by Imani Perry
Of particular irritation to her was her sister’s husband, Vincent Tubbs, whose politics she abhorred. She especially bristled at his criticisms of Paul Robeson’s “failure to act as a good American.”19 Tubbs was a real American-type American, not unlike her father, Carl. Lorraine excitedly took him on in political debate. She reported to Robert with great exasperation that despite her brother-in-law having been a war correspondent and traveling in Africa, Europe, and Asia, he had the nerve to repeat the cliché “This is the greatest country in the world” without any historical reflection or criticism.
In her jousting with Vincent, who would eventually become the president of the Publicists Guild of America, and therefore the first Black man to head a Hollywood film union and the first Black publicist at Warner Brothers, she admitted that she had likely killed any possibility that Vincent might help her be hired at a newspaper. Yet, after their fight, she was more self-satisfied than anything. While generally frustrated that her family hadn’t been discussing politics at all, Lorraine relished confronting and eviscerating Tubbs’s uncritical patriotism and patriarchal posture.
And yet, her correspondence with her sister, Mamie, and Vincent throughout the 1950s was much more often tender and warm than not. She told them about her work; they encouraged her to avoid anyone who would exploit her and anything that would create too much distraction. They kept Lorraine abreast of their brother Perry’s frequent misadventures and their mother’s health and well-being. Lorraine often wanted to hear from them, and she sent them clippings, hoping that they would be proud of her. In short, like most families, the relations were complicated yet loving.
That fall, Lorraine returned from Chicago to the bustle of New York life. While politics were a central part of her day-to-day living, she enjoyed a full counterculture Manhattan life. Jazz impresario Art D’Lugoff remembered those days with Lorraine fondly, particularly the way she helped him put together early shows. He said, “Lorraine wrote my first leaflets, typed them up, and took them around to the coffeehouses. I got to know her husband, Bob Nemiroff, at NYU. They became close friends of mine, and I worked with her at her in-laws’ restaurant—called Potpourri, on Washington Place. . . . Lorraine and I waited and bused tables.”20
This is a life we’ve seen before. Not so much that it is a cliché, but familiar enough that we can imagine it. Midcentury interracial couple, activists, bohemian, artistic—it falls apart, but something remarkable always comes of it: brilliant children or great art. That’s how the story goes. What lies underneath is always more particular and complicated. Lorraine and Bobby thought together, and also separately. In either case, her genius overtook the substance of the relationship. It was its center. He worked to keep her on course, chastised her when she was distracted, pushed her. She criticized him too, but that was on matters of personality, not his music or writing.
Feminist criticism has taught us that life for men artists is usually different from life for women artists. Men artists have often had an architecture of support behind them: people labor and resources. In contrast, women artists have often snatched at time and space between a legion of responsibilities. That wasn’t Lorraine’s fate. While indeed she faced racism and sexism and patriarchy, Robert, as Lorraine’s provider, interlocutor, and facilitator, gave her a foundation that few women artists had.
She tried to write, but didn’t really get anywhere. On the other hand, Alice Childress was at work on a play that would have bearing on Lorraine’s future. Childress was already a role model for Lorraine in some sense. She’d had three plays produced. The first was a one-act play she’d starred in, titled Florence, about the thoughts and experiences of a Black woman domestic. That was in 1949. Then, in 1950, she wrote an adaptation of Langston Hughes’s short stories Simple Speaks His Mind, which was produced in Harlem, and, in 1952, a work titled Gold Through the Trees.
