Looking for Lorraine

by Imani Perry

  As she wrote to Evie, Lorraine was in bed, watching the March on Washington and “being melancholy about all those who didn’t live to see ‘America Awaken’ and all (or, in some cases, stay out of the booby hatches—or who ulcerated a bit in the process—).” She had to be thinking of her father, of course, for whom the occasion likely would have seemed to be a sign that his noble efforts at racial inclusion hadn’t been all in vain. But he was long gone. Lorraine was angry. Not just about death but also about the life she was living. She said,

  I will and have suffered and for the first time know why some can decide living isn’t quite worth all this.

  On the other hand—I have been surrounded by all the devotion one could wish and the skill of science and am allowed by the grace of fortune to recover in this stunning setting which is my present home.5

  There she was, a small Black woman in the mountains, in a beautiful home up a narrow incline, far away from the urban landscapes that had shaped her life. She took to that natural world, but kept looking back out into the thick of things. Beauty helped. But it wasn’t enough.

  The night before the March on Washington, her teacher and friend W. E. B. Du Bois died. That undoubtedly was also on her mind and added to the distress of the moment. Lorraine would spend the next two-and-a-half years dying of cancer, though she was unaware of what was wrong with her for most of that time. But, as her letter attests, she experienced the terror of a body gone awry. Bobby, who remained her caretaker and confidant, kept the seriousness of her illness from her. Doctors back then believed it helped patients to have a little hope. Even when she struggled, Bobby also kept encouraging her to write.

  Though still ill, Lorraine made her way to Carnegie Hall in February of 1964 for a program to remember and honor Du Bois. Ossie Davis led the gathering. AME bishop Stephen Gill Spottswood gave the invocation. Tributes were offered by scholars Arna Bontemps and Arthur Spingarn. Bontemps talked about Du Bois’s scholarship and personal history. Spingarn, who was more liberal than radical, focused on their sixty-year friendship, though he and Du Bois were worlds apart ideologically. He described Du Bois as one of the great figures of the twentieth century who foresaw independent Black nations. Eslanda Goode Robeson, Paul’s wife and an activist in her own right, said that Du Bois was a great statesman and an inspirational leader who had a keen political insight. Historian John Hope Franklin gave the main address, commenting on the news media’s failure to note the death of such an important man. Further, he asserted that the vision that made the March on Washington possible began with Du Bois’s early twentieth century drive for first-class citizenship. Langston Hughes, Ralph Bunche, Daisy Bates, William Patterson, and Whitney Young also spoke.

  Lorraine read a message of thanks from Du Bois’s wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and then delivered her own remarks:

  I do not remember when I first heard the name Du Bois. For some Negroes it comes into consciousness so early, so persistently that it is like the spirituals or blues or discussions of oppression, he was a fact of our culture. People spoke of him as they did the church or the nation. He was an institution in our lives, a bulwark of our culture. I believe that his personality and thought have colored generations of Negro intellectuals, far greater, I think than some of those intellectuals know. And without a doubt, his ideas have influenced a multitude who do not even know his name.6

  Not only did Du Bois have a huge influence, but, according to Lorraine, he also left the rest of them with a responsibility:

  His legacy is, in my mind, explicit. I think that it is a legacy which insists that American Negroes do not follow their oppressors and the accomplices of their oppressors—anywhere at all. That we look out of the world through our own eyes and have the fibre not to call enemy friend or friend enemy, [. . .] never never again must the Negro people pay the price that they have paid for allowing their oppressors to say who is or is not a fit leader of our cause.7

  Lorraine’s words cut through the palliative that often attends death. In those moments, mourners are told that our differences are supposed to be muted. Great figures are often made into flat paper dolls of themselves, less challenging, less difficult. Lorraine said no to that. Her caution was subtle yet pointed to the mainstream of the civil rights movement. To honor Du Bois could mean sustaining his Pan-Africanist and socialist vision, or it could mean leaving him behind, along with others who were concerned with a global struggle, in order to pursue assimilation into the fabric of American empire. Lorraine clearly thought the latter would be a terrible sin. Du Bois’s greatness, according to his spiritual and political daughter, was inextricably tied to his radical courage, his truth telling, his calling out of white supremacy, his willingness to risk and to be cast aside. He died an exile, like her father, because he could not bear the stink of this unrepentantly racist nation to which he devoted his remarkable gifts for decades. She would not let anyone in that room forget it.

