Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: the Relationship Between James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry & Nina Simone
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Don’t Let me Be Misunderstood: The Relationship Between James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry & Nina Simone by Lynnée Denise Bonner This excerpt focuses on the relationship dominant social movement narratives by privileged between Lorraine Hansberry and southern, Christian, and heterosexual voices over the social networks of cultural production, led by artists, James Baldwin. women and queer activists. When Alice Walker coined the phrase “ancestors in my This is an examination of the personal relationships line of work” she did so to describe the motivation behind between Baldwin, Hansberry, and Simone who her quest to restore the legacy of writer and anthropologist created work that was often seen as oppositional to Zora Neale Hurston. In her 1975 essay, “Looking for popular movement strategies. By focusing on their Zora,” Walker recalls posing as Ms. Hurston’s niece interconnectedness, I hope to move away from the black in order to fnd traces of the writer’s existence in her exceptionalism trope that denies how the comradeship childhood town of, the all-Black Eatonville, Florida. between these artists and their communities are indeed Most of what we know about the cultural work of Zora key elements in the creation of their most celebrated Neale Hurston today is due in part to the efforts of Alice works. From Jimmy’s queering of American literature Walker and her relentless search to reverse what she through Giovanni’s Room, to Lorraine’s second wave pronounced to be “the symbolic fate of far too many Black feminist thread in A Raisin in the Sun, to Nina’s Black writers in America — to die alone, impoverished, unapologetic civil rights soul song “Mississippi Goddam,” and in an unmarked grave.” Hurston’s absence from the the elevation of the charismatic male leader turns our discussion of notable artists from the Harlem Renaissance attention away from political art works that were produced was impetus for Walker’s self-directed, investigative, and or inspired by communal-spirited spaces that I hope will archival practice. garner more attention by academics and scholars. Impressed by her literal and fgurative excavation work, Prior to falling in love with James Baldwin’s bibliography, I began to think about who I could name as the “ancestors I entered my relationship with him through the 1989 in my line of work.” I had questions about the silenced documentary The Price of the Ticket. It was from this histories of women and queer artists in the black radical place that I began to critically engage his position on what tradition whose legacies got lost in the male centered place an artist must occupy to ensure an honest reckoning recalling of most political and arts movements. Those with the moral cost of American life. Baldwin describes ancestors in my line of work are James Baldwin, Lorraine that this role is a witness to the truth. “[The artist],” he Hansberry and Nina Simone. And similarly to Walker’s says, “must rob us of our myths and give us our history, restorative work with Hurston, my research for the which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our International James Baldwin Conference, A Language personalities.” Throughout multiple essays, Notes of a to Dwell In, hosted by the American University of Paris, Native Son and The Creative Process being two of the was a historical recovery project that sought to interrupt highly referenced, Baldwin designates the role of the 16 african Voices artists as people whose sole purpose should be to uncover writer for Paul Robeson’s Pan Africanist and communist the illusion of America. He insists that “the artist cannot inspired newspaper called Freedom, a publication edited and must not take anything for granted, but must drive by Louis E. Burnman whom she also identifed as a to the heart of every answer and expose the question the mentor. Like Baldwin, but from a different proximity, answer hides.” Hansberry too was shaped by the Harlem Renaissance and cited Langston Hughes as being one of the most infuential In the 1940s, a decade before Baldwin would meet writers on her work. A one-time student enrolled in a Hansberry, he was in a community with Harlem W.E.B. DuBois African studies course, and a person drawn Renaissance writers and soon to be expatriates Richard to the work of fellow journalist for Freedom and Black Wright and Countee Cullen, and shared a unique and woman playwright Alice Childress, she learned early that transformative relationship with visual artist Beaufort in the achievement of Black rights, artists didn’t have the Delaney. Baldwin biographer David Leeming tells us that luxury to surrender their platforms to merely entertain, “Delaney