by Imani Perry
Then she commented that though people made comparisons between her work and that of O’Casey and Chekhov, only one critic had noticed the connection between Raisin and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. (She noted this is partly because the ensemble overwhelms Walter Lee so he doesn’t stand out the way Willy Loman or Hamlet do.) But she also thought people failed to see Walter as like Willy because they couldn’t help but see Walter as an exotic character of the sort previously imagined in American drama in “‘Emperor Jones’ or ‘Porgy,’ . . . the image of the simply lovable and glandular ‘Negro.’”20 That figure of emotional abandonment and joyfully tolerated poverty, according to Lorraine, acquitted white viewers of their haunting guilt about American racism.
These observations were all part of Lorraine’s effort to show why so many people couldn’t really understand Walter Lee, and his motivations, as distinctly American. She ended that section of the article with a joke about a critic who remarked “of his pleasure at seeking how ‘our dusky brethren’ could ‘come up with a song and hum their troubles away.’ It did not disturb the writer that there is no such implication in the entire three acts. He did not need it in the play, he had it in his head.”21 This is funny, but it is no laughing matter. Lorraine identified a problem that persistently dogs Black artists. How does one navigate racial perceptions that overlay everything, that obscure and cast such that they effectively become part of the production no matter what the artist does? For Lorraine the answer was to become a critic.
It was unusual for a playwright to function as a critic. And in her critical assessments Lorraine eviscerated many of those who diminished her characters. That was even more unusual. Shortly after the publication of the Willy Loman essay, Lorraine ran into Brooks Atkinson, who had refused to publish it in the New York Times precisely because it was so strange for a playwright to write her own criticism. Years later, Philip Rose recounted this meeting. It took place in a theater, shortly after Atkinson announced his retirement from the New York Times after thirty-five years. At the intermission Lorraine walked directly up to him and introduced herself: “‘Mr. Atkinson, my name is Lorraine Hansberry.’ She reached out and held his hand as she continued to speak. ‘I have just read and been saddened by your announced retirement. I have admired and respected for years your contribution and love for the theatre and its playwrights. Your leaving will be a tremendous loss for all of us.’”22 Rose believed this encounter had quite an effect on Atkinson, because a few days later he sent a note of apology to Lorraine, explaining he had been suffering from personal problems when he declined her essay.
She was just so unusual. Lorraine was not a typical figure of the New York theater establishment because of her gender, race, and politics but also because of her relation to art as an intellectual. She pushed against all sorts of barriers and seemed to often captivate people despite their disinclinations.
By 1961, once Lorraine was firmly situated as a great playwright and audiences were waiting for more from her, her voice had grown firm and her eyes steely in her social and artistic criticism. It was as though the mischaracterization of her play had straightened her backbone and she was insistent upon making her positions widely known. Lorraine was invited to deliver the Martin Weiner Distinguished Lecture at Brandeis University that year. In her address, she used her biting sarcasm to retaliate against some critics: “I have discerned from conversation and published thesis alike that it is only bad artists who load their statements with a point of view and that they shall be known forever more in hell as something called ‘social dramatist.’”23 In fact, she believed that label has some nefarious purposes. Certain rules that served to control the content of art created a situation in which a person who accepted all standard social and political conventions was not considered to be someone who was taking a position, but rather simply an artist. But the person who challenged dominant values was routinely reduced to being nothing more than a political extremist. She found this practice reprehensible, because whether one followed the status quo became a standard of artistic evaluation, rather than the quality of work and its composition, elaboration, or ideas. In an elegant turn, Lorraine criticized dominant ideology and the normative assumptions that went along with it a generation before postmodernists would issue the same criticisms. Further, she argued that the casting of her art, and that of many others, into narrow confines was an anti-intellectual gesture at best.
Later in the same address, when talking about Bertolt Brecht’s theater of the absurd, she said, “I have heard it said even that it is the mysteries remaining in his plays which excite us rather than that stunning illumination and revelation which I had always thought to be the most special mark of his genius. It is as though we cannot bear the light.”24 She persisted in her belief that great art emerges through the imagination of an alternative social order, the kind of imagining that comes about only through shifting the frames that we assume. Hence, there was no necessary tension between art and politics, according to Lorraine. She believed, instead, that great art required one to say something about society.