Trouble in Mind was Childress’s new work, its title borrowed from a blues standard. The play itself was about a play within a play. In it, the characters’ efforts to put up an antilynching production are hampered by tension between the Black actors and the white director. The theme of racism, particularly in the world of theater, was sharply captured. The writer John Oliver Killens described Trouble in Mind as follows: “In this play Childress demonstrated a talent and ability to write humor that had social impact. Even though one laughed throughout the entire presentation, there was, inescapably, the understanding that . . . one was having an undeniably emotional and profoundly intellectual experience.”21
The play debuted off-Broadway in November of 1955. It was a tense year. Emmett Till had been murdered that August. The Montgomery bus boycott began on December 5. And on December 7, Claudia Jones, a powerful presence in the world of the New York Black Left, who had been held in detention centers and prisons off and on since 1948, was deported. Three hundred fifty people gathered at Harlem’s historic Hotel Theresa to honor and thank Jones before her departure.
In Trouble in Mind, Childress’s indictment of racism, and specifically racism in the theater world, was both timely and well received. And yet, when she was offered the opportunity to have the play produced on Broadway, Childress declined. The changes the producers sought would have muted criticism of white figures in the theater industry.
Her refusal to change the message of Trouble in Mind left the door open for Lorraine to become the first Black woman playwright to have her work produced on Broadway. But one wonders too, what did Lorraine take from this moment of deportation, death, and the demand to compromise? And also, what hope did she glean from the promise of resistance that had appeared in Montgomery?
She’d soon have the time and space to explore such questions.
Bobby had a job in promotions at Avon Books. But he was a songwriter too. In early 1956, he and Burt D’Lugoff, Art’s brother, came up with the idea to use the music of a song frequently sung by Black dockworkers on the Georgia Sea Islands and match it with pop love-song words. They designed their composition to fit into the current calypso craze, a fantasy-driven flurry of watered-down versions of Trinidadian music. They titled it “Cindy, Oh Cindy.” The song was a hit; first for Vince Martin and then for the heartthrob Eddie Fisher. Suddenly the struggling artists Bobby and Lorraine had a great deal of royalties money.
“Pay me my money down,” the lyrics of the dockworker song, were originally sung to the owners and investors. Now, in “Cindy, Oh Cindy,” the money went not to laborers but at least to someone who politically cast herself with them. The money was earned through the fantasy image of Trinidad, shortly after Lorraine’s Trinidadian friend Claudia Jones was deported to England (because Trinidad wouldn’t accept her). It was a strange intersection of race, politics, entertainment, and consumption. But in the middle of all that, Lorraine finally had time and resources to simply write. She searched for stories to tell, tried and failed, and read, and tried.
Lorraine returned to Chicago in the summer of 1956. The letters to Robert this time, frankly, were more sad. In one from June 29, she describes tending to her sick mother and then intimates their brokenness: “Every one asks about you. I have told them nothing. It is all very difficult.”22
Despite what is suggested—a distance and perhaps an ending, to their marriage—he was still her interlocutor. She brought ideas to him. About her hometown, which she continued to see with new eyes, she wrote: “Chicago continues [to] fascinate, frighten, charm and offend me. It is so much prettier than New York. And so proud of its provincialness. There are no shows at all running—save summer stock. People—not just Negroes—but the radio commentators; the papers, remain as aggressively ignorant as I left them eight years ago.”23
Lorraine was out of sorts, frustrated by Chicago’s lack of cosmopolitanism, frustrated by life. We shouldn’t read her ever-ready hyperbole as a lack of love for the city, but more as a sense of rudderlessness and isolation. She described the vagaries of her life to Robert, one about an encounter with two Chinese women about literature
and the benefits of Maoism that made her feel a bit less alone, a bit more like her New York self.
