Why Lorraine Hansberry is My Hero.

“I care, Wally, I admit it: I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care. …The why of why we are here is an intrigue for adolescents; the how is what must command the living. Which is why I have lately become – an insurgent again!”
                                              -Sidney, The Sign In Sidney Brustein’s Window

There are several hows that reach across Lorraine Hansberry’s writing, her intellectual life and her personal life – sharpness; big heartedness; human concern; humor – and for each one there is another reason to like the playwright (1930-1965), but there is a particular how that I rarely see enough of, that makes her my hero.  But it’ll take a little explaining…

Recently, new scholarship about Hansberry’s private life recently came out through an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum (that just closed last month) called “Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry’s Letters to ‘The Ladder,’” focused on her letters to an early (1950s) lesbian magazine.  While many people had connected the dots to long ago (for example, the letters were only initialed, with the initials of her married name, and nothing on the topic appears in the collection of papers that makes up her autobiography, although it does appear in a biography published in the 1990s), her sexuality was largely outside of history.  I can only imagine why – The atmosphere around the topic made it difficult even for radicals at her time, and I can only imagine how she and so many other people must have struggled because we still do, decades later, even here, even now. But that isn’t even close to what makes her my hero.  First, take this quote from The Village Voice relating her take on what it calls the ‘born this way’ argument – the argument that we’re all familiar with, how homosexuality is acceptable because this is the way we are born.  Lorraine trashes it.

“Since it does not follow that all which proceeds from nature is in any way automatically desirable for human good, it is silly and baseless to posit the rights of homosexuality on the remote (+ in some sense irrelevant) possibility of its possible congenital character.”

“You’ve done it again, Lorraine!” I sat back from the computer and laughed when I first read this. Who else does this? Who else, even in the most sensitive areas, at times most in need of support, does not just grab onto any argument; agree with anything just because it’s for their benefit? She rejects an argument even in her favor, even one she could need, simply because it doesn’t follow.  Who else is this dynamic? Who has that kind of integrity?

The dynamic life is what I enjoy most in Hansberry’s drama, where above all else, the characters are not one-dimensional. Her plays aren’t about good guys and bad guys. The antagonists make mistakes and the bad guys aren’t always wrong. The character most like her in her most famous play (Beneatha in A Raisin In The Sun) is strongly admonished by the family matriarch (“When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right”) and in The Sign In Sidney Brustein’s Window, a play about New York bohemians, the character Mavis, who is a conservative, middle-class sister of one of the stars, is known for being dull, uninvolved, conventional and stuffy. Still she delivers one of the most powerful, damning lines of the play:

“I am standing here and I am thinking: how smug it is in bohemia. I was taught to believe that – (near tears) – creativity and great intelligence ought to make one expansive and understanding. That if ordinary people, among whom I have the sense at least to count myself, could not expect understanding from artists and – whatever it is that you are, Sidney – then where indeed might we look for it at all in this dreadful world.
(She almost starts out, but thinks of the cap) … Since you have all so busily got rid of God for us!”

It makes the plays more lifelike to me. The depth of character is also what gives Hansberry’s plays their power. Hansberry herself was deeply committed to ‘common people’ as exceptional, and her ability to hold many sides in her plays also followed in her intellectual and activist views. I look to her as an example of how to walk the thin lines of ideal and practicality, faith and reason. For example, in civil rights, she advocated measures depending on what the situation called for rather than formulaic stances. Still she held the simple ideal of pure peace. And while she claimed to “admire” the human ability to create religion, she said so providing it’s “dropped when we know better” (To Be Young, Gifted and Black). You can see her full breadth – her heart and her sharpness – in comparing part of this letter to her mother and a segment of an interview from that collected autobiography, To Be Young, Gifted and Black (all excerpts [sic]). To her mother:

“Mama, it is a play that tells the truth about people, Negroes and life and I think it will help a lot of people to understand how we are just as complicated as they are – and just as mixed up – but above all, that we have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks – people who are the essence of human dignity. That is what after all the laughter and tears, the play is supposed to say.”
And in a formal interview…

INTERVIEWER: The question, I’m sure, is asked you many times – you may be tired of it – someone comes up to you and says “This is not really a Negro play; why, this could be about anybody! It’s a play about people!” What is your reaction? What do you say?
L.H.: Well, I hadn’t noticed the contradiction because I’d always been under the impression that Negroes are people. But actually it’s an excellent question, because invariably that has been the point of reference. And I do know what people are trying to say. People are trying – what they are trying to say is that this is not what they consider the traditional treatment of the Negro in the theater. They’re trying to say that it isn’t a propaganda play, that it isn’t something that hits you over the head; they are trying to say that they believe the characters in our play transcend category. However, it is an unfortunate way to try to say it, because I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.

Indeed, the characters in all of our plays transcend category. Nonetheless, I so often find myself in real life situations somewhat like the ‘propaganda plays’ she talks about. So often we’re all expected to go along with things just because a reason is given. Give a reason and all the sudden you’re a believer. Believe one thing and you’re expected to believe a following category of others. Bring up a flaw and it’s assumed you’re against it. Bring in an unpopular example and your whole view is thrown out. That’s the one-dimensional world I experience daily and I think, no wonder we’re so stymied by some issues in our culture: we look for yes or no answers in a world where opposing forces can both be right, and things are so complicated. Things that cannot be ‘evened out,’ even through our ham-fisted attempts at justice. God forbid we should understand the villains. If you can stand one more quote, Robert Nemiroff really puts the problem best in an introduction to her unproduced TV drama, “The Drinking Gourd”:

“What was so troubling, so damning about The Drinking Gourd was not, I believe, it’s frankness but, oddly enough, it’s fairness: the objectivity of its approach to character and the nature of the indictment that resulted. It was not even the horrors she showed – the fact that the young black hero was to be shown on perhaps fifty million American home screens being blinded for the statutory crime of learning to read – but the fact that she insisted upon empathizing as well with the white forced to blind him! In a medium not noted for avoidance of horror, an industry whose stock-in-trade is violence, one might suppose that this image could be tolerated. But the approach to Zeb Dudley and Hiram Sweet was something else again.”

It’s true. That’s the simplicity of so many things that do get produced. If only Lorraine Hansberry were here to teach us to be more – reasonable! Or at least more real.

But she does reach out through the invisible means of words, transcending time and space to let us in again and again on this emerging way or being. It’s fresh air that I gulp thankfully and whenever I read more by her or about her, it’s like seeing an old friend again. A Raisin In The Sun is currently playing on Broadway, starring Denzel Washington and for more information about Hansberry, check out the great new digital archive, The Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust, lhlt.org.