The Books: The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town, edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Playwright’, by Lillian Ross

It’s playwright Lorraine Hansberry’s birthday today. Here’s a post I wrote about her.

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Next up on the essays shelf:

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks) is a collection of “The Talk of the Town” pieces in The New Yorker, grouped by decade, which is a lot of fun because you can see how the “voice” of the magazine developed, and how “The Talk of the Town” has grown and changed over the years.

“HARLEM”
by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

RaisinInTheSun

A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, premiered on Broadway in 1959. The playwright was only 28 years old. It was the first play written by a black author to be produced on Broadway. But there were a lot of other firsts. The majority of the cast of characters in the play were African-American. While there were black theatre companies, and many great black artists writing at the time, the productions were geared mainly for African-American audiences. To produce a story about black Americans, by a black American (and a woman no less), a story that confronted racism and segregation in America, and then to present it to a mainstream mostly-white audience was an enormous financial gamble. It took a while for the production to come together because of that. Would whites go see it? No one wanted to back it. It was 1958.

A Raisin in the Sun has gone on to take its rightful place in the American canon. It was recently revived on Broadway (unfortunately I did not see it, although Sanaa Lathan, one of my favorite actresses working today, was in it). Hansberry grew up in Chicago, and her father got embroiled in a lawsuit which kept him gone for months at a time (the suit went all the way to the Supreme Court: you can read more about it here). The issues of that lawsuit form the backbone of Raisin in the Sun, although Hansberry also said it was not strictly autobiographical (she came from a middle-class background, whereas the characters in her play were on the brink of poverty). The play tackles racism through the filter of economics, opportunity and fairness. A comparison to Death of a Salesman is not off the mark. The play was an enormous hit, critically and financially. The fears that white people would not care about a story about black people were unfounded. All sorts of new ground was broken up, ground that needs to broken up again and again. We see it in the movie industry too. Hansberry’s talent, her gift with creating memorable characters, real living-breathing people, is the main reason for all this success. Hansberry won the NY Drama Critics Circle Award for best play (I believe she was the youngest person to win that award, and and of course it is also a male-dominated list). The play was nominated for four Tony Awards. It was the first play on Broadway helmed by a black director (Lloyd Richards). A Raisin in the Sun was a breakthrough for its star, Sidney Poitier as well.

1959
Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, and Lonne Elder III, original production of “A Raisin in the Sun

And so sadly, so unfortunately, Hansberry died less than 10 years later from pancreatic cancer. She was 34 years old. Tragic. Her funeral was held in Harlem. Martin Luther King, Jr. sent a message which was read during the service:

“Her creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.”

He was right.

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But what a loss to American theatre.

Here’s a beautiful interview with Nina Simone about Hansberry, whose posthumous collection of writing (To Be Young, Gifted and Black) gave Simone the title for one of her most well-loved and requested songs, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”.

In 1959, Lillian Ross met Lorraine Hansberry for breakfast. A Raisin in the Sun had just opened on Broadway and Hansberry found herself a star, almost overnight. She wasn’t 30 years old yet. She lived with her husband in a walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village and hadn’t quite gotten used to the idea yet that she was famous, that she would be called upon to speak out on “issues”, that everyone would want her on their committee, their league, etc. As she ate her eggs with Lillian Ross, she talked about her experience of all of that, and also talks about her childhood.

Almost the entirety of this piece is made up of long quotations from Hansberry: her voice, un-editorialized.

Here’s an excerpt.

The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks), edited by Lillian Ross; ‘Playwright’, by Lillian Ross

“I was born May 19, 1930, in Chicago,” she told us. “I have two brothers and one sister. I’m the baby of the family. My sister Mamie is thirty-five and has a three-year-old daughter, Nantille, who is divine and a character. She was named for my mother, whose name was Nannie, and her other grandmother, Tillie. My older brother, Carl, Jr., is forty, and my other brother, Perry, Sr., is thirty-eight and has an eighteen-year-old daughter, who is starting college and is very beautiful. Carl, Perry, and Mamie run my father’s real-estate business, Hansberry Enterprieses, in Chicago. My father, who is dead now, was born in Gloster, Mississippi, which you can’t find on the map, it’s so small. My mother comes from Columbia, Tennessee, which is on the map, but just about. My father left the South as a young man, and then he went back there and got himself an education. He was a wonderful and very special kind of man. He died in 1945, at the age of fifty-one – of a cerebral hemorrhage, supposedly, but American racism helped kill him. He died in Mexico, where he was making preparations to move all of us out of the United States. My brother Carl had just come back from Europe, where he fought with Patton’s army. My father wanted to leave this country because, although he had tried to do everything in his power to make it otherwise, he felt he still didn’t have his freedom. He was a very successful and very wealthy businessman. He had been a U.S. marshal. He had founded one of the first Negro banks in Chicago. He had fought a very famous civil-rights case on restricted covenants, which he fought all the way to the Supreme Court, and which he won after the expenditure of a great deal of money and emotional strength. The case is studied today in the law schools. Anyway, Daddy felt that this country was hopeless in its treatment of Negroes. So he became a refugee from America. He bought a house in Polanco, a suburb of Mexico City, and we were planning to move there when he died. I was fourteen at the time. I’m afraid I have to agree with Daddy’s assessment of this country. But I don’t agree with the leaving part. I don’t feel defensive. Daddy really belonged to a different age, a different period. He didn’t feel free. One of the reasons I feel so free is that I feel I belong to a world majority, and a very assertive one. I’m not really writing about my own family in the play. We were more typical of the bourgeois Negro exemplified by the Murchison family that is referred to in the play. I’m too close to my own family to be able to write about them.

“I mostly went to Jim Crow schools, on the South Side of Chicago, which meant half-day schools, and to this day I can’t count. My parents were some peculiar kind of democrats. They could afford to send us to private schools, but they didn’t believe in it. I went to three grade schools – Felsenthal, Betsy Ross, and A.O. Sexton, the last of them in a white neighborhood where Daddy bought a house when I was eight. My mother is a remarkable woman, with great courage. She sat in that house for eight months with us – while Daddy spent most of his time in Washington fighting his case – in what was, to put it mildly, a very hostile neighborhood. I was on the porch one day with my sister, swinging my legs, when a mob gathered. We went inside, and while we were in our living room, a brick came crashing through the window with such force it embedded itself in the opposite wall. I was the one the brick almost hit. I went to Englewood High School and then to the University of Wisconsin for two years. Then I just got tired of going to school and quit and came to New York, in the summer of 1950. The theatre came into my life like k-pow!” Miss Hansberry knocked a fist into the palm of her other hand. “In Chicago, on my early dates, I was taken to see shows like ‘The Tempest,’ ‘Othello,’ and ‘Dark of the Moon’, which absolutely flipped me, with all that witch-doctor stuff, which I still adore. In college, I saw plays by Strindberg and Ibsen for the first time, and they were important to me. I was intrigued by the theatre. Mine was the same old story – sort of hanging around little acting groups, and developing the feeling that the theatre embraces everything I like all at one time. I’ve always assumed I had something to tell people. Now I think of myself as a playwright.”

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