was to reconcile for his protégé the music of the nor did she prescribe to one particular political strategy Harlem streets with the music of the Harlem churches, and in the pursuit of social justice. In a 1962 speech titled “A this helped Baldwin reconcile his sexual awakening with Challenge to Artist,” Hansberry speaks candidly about her his artistic awakening.” impatience with apolitical artists, saying: Baldwin’s politicization in Harlem, the Village, and Paris “Finally, I think that all of us who are thinking such functioned like a rites of passage and offers insight into things [as civil rights], who wish to exercise these where he was at the frst point of connection with Lorraine. rights that we are here defending tonight, must really By the time they formally met, he was an openly queer exercise them. Speaking to my fellow artists in public intellectual expatriate and an established novelist, particular, I think that we must paint them, sing them, playwright, and essayist. Baldwin had become, as he write about them—all these matters which are not would say, “The artist here to disturb the peace.” currently fashionable. Otherwise…we are indulging Lorraine Hansberry was twenty-nine to Jimmy Baldwin’s in a luxurious complicity—and no other thing.” thirty-four when she walked into the Actor’s Studio in Perhaps one of the most compelling occurrences that the winter of 1958, where Giovanni’s Room was being affrm the intimate relationship between Baldwin and workshopped for stage production. She had heard of Hansberry was expressed in a letter he had written to Baldwin’s work and he was aware of her organizing his brother David from the South of France. In the 1965 and journalistic grind. At this production, in the face letter he writes, “The night of January 12, when my of unfavorable responses to the play by Broadway fever reached its rather alarming peak, was the night executives, Hansberry publicly defended Baldwin’s Lorraine Hansberry died.” He described his condition willingness to introduce theater audiences to homosexual that evening as a psychosomatic one. Two years leading content, which spoke to her own developing feminist up to Hansberry’s passing, Baldwin was devastated by and queer politics. This fearless representation of sexual the season of death that reached across transnational diversity, Hansberry felt, was consistent with the voice an borders to engulf his life. He returned to America to artist must have if they are to be agents of social change. address the 16th Street Baptist church bombing that killed She saw Baldwin as an ally to which he responded, “I four little girls, the abduction and murder of civil rights was enormously grateful to her, she seemed to speak for workers (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael me; and afterward she talked to me with a gentleness and Schwerner) in Mississippi, and the murder of Medgar generosity never to be forgotten.” (Baldwin:1969). Evers on his porch in front of his family. Just one month Hansberry’s clarity about the role of an artist developed after Hansberry’s passing would be the assassination of long before meeting Baldwin in 1958. She was a highly Malcolm X, who attended Hansberry’s funeral and who visible activist and public intellectual, politicized by her Baldwin was scheduled to meet with, along with Martin family’s social justice work in Chicago. When she moved L. King Jr. on February 23, two days after Malcolm to New York in 1951, she was immediately employed as a was killed. It was in the spirit of grief and gratitude that african Voices 17 Baldwin penned the essay Sweet Lorraine for Esquire in “…I would often stagger down her stairs as the sun 1969, four years following Hansberry’s death, and one came up, usually in the middle of a paragraph and year after Dr. Martin Luther King had been killed. always in the middle of a laugh. That marvelous laugh. That marvelous face. I loved her, she was my The affection between Lorraine and Jimmy is clear sister and my comrade. Her going did not so much starting with the title of the essay Sweet Lorraine from make me lonely as make me realize how lonely which he jumps right into the text with the opening we were. We had that respect for each other which sentence, “That’s the way I always felt about her and so perhaps is only felt by people on the same side of the I won’t apologize for calling her that now.” Baldwin’s barricades, listening to the accumulating thunder of tender defance refects that of a journal entry or maybe the hooves of horses and the heads of tanks.” even a conversation with Lorraine’s lingering spirit. It’s unclear who the audience is, or whether or not this is a The sentiment in Baldwin’s writing in Sweet Lorraine cathartic piece written to fellow disillusioned movement is telling of a debilitating loneliness; the loneliness of members mourning the loss of their assassinated friends.