by Imani Perry
And Ruth. Ruth’s quiet place in the play has led to her critical neglect. There are two important points about Ruth. Ruth learns she is pregnant and intends to have an abortion. But she doesn’t articulate whether that plan is a result of their poverty or her deteriorating relationship with her husband. Lena is horrified and tells Walter Lee. His assertion that Ruth wouldn’t do that and Lena’s response that a woman will do anything to save her family that’s already here don’t give us a clear answer. The silence of Ruth’s interior is meaningful. So much is there that we do not see while everyone is fighting over what to do with the inheritance.
Ruth’s voice is strongest when she insists that despite the loss of their money, they will move. She says, “It is my time.” She proclaims she will work with her baby strapped to her back for that house. For Ruth a home is freedom.
Lorraine began working on Les Blancs in 1960. It was also a play that at its root confronted the question of what to do with one’s inheritances. The play takes place in a fictional African country as the people overthrow colonial authority. In this play, as with Raisin, the father has just died. There are three sons: Tshembe, who returns from England, where he has a white wife and a child, for his father’s funeral; Abioseh, who is studying for the priesthood; and the youngest, Eric, or as his mother named him, Ngedi. Eric is different from the other two. He is not their father’s biological son but the child of a British settler and rapist. He is also the only one who was at their father’s bedside at his death.
Much of the play consists of Tshembe verbally jousting with a white American visitor named Charlie who stands in for the white liberals who often irritated Lorraine. Charlie wants to equivocate and preach nonviolence but refuses to acknowledge the full responsibility of colonialism and white supremacy. Even as Tshembe has a biting criticism of colonial power, he and his two brothers have to confront what precisely he and they intend to do and how they will respond to the prospect of revolution. How will they honor their father and claim their motherland?
Abioseh, to Tshembe’s dismay, believes that the church and “civilization” will convince the settlers to respect them and grant them rights. Tshembe believes Abioseh has cast aside his own inheritance and placed his faith in the colonial one. In contrast Tshembe is skeptical of Eric in another way. Eric, it is implied, is in a romantic relationship with a European man, Willy DeKoven. Tshembe finds Eric with a case of makeup given to him by Willy, and shouts at the youngest brother, “A woman’s cosmetics! So, Eric, if you cannot quite be a white man you have decided to become a white woman? (Cruelly knocking the pith helmet from the boy’s head) And toys like this! What else does he give you to make you his playtime little white hunter?”8
Later, however, Eric is the only one of the three who has no hesitation about joining the freedom fighters. He says, standing before his brothers, that it is time “to drive the invaders into the sea. And that I shall carry the spear and shield of our father.”
A tense exchange follows:
TSHEMBE: You are half European. Which part of yourself will you drive into the sea!
ERIC: I am African enough not to mock when my people call!
TSHEMBE: And what will you do when your doctor calls, Eric? It takes more than a spear to make a man.
ERIC: What does it take, Tshembe? You teach me! What does it take to be a man? A white wife and son.
Tshembe wrests their father’s sword from Eric’s hands. And Abioseh asks Eric why he hates “them,” meaning the white settlers. Tshembe implies that Eric’s intimacy with Willy is a sign of his debasement at white hands. As though he is their charge, Tshembe and Abioseh each claim that they will take Eric back home with them in order to save him. Eric interjects, “No. I am staying here—where I belong! . . . They call me by the name my mother gave me.”9
“They,” the independence fighters, recognize Eric’s inheritance. And that is enough.
All three brothers are called to question their intimate connection to whiteness, a connection that is also part of the inheritance of colonialism, of slavery, of what it meant to be Black in the modern world. Tshembe wonders whether to stay and fight or return to his wife and child in England. Abioseh chooses to betray the revolutionaries, though he says he does it for the greater good of Africa and Africans. Eric, the one whose manhood is questioned, is the one who leads in courage. He is also the one who has a lover who understands the violence of colonialism.