In an address at Swarthmore College that same year, she again rejected the label “social dramatist” while also arguing that great art necessarily deals with the social. In the process, she criticized the critics who classified poetic drama (good) on one side and social drama its opposite. According to Lorraine, the social dramatist was dismissed as one
who plots out the dreary course of life as it is lived: continuing all action—and all possibility of man into the little “peep-hole” proscenium of highly representational productions; imposing the unilluminated prosaic and pedestrian lives of his character on audiences who have innocently and hopefully come expecting and deserving the stimulation and release of Dionysius.25
Especially interesting for a writer who was so concerned with the domestic arena, Lorraine strongly criticized Walter Kerr for his ideas in the essay “How to Write a Play,” because in it he asserted that the best dramas were the most intimately concerned. He believed that drama grew larger if the scope of concern was reduced and that a tangle with society made for consistently mediocre plays. Lorraine found this argument specious at best. Lorraine’s Left politics are clear in this criticism of Kerr, but also her investment in the social architecture of her own play in which intimate relations are tied to the fact of racial segregation, economic exploitation, service labor, and private property. It was not either-or in her work. She knew quite well that we live and love and desire within the economic and racial regime. We are of the ether.
It was on this point, specifically as it regarded race, that Lorraine had a particular beef with the Beat writers, her fellow Greenwich Village–dwelling, counterculture artists. The Beats had offered themselves up as outsiders to the mainstream who could provide insightful interpretations of Black people, who could even be likened to Black people, according to Norman Mailer in his 1957 essay “The White Negro,” which incensed Lorraine. In it Mailer described the white hipster, lover of jazz and Black style, who “absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro,”26 a man who had adopted the Black man’s code of existentialist living in the face of the ravages of capitalism and violence, finding like Black people that “the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.”27 Of these hipsters, Lorraine said at Brandeis, “They have made a crummy revolt; a revolt that has not added up to a hill of beans. I am ashamed and offended by their revolt because they have had artists in their number and they have produced no art of consequence and they have proven no refuge for true revolutionaries. I accuse them of having betrayed Bohemia and its only justification.”28
And specifically, with respect to race, she found them no more righteous, responsible, or thoughtful than the rest of white America. In an essay
titled “Thoughts on Genet, Mailer, and the New Paternalism,” published in the Village Voice on June 1, 1961, she decried their romantic racism and traced the roots of it to Mailer. He and his ilk had also dismissed her work. She wrote, “Nelson Algren agrees in print with Jonas Mekas that ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ is, of all things, a play about ‘insurance money’ and/or ‘real estate.’ This particular absurdity, it is true, is rendered a little less frightening only by the knowledge that there are people who sincerely believe that ‘Othello’ is a play about a handkerchief.”29
Despite the sense of personal affront, the bulk of Lorraine’s problems with the Beats didn’t have to do with her ego but their arrogance. In the essay, she focused the bulk of her attention on Jean Genet’s play The Blacks, a play within a play about the inversion of racial stereotypes and filled with Black subjects. Mailer, in his accounting of the play (and Genet admitted this), noted that it was, among other things, a conversation among white men about themselves. Lorraine said that that was all it was. And it certainly had nothing to do with Black life and thought. Genet’s projection of white desire upon Black people might have been liberatory for the hipster, but was, according to Lorraine, simply racist: “He fabricated his own mythology concerning certain ‘universals’ about 20 million ‘outsiders’ and rejoiced because his philosophy fit his premise. . . . The new paternalists really think, it seems, that their utterances of the oldest racial clichés are somehow, a demonstration of their liberation from the hanky panky of liberalism and God knows what else.”30
She then catalogued some things that hipsters truly failed to understand about Black perceptions of white Americans, including how Black Americans generally thought white people, especially white women, were dirty and inherently cruel; thus revealing the silliness of their argument that Black people were either nihilists or desired whiteness. Black aspiration, Lorraine instructed them, did not pivot around love or desperation regarding whiteness.
Lorraine speculated that perhaps Black writers had aided the misperceptions of Black feelings that these paternalists had run with: “We [Negro writers] may have carried the skin-lightener hair straightener references too far for a climate where context is not yet digested. Pride of race is not alien to Negroes. The Lord only knows that what must be half our institutions seem to function on the basis of nothing else.”31 She was bold and courageous in her criticism of the Beats. She was also ahead of her time. She attacked the racial essentialism that the Beats so heavily trafficked in. She wrote, “Of course oppression makes people better than their oppressors, but that is not a condition sealed in the loins by genetic mysteries. The new paternalists have mistaken that oppression for the Negro.”32
Lorraine’s friends were thrilled by this piece that put the Beats in their place. Langston Hughes wrote her, playfully and admiringly, “Wonderful piece of yours on ‘The New Paternalism’ in the ‘Voice.’ I could read you all night long—and stay awake! I hope you will write books as well as plays—and lots more articles and commentaries in lots more places. I sure do!”33 He recognized the power of her critical chops, ones that arguably equaled her creative ones.
