by Imani Perry
However, race is a theme in one of the published and at least one of the unpublished Emily Jones stories. In both, the Black woman character is opaque though admired and ultimately triumphant. There is hope in these works, and a bit of resentment.
“Chanson Du Konallis,” published in the Ladder in September 1958, begins with the sentence “She was exquisite,” referring to a Black jazz chanteuse.26 Though the protagonist, an upper-class, blond white woman named Konallia and nicknamed Konnie, observes her husband’s excitement about the singer somewhat mockingly, she is also captivated:
The cheek bones high; the full lips sensuous beyond description; and the eyes like dark slanted slashes across the face. . . . The eyes! Konnie shifted in her seat and looked quickly to the table. What a strange moment. It had happened before in life. On the street; parties; in classes in school years back; the thing of being surrounded by many people and finding another girl’s or woman’s eyes, commanding one, holding one’s own. It was extraordinary. Pleasant, she thought. No, not pleasant. Terrifying because of the kind of pleasure it brought.27
Konallia Martin Whitside, the reader learns, possessed a cultivated reserve that frustrated her husband. She prided herself on maintaining control over rebellious thoughts and spontaneous action. And yet this control is wildly overstated. Underneath the surface, Konallia’s fantasy about the woman is a sensuous spectacle, reminiscent of Jean Toomer’s classic Harlem Renaissance work of experimental fiction, Cane:
Egyptian queens . . . striding along mammoth corridors in the temples (or palaces or whatever the hell they usually strode along) graceful the way only queens could be (one was taught!) . . . in something white and tight and gathered at the hips with those long pleats hanging down to the golden sandal tops. . . . Anyhow—Egyptian queens . . . very young, very supple and very beautiful with the stiff black hair hidden under those curiously attractive head dresses. . . . No—not Cleopatra, she was Greek or something. This particular queen would be darker—like the Nile without moonlight; with high cheek bones and—full, impossibly sensuous lips—like—like her!28
Konallia struggles with the rules of her class and caste in this moment of pleasure. She asks herself, “Who were all those dead people who were deciding things from their graves?”29 Those past respected generations of illustrious attainment had nothing to do with her, not really, and yet she felt bound by their expectations.
Konnie’s husband, Paul, invites the singer, Mirine Tige, to the table. Mirine dismisses his small talk and condescending statements about France and turns the questions and comments on Konallia, asking her if she’d liked France and complimenting her accent (as Paul did of Mirine’s). Before departing to finish her singing, Mirine tells Konnie that she reminded her of someone she knew in France, by way of explaining her attentiveness. She calls meeting them pleasant, but Konnie thinks it was not pleasant, although there was pleasure. That is the difference between satisfaction and desire.
The story ends sadly. Her husband is sated, but Konnie expects she will have to drink to “make it easier.” And curse the figures of her desire: Paris, Egyptian queens, and a girl named Lila she once knew. There is a doubleness in this story. We have to imagine that Konnie, though a WASP, shared some of Lorraine’s own feelings of class and caste pressure. Lorraine was raised to “never betray the race” and to maintain middle-class respectability. Despite having scandalized her mother politically, she had mainly succeeded in being a proper bourgeois daughter. Living publicly as a lesbian would have been an entirely different matter.
And yet, Lorraine was also in a sense like Mirine. She was one of the few Black women and few political radicals in the lesbian set to which she belonged. She was different and likely faced projections of some fantastic imaginings of what her Blackness and womanhood meant. In truth, she saw herself, and other Black women, as more liberated than their white counterparts. Lorraine wrote, in an unpublished essay on Simone de Beauvoir, “We have been, even the black slave woman, paradoxically assuming perhaps the most advanced internal freedom from a knowledge of the mythical nature of male superiority inherent in our experience as chattel.”30
The dance between steeliness and vulnerability repeats itself throughout the Emily Jones fiction, and it is a reflection of Lorraine’s interior life. In her diaries and her letters she questions and judges herself, at times finds herself intolerable. She is melodramatic and even adolescent. When the writing treats queer sexuality, this personal vulnerability is fully expressed artistically. I do not think this is because her vulnerability existed wholly around her sexuality. After all, “she was scared of heights, tunnels, water, planes, elevators and hospitals.”31 She once wrote to Robert a panicked note in response to him having traveled by plane: “I can tell you know that that was a positively horrible Saturday that you all left on that damn thing—I am now convinced that they should be banned. . . . YOU ARE NEVER TO FLY AGAIN.” Put plainly, she was generally a scaredy cat. But when she wrote on queer themes she was better able to access that emotional register, a tense and immediate sense of fear, than anywhere else in her work.