  Sylvester Leaks, a renaissance man—dancer, actor, public intellectual, and sartorial splendor—who also served as the editor of the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, Muhammad Speaks, wrote to Lorraine in response to her comments at Du Bois’s memorial, and he penned a feature in the paper that highlighted her words. His admiration for Lorraine was deep. In his article, Leaks called her statement brilliant and timely, and said he believed “Dr. Du Bois would have given his gracious approval with alacrity I am sure. For brevity, clarity of thought, and courage of convictions, they are simply matchless in this era of overkill and silence. Perhaps, most of all, the most important thing about your remarks is that they penetrate the concentric layers of falsehood, hypocrisy, and fear and permit truth to see the light.”8

  The encomium Lorraine gave for Du Bois had within it a question she kept asking herself, whether she was lecturing in Manhattan or convalescing in Croton: How, even in a state of infirmity, could she hold fast to her purpose? In various ways, in diaries and lectures, she kept this question alive. In one she wrote, “Do I remain a revolutionary? Intellectually—without a doubt. But am I prepared to give my body to the struggle?” She described looking at the acts and visages of freedom fighters: “They stand in the hose fire at Birmingham; they stand in the rain at Hattiesburg. They are young, they are beautiful, they are determined. When I get my health back I think I shall have to go into the South to find out what kind of revolutionary I am.”9

  Dying, though maybe she didn’t know it, yet, Lorraine was still trying to live her commitment fiercely.

  In her short play The Arrival of Mr. Todog, which riffed on Samuel Beckett’s classic Waiting for Godot, Lorraine turns ambiguity into clarity. While waiting for “Mr. Todog,” her two characters, unlike Beckett’s, don’t wait for God to provide answers; they realize if there is God at all, he is them and they are him. It is they who must act decisively to create the world. She lived this message, not only as a pupil but also a teacher and a creator, writing and speaking in bits and snatches whenever she could. She imagined architectures of liberation, visions and gestures from her sickbed. She also freed herself. Or at least tried to. On March 10, 1964, Lorraine and Bobby obtained a divorce in Juarez, Mexico.

  Five days later, she wrote a journal entry that she titled “Puzzle.” It read:

  Having had a cup of hot tea and written a bit—my mind sweetens on life once again.

  The mercurial aspect of me! Why is it so extreme? No drug, not even aspirin, and yet my mood is as different from what it was 45 minutes ago as the Himalayas are from the Sahara. Why? What does it mean? Am I so utterly a creature of my juices? Entirely? It would seem so.10

  And then there is a bit that seems strange for someone whose body was rapidly deteriorating: “We must get back to the physical body, methinks. Matter in motion, not mysticism. Chemistry to get a drip on mercury at last.”11 But maybe it isn’t strange at all. Maybe in her suffering the stakes were even clearer. Perhaps it brought her even more intimately in contact with the woman who lay on the ground, an officer’s boot upon her ne
ck. Maybe her body in pain put her in communion with humanity. In any case, she held herself grounded, desperately, no drifting.

  Two days later, on March 17, 1964, she wrote a letter to Bobby’s parents. In it she describes her condition with another barely truthful explanation given to her by doctors: tendonitis. She says she is feeling better, but it is clear that also isn’t entirely true when she tries to be philosophical about the whole thing: “You know, fate has a way of picking the worst thing to fit individual frustrations: Beethoven went deaf; Milton blind. Soooo, without implying equality with the company, it allows me a discomfort that makes it extremely difficult to sit at the typewriter for more than a little while.”12

  This was Lorraine’s dusk. Reading her words as her body caved, reminds me of Edward Said’s idea of “late style” in which he challenged any romantic ideas about how thinkers and artists tidily complete the arc of their thought in the final years. He raised the question, “What of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all?”13 It didn’t in Lorraine. It deepened her restlessness. Dorothy came to Croton, tended to her, fed her, and nurtured her. Lorraine was frustrated and in pain, and under Dorothy’s care, she did what she could with difficulty. Knowing what I do about pain (I have lived with chronic diseases for nearly half of my life), it shapes how I read the works Lorraine left from this time. There are many bits and pieces. But the fragments are something much more than their incompleteness. We cannot dismiss these artifacts that were not designated “done” as she lay dying. Lorraine worked and witnessed her own diminishing faculty. She saw in it a perverse poetry. Her late style was a stripping down to the bones, a building out of lumpy flesh, and a direction for us to follow. She worked on stories about the nineteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and on a play, based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Oliver La Farge’s Laughing Boy, about a young man caught between Navajo identity and a racist society. She posed profound questions about African independence in her play Les Blancs and imagined the life of the first monotheistic pharaoh, Akhnaton. She wrote a queer novel that she called Martaslund. These works are pictures of the past and future refracting her present. They are about freedom and faith and courage. They are about the sins of domination and the resilience of people. When her uncle Leo came to visit Lorraine in New York during one of her many hospital stays, he was stunned by her eagerness to hear about everything he was working on, thinking she should be resting. But no, she held on.

  Works sometimes cohere on their own anyway, regardless of what the author says about them. The message in her final pieces, in the imaginative landscape she presented, was that new human relations—intimate, social, economic, national, and international, just relations—must be pursued and championed. Withering behind trees, mountains, and water she continued to believe in humanity.

  Longtime Croton resident Cornelia Cottom wrote to me in the spring of 2017 and shared her one memory of Lorraine during this time, when she herself was very young. Cottom was delivering telephone books at a rate of seven cents a book, trying to turn a profit “in a race against gas spent driving from one isolated house to another in the backwoods of the town of Cortlandt.” She described approaching Lorraine’s house. At the glass panes of the entrance, Chaka and Spice were jumping and barking loudly. Cottom said, “Terrified, I stood at a distance, clasping her White and Yellow Pages. Miss Hansberry appeared in a robe, looking very frail—I did not know then that she was desperately ill—and, restraining the dogs, opened the door a crack. As I stepped forward to hand her the books, I shouted over the noise of the dogs, ‘I loved your play!’ Her worried expression gave way to a smile so beautiful that it repaid me handsomely for the ordeal of the dogs and the money lost in the delivery job, leaving me with a cherished remembrance of a lovely woman and writer.”14

  When Lorraine wasn’t in Croton, she was giving the occasional speech or, increasingly, in the hospital. Renee Kaplan, her friend and one of her former lovers, recalled that for a time she stayed in the NYU Hospital: “Lorraine’s room faced my building. . . . We used to wave to each other all the time. I was over there with great frequency.”15 As her body deteriorated further, Lorraine drank heavily to manage the depression, and she worked on her writing. She was running out of time and was donating her body, every bit of its strength, to the struggle, whether she realized it or not.

  Illness for Lorraine, as is often the case, drew in sharp relief what the core of her intellectual and political concerns were; where the heart of her calling resided. She wrote to herself, “When I get my health back I really should probably visit Europe . . . but it’s a curious thing. I cannot think seriously of being away from America. Everyone is always saying I ‘must go’ here or there—Greece, France, England, etc. I feel only that I must go to New England again, and to see the Pacific Northwest and the Coastline at Big Sur—and really very little else.”16

  Though she was an internationalist, and something of a Black nationalist, a Marxist, and a socialist, she was also deeply American. She understood that to be a thing of beauty and horror at once. She was disgusted by the war in Vietnam, and perhaps even more so at the passive acceptance of it by the American public. She saw in it the ease with which people could accept destruction as long as it wasn’t too close to home.

  In October, newspapers announced that Lorraine was dying.

  The letters that came flooding in were a symphony of admiration and love. They came from every quarter: from schoolchildren, from activists, from friends. She lived the end of her life in choral eulogy of sorts. Weldon Rougeau, a member of SNCC, wrote her on October 23, 1964, “Lorraine, the strength I saw in your face and heard in your voice is enough to overcome almost anything. I know that strength will keep you from despairing. That strength will make you well; it will help restore you to good health and happiness.”17

  Most of the letter writers thanked her, and they told her with desperate passion that they wanted her to survive. Eve Merriam declared, “I hear that you are in the hospital, and this makes the world an even stupider place than before. Lorraine, all my wishes go to you. Your gifts have been so large that greedily we want more.”18

  She was still essential. Her high school friend James Forman stated simply, “Those in the movement and elsewhere need you.” And Alex Haley reassured and implored her, holding up a mirror to her own steely countenance:

  A large plus in your corner, I think, is that your image for me, is courage dominated, with other allied qualities. I’ve done a fair amount of study of the metaphysical. I know there’s mountains of evidence of how often medical science’s miracles are catalyzed beyond our understanding by human courage. Also “square” as its[sic] appraised in far too much of our today world, I believe in praying, and I have petitioned in your behalf.

  Fight girl!19

  The letters from children were poignant. The genius of A Raisin in the Sun was that, notwithstanding its political nuance and sophisticated composition, it is a story even a child can seriously contemplate. The children told her they appreciated her. Their words were sweet, naïve, and sincere. A fourth grader from Oakland named Shawn Belvin wrote to her:

  Dear Miss Lorraine Hansberry

  I hope you get better. And I am in the fourth grade. Did you have a serious surgery? I wish you would come and see me sometimes when you feel better. Did you write many plays? Well, when you were well you could write plays like a dream.

  And there were adults, strangers who didn’t know her but felt moved to speak up about what she meant to them. A woman named Essie Barnes, whose written word is a quintessential voice from the Black South, wrote to Lorraine:

  Little girl you must continue to trust in God, believe and trust him and wait until he reaches you. . . . I wrote you two weeks passed. . . . I am writing against you can write me if you want to, let me know how you feel by now. . . .

  I am your friend, Essie Barnes
>
  Your photo in the Jet is cute.20

  “Little girl” is a moniker not unlike the designation “sweet” in Black Southern vernacular. It lets you know that you are cherished. Lorraine was by so many.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Homegoing

  In time of silver rain,

  The earth puts forward new life again.

  —Langston Hughes,

  dedicated to Lorraine Hansberry1

  Perhaps home is not a place but

  simply an irrevocable condition.

  —James Baldwin2

  THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW opened at the Longacre Theatre on October 15, 1964. Lorraine moved into the Hotel Victoria so that she could be close to rehearsals as she lay dying. She developed shingles. Her nights were agonizing. Her legs went numb. She lost speech when the cancer entered her brain. Nina came to visit in December and played her a recording of “In the Evening by the Moonlight.” Lorraine confessed that she wasn’t ready to go. Nina remembered, “She raised her hands in front of her face and said ‘Nina, I don’t know what is happening to me. They say I’m not going to get better, but I must get well. I must go down to the south. I’ve been a revolutionary all my life, but I’ve got to go down there to find out what kind of revolutionary I am.’” 3