The fictional Eric in various ways was like Lorraine’s beloved friend Jimmy. Like Jimmy, he is the one in his family who was not his father’s biological child. He is the one who according to Tshembe has failed to be a man. And yet he is the one who holds most closely to his father’s inheritance and his mother’s words—the name she gave him. His drinking and his love life are thinly veiled references to Jimmy’s struggles, as is his beautiful moral imagination.
In A Raisin in the Sun, Joseph Asagai says that he believes in the religion of doing what is necessary in the world. It is a glorious formulation. The revolutionary moment has its exigencies. This is what Lorraine believed too. She played the idea out in Les Blancs. The revolutionary moment required a casting off of the mother country and the patriarchal authority of colonialism. The figure of Madame Nielsen is introduced to make this point. She is one of the settlers, an elderly European woman now blind, who has known the brothers all their lives and who holds special affection for Tshembe. Madame Nielsen knows the end is near. She touches Tshembe’s face and hair, no longer able to see him. It is an intimate moment but an uncanny one. She knows him, but also doesn’t. He is transforming under her hands.
At the conclusion of the play, Tshembe, encouraged by Madame Nielsen, agrees to join the resistance. Abioseh, in contrast, has betrayed the resistance. Someone has died as a result. Siding with freedom over blood, Tshembe shoots his brother. A battle breaks out and Madame Nielsen dies in the crossfire. The white mother figure, the mother country, is dead.
In her early notes, Lorraine played with structuring the play primarily around women characters. Candace, the name of Ethiopian queens, was one she favored in her notes on Les Blancs and in other work. But in the later versions of the play near the time of her death, which Bobby pieced together to publish posthumously, the women are minor or silent. It is odd. The play is Lorraine’s voice. But she doesn’t ventriloquize women, only men. Maybe it was a way of noting that revolution and the establishment of nation states have for the entire course of modern history overwhelmingly been seen as the work of men. Maybe it was because Lorraine wanted to do things that were usually reserved for men—write about politics, write grand plays, lecture on street corners, and the like—that she more often cast the heroic in male archetypes. But with Eric she shows us how she believed in troubling gender. Valor, courage, and truth were not limited to the idealized masculine man. And, as she instructed, the bastard child might be the one best suited to avenge the disinherited.
There are three Black sons in Les Blancs and three white daughters in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. Notwithstanding the shift in identities, the father’s legacy is again at the core of this play. It began as a work about a woman named Jenny Reed. But by the time of its completion, Lorraine put women in the minor key. It became, at least nominally, a play about a man named Sidney Brustein, a disenchanted and unfocused former radical who jumps from one failed venture to another. Over the course of the play he finds himself enchanted by a political candidate who he believes will finally buck the system, only to find that like so many others, he has been co-opted by the powers that be.
The play struggled when it went up on Broadway. The reviews were mixed. Audiences were disturbed she hadn’t written a “Negro play.” Some called it a “Jewish play” instead. But it was really a play about the world Lorraine occupied in her young adult years. Lorraine wrote about Sidney for the New York Times, and as usual she was her own best critic:
Being 34 years old at this writing means that I am of the generation that grew up in
the swirl and dash of the Sartre-Camus debate of the postwar years. The silhouette of the Western intellectual poised in hesitation before the flames of involvement was an accurate symbolism of some of my closest friends, some of whom crossed each other leaping in and out, for instance, of the communist party. Others searched, as agonizingly, for some ultimate justification of their lives in the abstractions flowing out of London or Paris. Still others were contorted into seeking a meaningful repudiation of all justifications of anything and had, accordingly, turned to Zen, action painting or even just Jack Kerouac.10
Lorraine believed that the artistic and political grounds on which they had grown left her generation ill prepared for responding to the struggles for racial emancipation in Algeria, Birmingham, and Cuba. To put these three places together showed a great deal about her thinking. Racism wasn’t, according to Lorraine, principally about sitting at lunch counters, it was about dispossession, exploitation, and raw power.