Chatter. Politics. She was Robert’s wife, whatever the state of their relationship. They were still intellectual companions. He provided the money that was necessary for her to explore her writing. Whatever the relationship had become, it is clear she was feeling even more alone than usual. The words she wrote to herself were even more revealing on that count than those to Robert. In her diary for October 19, 1956, she writes:
Days like these are the worst again. Yesterday I rose at eight and brushed my hair and rushed out to the car before I should get a ticket. I returned and watched Robert wash and shower and shave and listen to disk jockies at that strange hour. . . . Then I vacuumed the rug and the corner of the house where the dog hair collects in pounds between times when I am finally moved to clean. . . . And then I scrubbed, not well at all, the bathroom and the kitchen and spread paper on the floor. . . . I did not answer the telephone, except once before ten thirty, that was Joan about an apartment24 . . . and then I read Simone in frustration again and slept.25
She recorded the acts and feelings of her sadness: The chicken she ate was awful. A friend who visited was dull. The dog hair collected in mounds and she couldn’t keep up with the vacuuming. Reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was a bittersweet respite and ritual for Lorraine. She wrote when she felt able, through the depression. Lorraine always worked on multiple pieces at once, and you get a sense from reading them of a mind that is both racing and probing. One was a story called “Arnold” that was rejected from the New Yorker. The editor was encouraging, writing, “‘Arnold’ comes so near to being successful that I’m going to give a much more detailed version of our criticism than we can usually manage. The piece has real backbone—a sound theme and a definite point of view on the writer’s part toward that theme. Your point, that pride, or self-respect to every one, and dormant perhaps, in every one, comes from living and has an eloquent sincerity.”26 At the end is a handwritten note: “And please let us see this again if you can do more with it.”
In “Arnold” one can see that Lorraine was a keen observer of life. She noticed not only the small details of human beings, their tentativeness, their sense of purpose, but also how often these important details are so easily overlooked. She wrote the story in the voice of a nineteen-year-old young woman working in a restaurant called the Golden Leaf. The woman remembers a dishwasher whom she once worked with: “As I remember Arnold, I remember that certain things had become indelible in my mind about men like him. The way they walked, all of them, the walk of men without places to go. I do not only mean that they ambled slowly and vaguely along, which they did, but it was more than that, Something about the picking up and setting down of feet that implied indecision; as though the feet could not always count on the sidewalk to be there.”27 Through Lorraine’s eyes, she saw another from the outside in and what it meant to be a man who couldn’t meet the ideals of man.
Looking back in time, she tells the readers that dishwashing is usually a temporary job occupied by men who couldn’t find other work. They would quit as soon as other jobs became available, or else if it just felt like they had been stuck too long in the “in between.” For most men, dishwashing became a humiliation, but Arnold took to it. Interspersed in the piece are subtle yet profound philosophical insights about living on the margins: “I think, and it is only what I think, it is difficult to accept the lost back into the fold of ordinary men. Maybe it is because we are afraid of them. Maybe it is because next to the dead themselves, we fear the living dead the most.”28
One night Arnold doesn’t come to the diner. Weeks go by and he doesn’t return. They all wonder at his absence. And then, spontaneously, he returns. His face looks different. With his meager earnings as a dishwasher, Arnold had his rotten, painful teeth removed. For weeks, he couldn’t bear to have the narrator see him, toothless. Lorraine ended the story: “How can I tell it so that you will understand what all of us felt sitting at that table that night. How can I put it down, what one feels in the face of the pride of a man who comes back.”29
Arnold is denuded, and ashamed, but returns. It seems surprising that the character Arnold came to Lorraine when she was so despondent. But he did, and that might be because even when she felt hopeless, a Melvillean glimmer of possibility persisted. In her writer’s disposition one can feel Melville’s words “Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts gathers her most vital hope.”30 And if faith is anywhere, it is in the work.
A similar sense of vocation and belief is evident in a vignette Lorraine wrote in 1956, this one called “Annie.” Annie is of an indeterminate age and adorned in a long-decayed fancy purple dress. It was a garment that once suggested the temptress, but now the dress is merely serviceable. Barely. But the wearer is not defeated: “The woman, however, herself is somewhat cheerful of departure and carries herself as though life were merely beginning and that tomorrow may hold forth the most delicious of prospects.”31
In these two remarkable pieces, one finished and one just a sketch, Lorraine was moving into a synthesis. There were her politics, centered on the poor, the marginal, the oppressed and outsiders, and there was her grasping at the interior life, especially its great disappointments with which all of us have to live.