Others, mostly white critics, accused her of being too angry and of alienating her allies. Some Black ones did too. Baraka responded to her in a letter in which he suggested that her bourgeois background made her hopelessly alien from real Black struggle, though ironically he made that charge in defense of white critics. He wrote, “I read your ‘exchange’ with Norman Mailer with a great deal of interest . . . and I thought you might be willing to take Mr. Mailer’s suggestion seriously that the two of you along with Jimmy Baldwin . . . along with W. E. B. DuBois, and either Max Lerner or Roy Wilkins to go at it at some kind of forum.”34 Apparently she rejected his suggestion, because his next letter read, “I am extremely disappointed that you don’t think your differences with Norman Mailer are significant. Or, more baldly, how you can think that the differences which make for your such antithetical conclusions to Mr. Mailer’s socially as well as aesthetically can be of such little import to yourself as you say. I suppose it is as they say, i.e. talk is cheap.”35
Then he really went for the jugular, at least it was the jugular for someone with Lorraine’s politics, which were much like his own (although at that point Jones was not as Far Left nor as deeply entrenched in Black life). He called her out of touch with the Black masses: “To my mind, the position you have made for yourself (or which the society has marked for you) is significant, if only because it represents the thinking of a great many Americans . . . black as well as white. Your writing comes out of and speaks of the American middle-class. . . . The critics . . . were joyful about Raisin for that reason. . . . The forum was designed, or is being designed, to at least straighten people out about the nature of your differences . . . not only with Mr. Mailer but with W. E. B. Dubois, Max Lerner and Jimmy Baldwin.”36
Jones attempted to cast her out of the countercultural Left because of her middle-class origins and the success of her play. He also concluded she was at odds with two of the most beloved people in her life, Du Bois and Jimmy. It was a mean-spirited jab, but there was nevertheless some insight in the midst of it. Although he miscast Lorraine, her politics, her values, he was correct in some regard about how so many critics saw Raisin, and how that allowed them to celebrate it. Their misunderstanding of the play haunted her from the beginning. It seems to be the case that she resisted ever running the risk of writing in a way that her politics might be misunderstood again. She had written a masterpiece, but its meaning had been excruciatingly submerged by the admiration of so many. When Amiri Baraka reflected on his youthful dismissal of the play (back when he was named LeRoi Jones) he said, “We thought Hansberry’s play was ‘middle class’ in that its focus seemed to be on ‘moving into white folks neighborhoods’ when most blacks were just trying to pay their rent in ghetto shacks. But it should be placed in context.”37 It was pretty common for Black communists and socialists to critique their less radical peers who were assimilationists in a fashion that often verged on vitriol. For example, even Freedom, which was rather ecumenical in terms of Black activism, if at times deeply frustrated with the civil rights establishment when it failed to support the Black Left, published an absolutely demeaning review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And Lorraine, as noted earlier, hadn’t been too kind to Richard Wright in its pages. Lorraine became, in a sense, a victim of her own tradition and deeds.
Over the next decades some members of the Black Left would continue to reject Lorraine as a symbol of assimilationist politics, none more virulently than Harold Cruse in his book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. He described A Raisin in the Sun as being filled with middle-class sensibilities poured into working-class figures; a sort of class-based blackface. Even though she presented the noble working class in line with a socialist-realist doctrine, according to Cruse she couldn’t get past the blinders that came from her own bourgeois roots. He questioned the entire premise: How would they get an insurance check? he asked. He was incorrect in his doubtfulness. In fact, the insurance check was an important reflection of Black working-class economic behavior in midcentury Chicago. For Black Chicagoans, life insurance provided an important old age provision, especially for the millions excluded from Social Security benefits because they, like Mrs. Younger, worked as domestics. In the 1950s, at least a half-dozen insurance companies were crucial institutions in Bronzeville, the majority-Black Chicago neighborhood. The largest was Supreme Liberty and Life, owned by a Hansberry family associate and which provided life insurance to thousands of working-class Black Chicagoans.
Cruse also questioned the daughter Beneatha’s attendance at college, asking who would have paid for it. I imagine that Lorraine imagined Beneatha as a student at the University of Illinois’s Navy Pier campus, which had a two-year program that served first-generation college students who, upon successful completion of the program, could go on to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A significant num
ber of Black female students were there in the early 1950s, and they had a Negro heritage club that studied African history and culture of the sort Beneatha was fascinated by. Many of the students at the Navy Pier campus studied the biological sciences, because the university had recently purchased a medical school, a dental school, and a school of nursing in the city, and therefore had the faculty and resources to support that branch of academic study. So Beneatha’s path did in fact make sense. Lorraine’s attention to detail was painstaking yet wholly neglected by some of her most aggressive critics.
Lorraine spent years trying to correct the misunderstandings of Raisin in various ways, including rewrites of the play and a more explicit elaboration of politics in her later artistic work. Her letters to the editor, essays, and other written corrections of the misunderstanding of the play reflected a practice she adopted about everything. She obsessively and insistently wrote down her complaints about how she was mischaracterized and misconstrued, and how often critics generally misunderstood art and politics.