But why did she make this point in a play that featured a Jewish Greenwich Village intellectual? That “chukka booted Bergman film-loving non-cold water flat living, New School lecture-attending, Washington Square concert going, middle class” figure didn’t immediately seem to have anything to do with Algeria, Birmingham, and Cuba.11 But like so much of her work, in an interior place and particular life, she raised large questions about alienation and politics and power. It is a portrait of the counterculture milieu, not really of Sidney, and the way he and the people around him were ill equipped yet trying to figure things out at a crossroads moment in history.
To that end, the most interesting figures in the play are the secondary characters. They ask Lorraine’s persistent question: How are we our father’s children? How ought we be?
Sidney’s wife is named Iris. She is a frustrated actress who frequents psychoanalysts and has begun to chafe at Sidney’s romantic idea of her as a backwoods country girl. Her sister Mavis is a bourgeois housewife, prim and conventional, and also stuck in a loveless marriage. The third sister, Gloria, is in love with Alton, a Black communist. Though Alton believes Gloria is an international model, she is in fact a prostitute.
Sidney relishes Iris’s shame-filled story about her patrilineage:
Papa was so crude and stupid. . . . You know, I never heard my father make an abstract thought in his life, and, well, he had plenty of time to think, if you know what I mean. Didn’t work that steady. And each of us, I think we’ve sort of grown up wanting some part of Papa that we thought was missing in him. I wanted somebody who could, well, think. Mavis wanted somebody steady and ordinary. And Gloria, well, you know—rich men.12
Later, Sidney is confused because Mavis describes their father as a dreamer and a backwoods poet, the type of man she wishes she had married. When Sidney confronts Iris about the sisters’ differing accounts of their father, Iris says she was just trying to live up to Sidney’s fantasy. Eventually Iris rejects Sidney’s fantasy and paternalism. She doesn’t need a second father.
The weight of the father in the sisters’ minds is bound up with their decisions to choose men who were vastly different from him. It is an unspoken aversion. Mavis has chosen someone rich and urban; Iris, a neurotic Greenwich Villager who is Jewish. And Gloria has doubly stepped away from what was expected.
When Mavis learns that Gloria is dating a Black man, she is horrified. Even though Gloria is a prostitute, Mavis believes she can “do better.” She says, “Well now listen, there are other men in the world! The last time I looked around me there were still some white men left in this world. Some fine ordinary upstanding plain decent very white men who were still looking to marry very white women.”13
Sidney’s upstairs neighbor walks in. He is a playwright. Mavis suggests Gloria might like him instead:
MAVIS: Well he’s sort of cute. [. . .] Is he married?
SIDNEY: [. . .] David’s got an alternative lifestyle.
(MAVIS considers but doesn’t get it.)
David’s gay. (She still doesn’t.) Queer.
IRIS: Homosexual. (MAVIS draws back.)
SIDNEY: Utterly.14
When Gloria’s actual boyfriend comes in, because of his light skin Mavis mistakes him for a white man, and also suggests him for Gloria. It is a moment from a Shakespearean comedy, a series of mistaken identities and misread surfaces. But the play soon turns into a modern version of a tragedy. Alton discovers that Gloria is a prostitute after he has proposed to her. He comes to Sidney angry that he wasn’t warned. Sidney tries to convince Alton that if he loves her it shouldn’t matter. But it does because of Alton’s tortured understanding of his inheritance. He screams,
THE WHITE MAN DONE WRAPPED HIS TRASH IN TINSEL AND GIVE IT TO THE NIGGER AGAIN, HUH, SIDNEY?! . . . Don’t you understand, man? Like I am SPAWNED from commodities—and their purchasers! Don’t you know this? How do you think I got the color I am? I got this color from my grandmother being used as a commodity, man! The buying and the selling in this country began with me, Jesus help me!15
Alton describes his father’s life as a Pullman porter who “wiped up spit and semen, carried drinks and white man’s secrets for thirty years,” and that of his mother, who was a domestic. He describes the shame of being given the table scraps from her employer, scraps they were forced to eat to survive: “And then one night he had some kind of fit, and he just reached out and knocked all that stuff—the jelly and the piece of ham, the broken lamp and the sweater for me—he just knocked it all on the floor and stood there screaming with the tears running down his face: ‘I ain’t going to have the white man’s leavings in my house, no mo’! I AIN’T GOING TO HAVE HIS THROW-AWAY . . . NO MO’!”16
Though a Marxist and a Black man, rather than finding solidarity with Gloria having been used as a commodity, Alton cannot bear proximity to such status. It threatens his aspirational manhood. He leaves Gloria. Lorraine’s depiction, though sensitive, is an indictment of the hypocrisy rooted in patriarchy. Alton, like Sidney, fails to recognize the woman he loves.
