by Imani Perry
In Ajijic, Lorraine entered a wholly different and lush landscape. She had been born and raised in a crossroads place, where commerce and capitalism together forged a city grid and its tall buildings with jealously guarded borders of status and station. In Madison she lived amidst simple brick buildings in the middle of America’s flatlands. But here, spaces were organic, improvisational, blended, and older than any place she had called home. In addition to the distinctive woods, architecture, and landmarks, the terrain was blanketed by wild mushrooms and orchids. Fresh and unfamiliar produce was colorful and abundant: papaya, pineapple, mango, and beans. There was a riotous variety of animals and people. When she arrived at Ajijic, the rainy season, with downpours often sputtering through the night, was in full force. None of the familiar sounds of industry polluted the air. The instrumentation came from color, water, music, and rural farm fragrances.
The people were something else too. The US and European artists who had begun to settle there sought an escape from the worlds they knew. The scene was rustic for them, and certainly for the urbanite Lorraine, as electricity (and refrigeration) had just recently been installed. It was also beautiful, novel, and comparatively pristine. Like most Western expatriates to places that had been colonized, many of the US and European artists in Ajijic failed to fully appreciate the power relationships evidenced in the indigenous people living in mud huts and the European-descended landowners. And yet, this group of artists was less interested in imposing themselves on the place than most. Ajijic’s settlers were more likely to romantically imagine that they could mystically become one with this place.
The program Lorraine enrolled in was directed by a New Yorker named Irma Jonas who had settled in Mexico some years prior. Jonas had been a teacher at the Ethical Culture school in Manhattan, but now made her living running art programs that she advertised in college campus publications and general market newspapers. That summer, Lorraine was one of a group of twenty-four young women and two young men from the States. I do not know the racial composition of the group, but I suspect that Lorraine was either the only Black woman or one of a few. With her classmates, she studied Spanish and took classes taught by the distinguished painters Carlos Merida and Ernesto “Linares” Butterlin.
Carlos Merida, though a visual artist, bore at least a conceptual resemblance to Lorraine’s beloved playwright Sean O’Casey. Like O’Casey, Merida’s work was rooted in the vernacular experience of his culture. A native of Guatemala, with indigenous roots, Merida was based in Mexico and had become a member of the muralist movement of which Diego Rivera was the best-known representative. Indeed, Merida began as one of Rivera’s assistants, and early on mimicked Rivera’s narrative and figurative paintings. By the time Lorraine met him, however, Merida had created in his work a distinctive blend of European modernism with Aztec and Mayan influences. He used traditional geometric forms in landscapes that depicted indigenous people along with precolonial motifs and patterns. Merida valued and celebrated, without sentimentality, his indigenous roots and reinterpreted their substance for the contemporary moment. For Lorraine this influence was undoubtedly significant. She must have recognized the power that existed in how Merida refused to shy away from his cosmopolitanism: he was connected with the vanguard of experimental European visual artists, and yet he also claimed the distinctiveness of his Central American identity, a claim that had politics attached to it. Implicitly he refused the assumptions of inferiority that had been applied to indigenous people since the early colonial era. Rather, indigenous culture was the source of artistic inspiration and innovation.
Her other instructor, Ernesto Butterlin, also known as Linares, or Ernesto Linares (he is listed on her transcript as E. Linares) was an abstractionist painter. He stood six foot four—spectacled and blond—and was a landowning Mexican of German parentage. Lin, as he liked to be called by friends, had been living off and on in Ajijic since the early 1940s. His busy, cluttered, and colorful canvases often featured moving bands of color and reaching hands. His personal life seemed to parallel the excitement on his canvases. He was passionate, queer, and often both stripped of clothing and ensnared in complex love triangles.
Among the many things that distinguished Ajijic from Lorraine’s previous life experiences were undoubtedly both the sexual and the artistic freedom. The isolation of the village from many of the expatriates’ former lives in Europe and the States likely facilitated the flourishing of a “free” community, which comprised not only painters but also dancers, writers, actors, and all manner of people who sought a life outside conventional Western norms and rules, and surrounded by beauty.
It is impossible and also unethical to project upon biographical subjects, no matter how dearly studied, the development of their intimate lives without having an explicit statement on their part, or on the part of their beloveds. And sometimes not even then. So I must say that I do not know whether Lorraine, at that point, had begun to explicitly catch hold of an identity that she would claim plainly later: lesbian. Nevertheless, it is clear that Ajijic was a place where her sense of possibility for her own life, her sense of romance and joy, was expanded and excited. That she could see all around her people living and loving in their own ways in Ajijic mattered, and it was her first real taste of that potential.