Lorraine’s community of lesbian friends provided an important social world and undoubtedly facilitated her literary ventures in this period. One woman, however, stands out among the others. Molly Malone Cook was a Californian transplanted to the Village and five years Lorraine’s senior. She worked as a photographer for the Village Voice and later would build a life in Provincetown with her long-term partner, the poet Mary Oliver. When they were together, Molly took photographs of Lorraine. These photos are different from all the others and tell a story in and of themselves. In them, Lorraine does not have her race-woman armor on as she usually does. Nor is she posed. She is casual, tomboyish. Her hair is mussed. Her back curved, adolescent, languorous, and playful at once. The light and wonder that we know must have often been in her eyes, because of her wicked humor and deep curiosity, I have seen only Molly capture on camera. The images are a dance of love.
In general, Molly’s photographs are dynamic and social, sensitive yet lively. The subjects are clear, yet their edges are soft. Her portraits are painterly. As an artist she shared some things with Lorraine: a brilliance when it came to framing and staging the social and the intimate at once, a sensitivity to the dynamic relations between beings within the allotted space. Molly also shared Lorraine’s tenderness for vistas. They both made staging look natural. They were masters of portraiture. In that vein, the plays Lorraine would later write are novel-like. They include narratives beyond what is standard for theatrical productions. Their stage directions include epigraphs and sense making, not just scene setting. They are works of art that are composed for readers and also theatrical viewers. And, unsurprising from an author who started as a visual artist, their scenes beg to be painted, hence, the magnificent stills that remain from the Broadway productions.
Both Molly and Bobby were part of Lorraine’s life as she wrote Raisin. But only one is known publicly. As the story goes, one evening in the summer of 1957, Lorraine shared the play she was working on with Philip Rose. She and Bobby hosted him in their apartment at 337 Bleecker Street. I do not know if this was before or during or when her relationship was just beginning with Molly, but it doesn’t really matter for this anecdote. She and Bobby hosted together regardless of who she was with. Bobby and Lorraine fed Rose spaghetti for dinner and banana cream pie for dessert. And they read him the draft of the play. Rose was captivated by A Raisin in the Sun. The trio talked into the night and the next morning. After he had returned home, Rose called Lorraine and said he wanted to get the play to Broadway. It was a life-changing moment, and like many, one she shared with Bobby. The entanglement and intimacy, the way Bobby was a lifeline to her work, was unceasing, even as she was finding her way with lovers, including with Molly, who was her kindred spirit.
Years later, Mary Oliver would describe what I believe was Molly and Lorraine’s relationship, though she deliberately doesn’t name Molly’s lover as a matt
er of care and respect. Just suppose it was Lorraine. It would say something that rings so true:
In 1958 and 1959 she traveled by car across the country to California, leisurely, through the south and back through the northern states—taking pictures. She had, around this time, an affair that struck deeply, I believe she loved totally and was loved totally. I know about it, and I am glad. I have an idea of why the relationship thrived so and yet failed, too private for discussion also too obviously a supposition. Such a happening has and deserves its privacy. I only mean that this love, and the ensuing emptiness of its ending, changed her. Of such events we are always changed—not necessarily badly but changed. Who doesn’t know that, doesn’t know much.32
The fabric—dead ancestors, living expectations, a husband, a series of political causes, all those things mattered—but so had love.