In the same period Lorraine’s critical intellectual life, her politics, and her art reveal a growing synthesis. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was her textbook. What she found in the book she kept returning to, calling it like a girlfriend; “Simone” was both a testimony to her suffering and a shaft of light. Among de Beauvoir’s readers, Lorraine says in one of her third-person moments, “There is the twenty three year old woman writer closing the book after months of study, thoughtfully and placing it in the most available spot on her ‘reference’ shelf, her fingers sensitive with awe . . . her mind afire at last with ideas from France once again in history equalite, fraternite, liberte—pour le tout monde!”32 In the marginalia of The Second Sex, Lorraine poured her ideas and engaged in a conversation with de Beauvoir, one that was passionate and enduring for the remainder of her life. She was a critical though captivated reader of de Beauvoir, and as was characteristic of Lorraine, her criticism was a sign of how seriously she took the work. She disagreed with de Beauvoir’s existentialism, preferring a materialist worldview. And yet she saw the book as essential. The resonances between these two women, who rejected conventional expectations and found themselves desperately alone at times as a result, were profound. De Beauvoir gave Lorraine space to articulate a feminism that did not separate out sexuality and sexual desire for other women and also the inspiration to build a feminism that did not exclude race but treated it as a necessary part of understanding race, and race as necessary for understanding gender.
Unbeknownst to the multitudes that would come to celebrate her, it gave shape to the work that would make her both famous and a first.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sappho’s Poetry
May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than sinew, sensitive than nerve.
—Theresa Cha, writing as Sappho1
LORRAINE WROTE TO HERSELF late on Christmas night in 1955: “It is curious how intellectual I have become about the whole thing—I don’t mean about you. I mean about me—and what I apparently am. My unhappiness has become a steady, calm quiet sort of misery. It is always with me and when for a moment something or other stirs me from its immediate ravages (thank God that is still possible)—I wonder at its absence. I suppose I am grateful that the overt hysteria has passed.”2
Around that time, Lorraine drafted a play called Flowers for the General. The protagonist, Maxine, is a college student whose schoolmate Marcia falls in love with her. Marcia is outed as a lesbian and attempts suicide. Maxine comforts Marcia, who in turn confronts Maxine with the knowledge that Maxine has also loved a woman. Maxine insists that despite her desires, she will marry her boyfrien
d anyway. It is a melodramatically composed and yet realistic story. It could have easily been true.
Critics write about Lorraine’s sexuality in varying ways. Some debate whether she should be outed as a lesbian. I believe that if we take her work seriously, we must talk about sexuality. I take the careful preservation of Lorraine’s writings in which she explored and expressed her sexuality seriously. Though her romantic relationships remain, for me, somewhat opaque, it is unquestionable that her desire for women and her love of women was meaningful as part of her politics, her intellectual life, and her aesthetics, as well as her spirit. I could not possibly write a portrait of her as an artist without it.
“IT.” Lorraine was intellectual about everything, including persistent desire and yearning. She was active too. She joined the Daughters of Bilitis. It was, as they were called back then, a homophile organization, devoted specifically to lesbians. The name came from Pierre Louys’s 1894 poetry collection The Songs of Bilitis. Louys’s verses personify one of Sappho’s courtesans, “Bilitis,” and Louys plied her with erotic poems. Daughters of Bilitis provided an obscure yet meaningful reference for the group. Founded in San Francisco by partners Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, within four years the organization grew from a small group of eight women to one with chapters in five cities and dozens of members. In 1956, they began publishing the Ladder, a magazine with articles, fiction, and opinion pieces all related to the lives of lesbian women. As with almost all the members, Lorraine’s belonging to the Daughters of Bilitis was quiet. It was dangerous to be out.
But Lorraine’s belonging was also passionate, as with most of what she committed to. She wrote two letters to the Ladder, both signed with her married-name initials: L.H.N. In the one she wrote in 1957, she displays a moving eagerness and intensity: