Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  Subtitled “hires out to Mrs. Miles,” the story of “Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat” is told from the perspective of the haughty white employer, who instantly reifies the “woman in a red hat”:

  They had never had one in the house before.

  The strangeness of it all. Like unleashing

  A lion really. . . . A black

  Bear.

  There it stood in the door,

  Under a red hat that was rash, but refreshing—

  In a tasteless way, of course[.]11

  The woman whom Mrs. Miles sees as an “it” or a “Bear” has been sent by an agency to substitute for a missing “Irishwoman . . . Who was a perfect jewel, a red-faced trump.”12 Clearly Mrs. Miles is unkind to any servant, but her shock at her child’s innocent affection for the Bronzeville woman dramatizes the often-unacknowledged tensions in the supposedly shiny fifties kitchen. When her child “Kiss[es] back the colored maid,” Mrs. Miles experiences disgust and rage:

  Heat at the hairline, heat between the bowels,

  Examining seeming coarse unnatural scene,

  She saw all things except herself serene:

  Child, big black woman, pretty kitchen towels.13

  Of course, the kinds of pink-collar jobs that young white women could apply for—jobs as file clerks and secretaries—were rarely available at that time to young Black women, or to Black women of any age. None of Sylvia Plath’s fellow guest editors at Mademoiselle were Black (or, for that matter, Asian or Hispanic). Brooks’s Maud Martha, like her Bronzeville woman, is offered a job as a domestic.

  Despite such racial stratification, however, the fifties was in many ways a decade shaped and complicated by the successes of African American culture. The music scene was as rich as it ever has been, with the new genres of bebop and jazz dominated by such figures as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. Louis Armstrong was still around, blasting his horn, and Harry Belafonte sang “Man smart, woman smarter” in Caribbean accents.14 Nor did women lag behind. Billie Holiday was still an idol, Ella Fitzgerald had just begun to record her classic songbooks, and in 1958 Nina Simone, born a year before Sylvia Plath, had inaugurated her brilliant and defiant career with the album Little Girl Blue.

  Like a steady drumbeat under this pattern of syncopation, the civil rights movement was gaining strength. After Gwendolyn Brooks produced Annie Allen, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award for Invisible Man and James Baldwin published Notes of a Native Son. Martin Luther King, Jr., led the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, after Rosa Parks refused to move to the back seat of a public bus. It was in this context that the Black playwright Lorraine Hansberry wrote her powerful A Raisin in the Sun, which opened on Broadway in 1959 and became a smash hit.

  THE STAGES OF LORRAINE HANSBERRY’S MILITANCY

  Memorialized in Nina Simone’s popular R&B song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” the short but activist life of Lorraine Hansberry evolved with the civil rights movement. Her first publication, the poem “Flag from a Kitchenette Window”—Hansberry’s father amassed his wealth by renting kitchenette apartments to his Black neighbors in segregated Chicago—paid homage to Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Kitchenette Building.”15 Yet in contrast with Brooks, Hansberry has received relatively little attention until quite recently—a startling omission, since she was the first Black playwright to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award (for A Raisin in the Sun). On opening night, when Sidney Poitier brought her up to the stage for a standing ovation, she was 28 years old.

  Paradoxes abound in the facts we do know. Born in 1930 into a well-to-do and college-educated family, Hansberry became an insurgent after her mother sent her to school in a white fur coat and the other kids beat her up: “from that moment I became—a rebel” by choosing friends from among the assailants.16 Since one of her youthful heroes was the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture, this identification with the dissident and disenfranchised was not altogether surprising. She could have gone to historically Black Howard University, where her uncle was a professor of African studies, but she chose to spend two years at the University of Wisconsin, which, like many institutions of higher learning, did not then provide on-campus housing for Black students.17 In a story set on the campus, Hansberry’s surrogate finds college “a bust,” proposes the toast “Long live—the Kinsey Report!,” and dedicates herself to the proposition that the distinction between “ ‘nice girls’ and ‘bad girls’ belonged in the Middle Ages.”18 Progressive activism more than art engaged her before she dropped out.

  Hansberry attributed the skepticism qualifying her faith that humanity can “command its own destiny” to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima when she was a teenager and the inauguration of the Cold War when she was entering her twenties.19 Hobnobbing with intellectuals in New York’s bohemian Greenwich Village, she studied with the influential philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois, and soon questioned the idea that words like “modern” or “progress” should be used as if synonymous with the West: “it is the women of Ghana who vote and the women of Switzerland who do not.”20

  In the early fifties, Hansberry rose from staff writer to associate editor of the singer-actor Paul Robeson’s Freedom magazine, contributing articles on Egyptian protests against British rule and substandard Harlem schools. She earned $31.70 a week, which accounted, she joked, for her slimness. The essays were produced while she was increasingly “sick of poverty, lynching, stupid wars, and the universal maltreatment of my people.”21 When she attended the Inter-American Peace Conference in Uruguay in place of the grounded Paul Robeson—he had been deprived of his passport because of his affiliations with the Communist Party—she knew that upon her return the FBI would start surveilling her.22

  During this same period, she signed a photograph of herself with the name “young Ida B.,” a reference to Ida B. Wells, the journalist famous for crusading against lynching.23 This self-identification explains the nature of some of Hansberry’s activism: she coordinated an artistic program in honor of Ida B. Wells, eulogized the career of the Black musical theater actress Florence Mills, and covered a conference of a group called Sojourners for Truth and Justice—Black women protesting the Korean War as well as racial discrimination. Increasingly militant about civil rights, Hansberry married the Jewish critic, producer, and song writer Robert Nemiroff, a rebellious act since interracial marriage was illegal at the time in most states. The night before the wedding, they protested the death sentence of the Rosenbergs. The couple attained economic security when Nemiroff earned a hefty sum from his 1956 coauthored song “Cindy, Oh Cindy,” which was recorded by Eddie Fisher.24

  The next year, with Hansberry free to focus on her writing, she celebrated Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as “the most important book in America.” According to Hansberry, gossip about the author’s relationship to Jean-Paul Sartre or “her alleged ‘lesbianism’ ” testifies to the truth of the book’s assertion that men compel women “to assume the status of the Other.” Since Beauvoir refuses “to accept the traditional view” of marriage’s “sacred place in the scheme of human development,” accusing her “of not respecting marriage is quite like accusing a communist of not ‘respecting’ free enterprise.” Unlike those who disparaged Beauvoir, Hansberry portrays her own reverential response: she is “the twenty-three-year-old woman writer closing the book thoughtfully after months of study 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, egalité, fraternité, liberté—pour tout le monde!”25

  Woman, Hansberry declares, is “chained to an ailing social ideology which seeks always to deny her autonomy and more—to delude her into the belief that that which in fact imprisons her the more is somehow her fulfillment.” And she concludes by tackling the detrimental effects of the celebration of domesticity: “The ancient effort to glorify the care of
the home into something which it is not and cannot be is one of the greatest assaults against womanhood.” As if directly opposing Farnham and Deutsch, she proclaims that women who devote themselves entirely to their husbands and children become “one of the most neurotic sections, no doubt, of our entire population.”26

  Yet the central character of A Raisin in the Sun, completed while Hansberry wrote so fervently about Simone de Beauvoir, is the widowed Mama whose heroic act consists in abdicating her power to her son. At the end of the play, Mama decides to make her son Walter Lee the “head” of the family “like you supposed to be.”27 And her quest—to move the family from the South Side of Chicago to a suburban home—would seem to replicate precisely the domestic ideology that Hansberry herself critiqued. Indeed, the genius of the play consists in Hansberry’s testing the American dream of the fifties against the experiences of working-class Black people and finding it sadly wanting.

  In doing so, she not only gained the wide audience needed to get a play produced on Broadway (then made into a movie and later revived repeatedly on stage); she also addressed the gender and racial biases of her time.28 A Raisin in the Sun recasts the experience of Hansberry’s parents when they moved from a Black neighborhood in Chicago to an affluent white neighborhood, where the 8-year-old was threatened by brick-wielding whites—one brick crashed through the front window, almost hitting her—and her mother patrolled the house with a loaded Luger. The little girl was “spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek” to and from a Jim Crow school whose mission was “not to give education but to withhold as much as possible.”29 After the family was evicted by an Illinois court, her father worked with the NAACP to win a favorable decision from the Supreme Court, although it would not address the larger issue of racially restrictive real estate covenants until another case, eight years later.

  More impoverished than Nannie and Carl A. Hansberry, most of the Younger adults in A Raisin in the Sun undertake domestic work outside as well as inside the house. When the widowed Lena Younger, “Mama” in the play, receives $10,000 of insurance money, she uses it to put a down payment on a house in a white neighborhood, although her son Walter Lee wants to invest in a liquor store. In the final act, Mama willingly renounces her financial power over Walter Lee, just as he, defrauded by his partner in the liquor scheme, refuses to sell out to white racists and decides instead to lead the family into the new house. No one knew better than Hansberry what the Younger family had waiting for them there.

  Regardless of the racism Mama will continue to have to face, her triumph at the end of the play consists in her realization that her son has “finally come into his manhood today.” Their generational struggle has not converted Walter Lee to his mother’s religious piety, but it has convinced him not to grovel or capitulate to those who think his family would “dirty up” the white folks’ neighborhood.30

  A Raisin in the Sun addresses feminist themes in its portrayal of the generational conflict that strengthens Mama’s daughter-in-law and daughter, each of whom manages to confront what Langston Hughes called “dreams deferred” without drying up “like a raisin in the sun.”31 Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth, determines whether to abort a pregnancy when there is barely room in their cramped apartment for their little boy. And Walter Lee’s sister, Beneatha, struggles with her desire to become a doctor, given the scarcity of money and the pressure to marry.

  Especially through the overtures of her two quite different suitors, Beneatha—who in the course of the play decides to close-crop her “unstraightened” hair—realizes that her rejection of the “assimilationist” suitor who is “willing to give up his own culture and submerge himself completely in the dominant, and in this case oppressive culture” does not necessarily mean that she should marry her Nigerian suitor and make Africa her homeland.32 The acolyte of Beauvoir created in Beneatha a female character who seeks autonomy and professional satisfaction.

  But through the resonant figure of Mama, Hansberry predicted that feminists of color would adopt agendas differently inflected from those espoused by white feminists. Hansberry’s Mama wants not independence from the home but a home of her own. She seeks not to challenge male domination but rather to reaffirm the damaged manhood of her son; and, as bell hooks has explained in a different context, Mama realizes that “masculinity need not be equated with sexist notions of manhood.”33 Mama does not need the right to work—she has worked her whole life outside and also inside her home—but instead she hopes to secure the future of her family. According to the prescient Hansberry, both gender and race must be addressed by activists committed to liberation.

  A few weeks before the opening of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry delivered a passionate plea to Black writers who, in her view, needed to produce socially engaged art in order to refute the prevailing platitudes of the day: “women are idiots”; “people are white”; “European culture is the culture of the world.”34 Taking issue with the Beats, whose appropriation of Black language seemed patronizing to her, and with Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” (1957), which seemed prompted by misbegotten primitivism, Hansberry urges African American authors to tackle the “hideous malignancy” of “color prejudice” that continues to result in Blacks murdered “with and without rope and faggot, in all the old ways and many new ones.”35 Though she has witnessed terrible injustice, she bases her hope for the future on the thousands who marched in Montgomery and the nine children who determined to attend school in Little Rock. It must have been a source of satisfaction to her that one of the nine students sent her a fan letter after seeing a performance of A Raisin in the Sun.

  Before Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at 34, she analyzed the forces that had led her to mistitle this landmark 1959 speech—which was not published until 1981—“The Negro Writer and His Roots” (italics ours). The 1961 essay “In Defense of the Equality of Men,” which went unprinted until we included it in the first edition of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985), castigates a social order that effectively keeps women in a “second-class situation, but which is less often criticized for imposing upon males the most unreasonable and unnecessary burdens of ‘superiority’ and ‘authority,’ which, in fact, work only to insult their humanness and deny the reality of their civilized state.” Citing Mary Wollstonecraft, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet Tubman, Hansberry repeatedly demythologizes the homemaker: “The Feminists did not create the housewife’s dissatisfaction with her lot—the Feminists came from out of the only place they could have come—the housewives of the world!” (italics hers).36 Before Betty Friedan, there was Lorraine Hansberry.

  Alternately empowered and plagued by the celebrity that came with a Broadway hit, and separated from her husband, Hansberry pursued projects arising from her commitment to combat racism at home and colonialism overseas. “Jimmy” Baldwin, who called her “Sweet Lorraine,” partied with her and accompanied her to meetings and protests. To Nina Simone, whose performances she enjoyed at the Village Gate, she could confide her melancholy and her shame at being alone: “I have closed the shutters so that no one can see. Me. Alone. Sitting at the typewriter on Easter eve; drinking; brooding; alone.”37

  Readers today can gain a sense of some of Hansberry’s writings about her erotic relations with women in Imani Perry’s Looking for Lorraine, which captures the dazzling beauty and wit of a woman who lived before her time. Yet Adrienne Rich was right in noting the damages wrought by external and internal censorship.38 Hansberry’s proposed project “The Sign in Jenny Reed’s Window” had morphed into The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, a show that closed the night she died. In its last version, her next play, Les Blancs, which originally featured female characters, highlighted male protagonists. She never got the time to write her projected full-length drama on Mary Wollstonecraft, a strong spokeswoman “destroyed many times over.”39 And Hansberry’s pseudonymous contributions to the lesbian publication The Ladder—founded in 1955 by the Daughters of Bilitis—addr
ess the pressures on lesbians to marry, homosexual persecution, and anti-feminist dogma.40

  In 1964, Hansberry obtained a Mexican divorce, although she kept Robert Nemiroff as her literary executor. In the same year, in a letter to the New York Times, she referenced civil rights militancy by dwelling on the italicized last words of Langston Hughes’s poem about what happens to a dream deferred: if it does not dry up like a raisin in the sun, “does it explode?” 41

  AUDRE LORDE’S LESBIAN BIOMYTHOGRAPHY

  During the red scares of the fifties, when homosexuals were routinely outed as security risks and then flushed out of their jobs, many lesbians were necessarily closeted. However, in this repressive decade, the poet Audre Lorde joined a dynamic, mostly underground lesbian community centered in Greenwich Village. As she reported in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, which she labeled a “biomythography,” she once attended a party where guests raved over a platter of slices of rare meat “lovingly laid out and individually folded up into a vulval pattern, with a tiny dab of mayonnaise at the crucial apex.” 42

  But she had always been a defiant sort. Diane di Prima, who was her longtime friend and classmate at Hunter High, captured the intensity of her presence: “there was always Audre Lorde—who was later to become a poet of note—Black and fierce, and in those days often unreadable. She kept us guessing with her eyes and her silence. A kind of knowing and a kind of contempt.” 43 Still, she chose the title Zami for her memoir, a word in “Carriacou, meaning women who work and live together,” because her mother used it to mean “just friends”: “it probably came from Patois, which is a combination of French and Spanish, probably from ‘les amies,’ the friends.” 44