Lorraine and Molly were together and then split as she was developing A Raisin in the Sun, around the time it went through tryouts in various cities, the cast was composed, and money was raised to put it on Broadway. Molly, someone with a brilliant eye for composition, must have seen and to some degree influenced what others would see on stage and film: the simple poignant triangles between characters at odds yet intimately bound. Reading her joint memoir with Mary Oliver, I came across a journal passage of Molly’s that I just knew had to be about Lorraine. Cook wrote sometime in the 1980s,
Last night I turned on the TV and there she was,
It was wild. Her voice. I couldn’t replay it.
She spoke only a few words. It was mind-boggling.
I wonder if I shall ever be able to
come back to listen and watch her again.
Strange I should have fixed the VCR just a
Moment before she came on.
Well I never thought I would see her again—
Knew I would never hear her voice again in
This world. Oh I did always think I would
See her again and hear her voice again but,
Not in this world.33
But I didn’t know for sure. I just felt it and hoped it. It seemed so right. After Molly and Lorraine’s relationship ended, perhaps around 1958, Molly drove across the country. Then she met Mary in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s home in Provincetown. They built a life. And Lorraine became famous.
After Raisin is also after Molly. Lorraine’s life changed. My story of her love life thereafter becomes even more impressionistic, but it deserves a bit more treatment here before I turn back to Lorraine’s work of writing and politics. For a while, Lorraine dated Ann Grifalconi, a public school teacher, writer, and visual artist who had been trained at Cooper Union. From some time in 1960 until her dying day, Lorraine loved Dorothy Secules, a fiercely opinionated and smart blonde who climbed the ladder from working as a receptionist at Loft Candy Company to an executive. Her eyes were bright blue; her gaze in photographs is knowing. From her high school yearbook photo I learned that Dorothy’s youthful nickname was Dick. Dorothy was there beside Lorraine at key life moments, as were other women. Lorraine wrote in her diaries of their beauty, her desires, time spent together on dates and in the most intimate, sweet moments. Though Lorraine sought out what she described as “women of accomplishment,” her lovers didn’t become interlocutors for Lorraine the artist. Perhaps they were inspirations for characters; probably they were. But to the extent that queerness appears in subsequent texts, and it does, it does not connect to specific women in any way that I have explicitly traced. Their company, however, brought threads of joy that appeared throughout her art and ideas.
In 1960, fresh off of the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine bought a building at 112 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. Dorothy was a renter and Lorraine took the top floor. The FBI was aware of this purchase, and agents looked for Lorraine there. The notes of the FBI agent who was following her describe how he physically checked all residences on Waverly Place from McDougall to Bank Street in the last week of March and the first week of April, but didn’t find her anywhere. On March 30, the agent used a pretext to ask Bobby about why he lived at 337 Bleecker Street while Lorraine lived elsewhere. Based upon his response, the agent wrote in his notes, “It is believed that the purpose for these two addresses is for business reasons inasmuch as during the above-mentioned pretext subject’s husband stated that his wife was unavailable for interview. The subject’s husband mentioned that this was the customary practice of his wife whenever she was engaged in writing.”34 The FBI seemed to have accepted this explanation because an interview with a mail carrier revealed that Lorraine was not receiving mail at Waverly Place but rather on Bleecker Street. It appears that thereafter the FBI stopped watching the Bleecker Street address.
In Lorraine’s datebook for March 28, 1960, as the FBI were attempting to surveil her domestic situation, she wrote to herself:
Are you happy in your present living? Or are you looking for something else, or do you just want to play? You see, I must know because it is Spring . . .
Have toys—will play
I wish to light up the stars again.