Yet, as was often the case for Lorraine, she experienced a tension too. Mexico was a place of mourning. It had to be, as the place where her father had passed away, so distant from his family. It is the place from which his body had been retrieved. Neither she nor her siblings could know what his last moments had been like. They didn’t feel the quality of the air as he took his last breaths. They had no memory of the ending to preserve. Lorraine was a pilgrim. It is hard to avoid the sense that she had come, like her father, seeking answers that her home couldn’t provide. A poem she wrote while in Mexico is an opaque reference to that truth:
green land. Dark land.
Land of the no winter
My father dreamed of you,
My father
Franciscarosa Medico
Chapultepec
Lovely.10
Lorraine’s reference to the pastoral, and specifically a “dark” pastoral, is not merely descriptive. Her father’s dream of a place free of the badges of servitude that marked Black Americans was not lost on Lorraine. She recalled that he was “bitter” at his death, disposed of all his patriotic faith in American entrepreneurship and democracy. Perhaps, too, in Mexico she dreamed a dream of a life even more free than Carl’s hopes. As a reader of her private poem, I wondered at the paucity of words. To whom or what does “Franciscarosa Medico” refer? Is it a place or a person? At first when I read the word Chapultepec, I wondered, Is she thinking of the castle or the forest? Or perhaps she wrote it simply because of the delicious taste the Nahuatl word leaves on a speaker’s tongue. Then later I found out her father had been in attendance at the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace in 1945. It was held in Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City. He had seen Chapultepec.
The landmark conference had included representatives from all over the Americas. Over a week and a half they worked out principles of the region, including a mutual agreement to protect the sovereignty of all member states. Carl was among the participants who fought to support Haiti’s resolution against racial discrimination in the Americas. Some countries’ representatives resisted, including the United States, which eventually supported a watered-down version of the resolution that passed. His country’s resistance to equality on a hemispheric stage may have been the final straw that prompted Carl to move his family to Mexico, a “colored” nation. And certainly the memory of Carl, his ambition and passion, was part of what moved Lorraine to travel to the site of his aspired exile.
Lorraine took delight in words and ideas as much as sights. Her poem reveals longing and reveling. At the same time, we can’t forget she was also simply a late adolescent who was having a great deal of fun in a tropical landscape. That combination
of play and seriousness was at the core of her personality.
Another poem from the same summer includes the following stanzas, a mix of trifles and profundity:
Foreign paper told me about Miss Bergman,
apart of my soul left me
and the others chatted on about the
little village
apart of my soul
from the days of adoration . . .
(you humans are an unhappy lot, Jesus)
and I weep
My Maria11
The lines intertwine some heartbreak of Lorraine’s own life with the gossip-pages scandal of married movie star Ingrid Bergman falling in love with her director, Roberto Rossellini. Or at least that’s how it seems. The sense of prohibition, forbidden love, perhaps, hit close to home, making her weep for someone she simply refers to as “My Maria.” I dare not speculate as to who or what relationship that was, but at the very minimum it provides evidence of the canvas of passion that apparently was awakened in Mexico. She held on to it after the summer was done. According to JoAnn Beier,
[Lorraine] came back utterly delighted with the remote village she had lived in with a group of art students.
“We literally threw paint on canvas,” I remember her telling.
And she really wasn’t ready to come back. She told how much she loved it and had expressed the wish that she could remain there for a lifetime.12
What was possible in Ajijic was not possible in Madison. And that was much more than a question of landscape. It was a question of living. She found intimate friendship at Madison. That is apparent. But hardly freedom. Years later, through the careful mining of her effects and her connections, Lorraine’s future husband, Robert Nemiroff, collected the remains of a deep connection with at least one schoolmate from Madison, a woman named Edythe Cohen. Cohen wrote Nemiroff a letter in the summer of 1968, in response to his posthumous public call for communications that anyone might have had with Lorraine. In the letter, she said:
I have just now gotten around to the Times Book Review in which your request for letters etc. about Lorraine appeared. I have a dozen from her written twenty years ago. Obviously they meant something to me then or I wouldn’t have saved them. Since they are 95% of a personal nature I doubt very much that they would be of any interest to you. It was very upsetting to re-read them and if it were not her husband making the request, this letter would never be written.13
Nemiroff replied to Cohen with sensitivity and grace: “Lorraine spoke to me so often of you and your friendship—and how much it meant to her—so that it really comes as no surprise that her letters to you are ‘95% of a personal nature.’ She told me a great deal about those years and so I understand why the letters mean so much to you and why you have hesitated about sending them.”14
The letters themselves are tender and self-conscious about their sophomoric times together. It is clear that both women were politically engaged, though Lorraine was more strident. Both were passionate about the theater, and both at least a bit heartbroken at having lost each other’s presence. Lorraine wrote to Cohen from New York, “I do reflect quite often to these wild miscalculations of the Langdon Manor discussions. How far-fetched we all were, the sophisticated and the naïve alike.”15
The sense of possibility, the vastness and remoteness of Ajijic on the one hand, and the “wild miscalculations,” the sophomoric, the unrealistic, in the context of Langdon Manor; those two truths might very well have been the same thing. It is possible that what was unrelentingly misfitted at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was precisely what brought Lorraine such a sense of hope in Mexico and what drove her desire to never leave it. And yet, when the program was over, she left Ajijic and returned to where she was supposed to be, Madison. But by February she was on scholastic probation. Soon thereafter she departed from Madison again, and this time permanently.