Later Gloria and David speak. She is bereft. He is wry at first: “Isn’t it the great tradition for writers and whores to share the world’s truths?”17 Gloria is offended, but after David apologizes, they have a profound conversation. Gloria speaks her bitterness about Alton: “I was going to marry that vanilla dinge! Do you know what some of the other girls do—they go off and sleep with a colored boy—and I mean any colored boy so long as he is black—because they figure that is the one bastard who can’t look down on them five seconds after it’s over! And I was going to marry one!”18
“One,” the categorical definition, the thing that places you here or there, of value or not, a condition that is applied, inherited, or immutable. Lorraine pressed at that. She pressed at it according to race, she pressed at it when she had Alton and Walter Lee throw about the word faggot as though with the slur they could recuperate their insecure manhood. She pressed at it in Gloria’s vision of Alton and in his vision of her. For Gloria, being a “one” not by birth but by the Madonna-whore binary endemic to patriarchy put her at the mercy of the derision and violence of others.
Lorraine has Gloria testify about the terror of her trade. She reveals her “predilection for psychos and vice cops.” She says, “This last one . . . I think he was trying to kill me.”19 Gloria has been abused by johns and attempted suicide three times. Her shame is overwhelming. It goes back to the father. She asks, “Whaddaya do if your own father calls you a tramp . . . on his deathbed . . . huh? Whaddaya do?” David responds by stating, “Trying to live with your father’s values can kill you. Ask me, I know.” Gloria retorts, “No, Sweetie, living without your father’s values can kill you. Ask me, I know.”20
Of many, this is perhaps the most profound reckoning in the play. To honor the father and to betray his wishes are both potential minefields. Patriarchy confounds and captures. The moment is disrupted when, after Sidney leaves the room, David has a proposition for Gloria. He tells her about “a beautiful burnished golden b
oy . . . sitting on a chair upstairs. He is from one of the oldest, finest families in New England. He is exquisite. But great damage has been done to him—” Gloria interrupts:
GLORIA: (For this girl there are no surprises left) He requires . . . the presence of a woman. . . . Not just any girl, but someone young enough, fresh enough, in certain light, to make him think it is somebody of his own class.21
Their intimacy instantly rots. Gloria realizes that for David she is a potential object, a “one” whose usefulness is that with her presence she might allow the golden boy to maintain the fiction that he has not betrayed the rules of men of his class and station. The golden boy lives in what Jimmy termed a “male prison.” In Gloria’s character, Lorraine imagined the effect of the patriarchal prison on a woman deemed unworthy of marriage yet worthy of purchase. What could have been a profound connection between Gloria and David, a pained yet shared confrontation with broken inheritances, is ruptured by the hold of yet another inheritance. Gloria, devastated, attempts suicide again. And succeeds.
Lorraine had been raised with the mandate that she never was to betray the family or the race. She maintained loyalty to the race in an expansive and experimental way with her art and her politics. She took these responsibilities very seriously. But she also understood that obligations were never innocent. The burden of honoring the father could also destroy. The shame of failing in that endeavor could too. Hers was a legacy not only of possibility but also, potentially, of terrible shame. She lived and worked with that cross to bear.