three years by then, but his presence continued to loom large in her life. Many of her peers, when they studied abroad, went to Europe. Years later, Lorraine would write that Europe never held any particular fascination for her, but the Americas did.
The 1949 summer art program sponsored by the University of Guadalajara was held in the bohemian enclave of Ajijic, Mexico. Ajijic had been attracting a motley assortment of European and American artists and intellectuals, some of whom settled there permanently, for close to a decade. Getting to Ajijic was difficult in those days. After arriving by plane in Guadalajara, Lorraine and her fellow students traveled by bus along a long dirt road through several small villages and a banana grove. Surrounded by the freshwater Lake Chapala, bordered by willow, mango, and eucalyptus trees, and mountains behind them, Ajijic is nestled in the southwest region of the state of Jalisco. The plaza of Ajijic faces a Franciscan church built in 1749 (the earlier Spanish church was destroyed by a hurricane). Constructed from a mosaic of uneven stones in shades of gray, with a single delicate cross at the top, the church of Ajijic is more elegant than grand. And I imagine Lorraine found it appealing even though she had little use for religion. She also probably enjoyed the congregation of locals who shopped and bartered for goods around the cobblestoned plaza. Trees provided shade, and mountains a rearguard vista. Farther afield, and in contrast to the church and a few Spanish colonial homes, dwellings made of mud and clay—huts, really—provided shelter for the Ajijiquenses.