Lorraine would say later that when she left Madison, she was looking for an education of a different sort. One can take that at face value. But she was also clearly looking for a living of a different sort: something bigger than what she would find in a college town, even one as vibrant and populous as Madison. She went home and stayed with her mother for a bit in the summer of 1950 and enrolled at Chicago’s Roosevelt University temporarily. She was admitted on academic probation because of her lackluster performance at Madison. That summer, Lorraine completed about half of an introductory course on German before dropping out of there too. A friend of hers at the time, Joseph Elbein, a student at the University of Chicago and a young member of the Communist Party, recalled that they spent much of the summer discussing social realism, which was undoubtedly more up Lorraine’s alley than conjugating verbs or campus dances. But Chicago in the summer was only a temporary landing before her next embarkation. And this one was major. She moved to New York City.
CHAPTER THREE
The Girl Who Can Do Everything
A girl who should have been born
tomorrow instead of some yesterday.1
HARLEM WAS NEW YORK’S EQUIVALENT of the South Side of Chicago. But Lorraine didn’t start there. She moved downtown, to Greenwich Village. And she took another stab at college, enrolling in courses in jewelry making, photography, short story writing, and the History of American Civilization at the New School for Social Research. That lasted for about “two erratic months” before she dropped out again.2 But she stuck with New York.
Lorraine was among the thousands of pilgrims to “the Village.” Many were of the same sort as those found in Ajijic, but the numbers in the city were exponentially greater. Poets and painters alike were drawn to Manhattan’s downtown. Artistic movements that are now counted among the most important of the twentieth century—beat poets, abstract expressionists, folk music—were all growing there, the art blooming out of gatherings of scruffy young creators. They hung out in bars and coffee shops. They had house parties and lived in lofts, and the more politically minded among them handed out mimeographed leaflets and went to rallies. New York University and New School students blended in with dropouts. Knowledge and experimentation circulated wildly. And as with Ajijic there was a greater degree of personal freedom than most places in the US. The Village became a place that was open to gay and lesbian people and had more interracial socializing than almost anywhere else in the US.
That fall Lorraine had her first publication. She was finally an artist, but of a different sort: a writer. It was a poem in the leftist magazine Masses and Mainstream, titled “Flag from a Kitchenette Window.” It reads:
Southside morning
America is crying
In our land: the paycheck taxes to
Somebody’s government
Black boy in a window; Algiers and Salerno
The three-colored banner raised to some
Anonymous freedom, we decide
And on the memorial day hang it
From our windows and let it beat the
Steamy jimcrow airs3
The poem was a sparse indictment of American militarism and hypocritical proclamations of liberty in the face of Jim Crow: an ironic commentary on Memorial Day. It was also a work that was clearly influenced by a distinguished Chicago Black woman poet, Gwendolyn Brooks. Brooks’s “kitchenette building” had been published in her 1945 book A Street in Bronzeville, at a time when Lorraine was still in high school. While Hansberry’s poem faces outward, Brooks, always a master of the interior, attended carefully to the feelings, senses, and space inside the kitchenette apartments of Chicago. She writes:
We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”
But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall . . .4
Lorraine was not a master yet. Her poem paled in co
mparison to Brooks’s. But she tried to do something like her fellow Chicagoan yet also distinct. The daughter of the “kitchenette king,” Lorraine wanted to present the lives of her father’s residents, people oppressed and exploited, offset against the national lies of liberty and democracy. She was political. But she was also an aesthete. Her words were chosen with care, for their sound and their rhythm. She had begun to step into herself.
And into a raucous public. The primary gathering spot in Greenwich Village was Washington Square Park. Named after George Washington, its arch bears one of his quotations: “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.” Though they were the very opposite of a stodgy memorial to the “father of the country,” these iconoclastic young people took his words fully to heart. Their honesty was a collective event, often sung out in the square accompanied by guitars, banjos, and mandolins. Lorraine found plenty of other young artists, plenty of passionate conversationalists, plenty of unsure seekers in the Village, and yet she was still one of just a smattering of Black women.