The FBI’s frustrated efforts to peer into her life coexisted with a marvelous though morose period of self-exploration. On April 1, 1960, she wrote two columns in her datebook titled “I like” and “I hate.” They read:
I LIKE I HATE
Mahalia Jackson’s music Being asked to speak
My husband—most of the time Speaking
getting dressed up Too much mail
being admired for my looks My loneliness
Dorothy Secules eyes My homosexuality
Dorothy Secules Stupidity
Shakespeare Most television programs
Having an appetite What has happened to
Slacks Sidney Poitier
My homosexuality Racism
Being alone People who defend it
Eartha Kitt’s looks Seeing my picture
Eartha Kitt Reading my interviews
That first drink of Scotch Jean Genet’s plays
To feel like working Jean Paul Sartre’s writing
The little boy in “400 Blows” Not being able to work
The way I look Death
Certain flowers Pain
The way Dorothy Talks Cramps
Older Women Being hung over
Miranda D’Corona’s accent Silly women
Charming women As silly men
And/or intelligent women David Suskind’s pretensions
Sneaky love affairs.35
The lists are mundane and profound. The great joy of her sexuality and also its difficulty courses through them. Lorraine the passionate and opinionated intellect and the aesthete are there. One also gets a sense of how trying fame could be: from the challenge of writing again after one has become a star to the desire to be out of the public gaze and also her frustrations with superficiality. But on the other hand, she delighted in being physically admired. Contradictions are a universal part of the human personality. Hers are fascinating: a vast intellect and a girlish charm, wisdom and wonder, pensive and playful, depression and exultation. These lists were two of the first publicly circulated artifacts asserting Lorraine’s sexuality. They were, in a sense, irrefutable evidence of the sort that travels quickly in the digital age. Their loveliness aided their circulation. Essays and articles have been written about these lists, and there could be more. It is a testament to the delicate strength of her pen that even this exercise in simple accounting became poetry.
When I first read the lists, my eyes kept returning to the items I especially liked: Eartha Kitt (it seems Orson Welles was not the only one who found her the most exciting woman in the world) and “the little boy in ‘400 Blows.’” The François Truffaut film was just a year old when Lorraine was writing. It starred a troubled boy named Antoine who is treated with clinical distance and disdain by his mother and stepfather. Antoine is also mistreated at school. Anguished, he becomes a truant and a runaway. He is ultimately jailed for stealing a typewriter, an
d then sent to a reformatory school by his mother where he receives psychoanalytic counseling. In the facility, the children are berated and brutalized for their failures to be properly disciplined according to the rules of gender, sexuality, and decorum. A film that begins as Antoine’s desire for connection becomes Antoine’s quest for emancipation. In the final scene he escapes from a soccer game at the facility. He slips under a fence and runs until he reaches the ocean. The final scene is a close-up of his face as he stands in the water.
Lorraine wrote this list in the early days of her fame. Her deep ambivalence about it is palpable. In 400 Blows, Antoine escapes to the shoreline. He also escapes from the game. Lorraine loved the little boy, and she did not.
CHAPTER SIX
Raisin
Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living—Liberty, Justice, and Right—is marked “For White People Only.” —W.E.B. Du Bois1
IT TOOK PHILIP ROSE fifteen months to raise the money to put A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway. Backers, even those who were sympathetic to his enthusiasm, didn’t believe that a play featuring Black people “emoting” would draw crowds. And, so, the Raisin cast and crew did tryouts in Philadelphia and New Haven, traditional places to test a production’s future prospects on Broadway. The play was a great success in both cities. The Chicago show, which caused Lorraine a great deal of anxiety, was also successful. Raisin’s extraordinary cast, including the already-established Sidney Poitier, and a brilliant though untested young Black director, Lloyd Richards, rendered Lorraine’s words with vigor and depth. With those stamps of critic and audience approval, A Raisin in the Sun made it to Broadway on March 11, 1959. It was a very big deal. Broadway audiences had never before seen the work of a Black playwright and director, featuring a Black cast with no singing, dancing, or slapstick and a clear social message. Here was a family living in the Chicago South Side ghetto. Armed with a $10,000 life insurance check after the death of the father, they hope to move out of their tiny kitchenette apartment and into a house in a segregated white neighborhood. The adult son, Walter Lee, dreams of becoming a businessman. His sister, Beneatha, aspires to become a doctor. The matriarch, Lena, and her daughter-in-law are most of all hoping for a home of their own. Despite the early misgivings of financiers and skepticism from many quarters, A Raisin in the Sun played at the Ethel Barrymore Theater for nineteen months before transferring to the Belasco Theatre for another eight. Lorraine would win the Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play with this, her first stage production. She was only twenty-eight years old, yet already had an imposing presence and powerful intellect. The theater world was forced to reckon with her.