Revisiting A Raisin in the Sun After More than 40 Years

I wish I knew Lorraine Hansberry. Hell, I wish she were still alive for me to know. She was 34 when the cancer got her in 1965, so she'd be 71. I've just seen, twice, the new production of her 1959 Broadway play, A Raisin in the Sun, at the Young Vic here. Lorraine Hansberry wrote at the time Africans dreamed of independence from Europe and African-Americans of escaping the ghetto or the South. But Lorraine Hansberry had no illusions about either.

The story unfolds in a tenement on Chicago's South Side, and the characters are the combative and loving Younger family. Mama, her son Walter Lee, her daughter Beneatha, Walter Lee's wife Ruth and their son Travis go through hell in three acts. Somehow, they walk out of their despair without, like Orpheus, looking back. Only one actor in a troupe playing African-Americans is an American, the formidable Novella Nelson. Nelson, a Broadway and Shakespearean actress, dominates the family and the stage?as the matriarch, Lena Younger, who takes no crap from nobody. I went to see another actress, Kananu Kirimi, who plays Beneatha. Kananu, whom I've known and loved (albeit platonically) for five years, has a Scottish accent, yet managed to sound more American than I do. Three performances deserve awards: Nelson's, Kirimi's and Lennie James'. James as Walter Lee expresses a vast emotional range in a fine voice and a dancer's movements. He would be a great Hamlet.

I saw Raisin the first time almost 40 years ago, and a short soliloquy by Walter Lee stuck with me. If it was intended to make young white boys think, it worked. "What's the matter with you all!" Walter Lee cries out to his family. "I didn't make this world! It was give to me this way! Hell, yes, I want me some yachts someday! Yes, I want to hang some real pearls 'round my wife's neck. Ain't she supposed to wear no pearls? Somebody tell me?tell me, who decides which women is suppose to wear pearls in this world. I tell you I am a man?and I think my wife should wear some pearls in this world!"

Back in 1959, most of white America did not want Ruth Younger or any other black woman to afford pearls. They didn't want black people in white neighborhoods, and they didn't want to see them in white collars at work. Some "colored" people, despite death threats and bombings, broke into the segregated white world. A few, including the mother and father of Lorraine Hansberry herself, went to court to live where they liked. After the Illinois Supreme Court declared covenants prohibiting the sale of land to black people unconstitutional, Hansberry's family moved for safety to Mexico. That was 1938, and Lorraine was eight.

When I was growing up in Los Angeles during the 1950s, the covenants were being phased out. My grandfather?like Ronald Reagan and many other white men then?had signed them, lest they sell their houses on to blacks and cause their neighbors' property prices to fall.

The only place where covenants preventing the sale of land to people of another race are enshrined in law today, so far as I know, is Israel. The old covenants preventing the sale of Jewish Agency-owned land to Arabs now make it illegal for 92 percent of the land in Israel to be sold to Arabs. If it was racist in Chicago and Los Angeles, is it in Israel?

Hansberry has a Nigerian student, Joseph Asagai, courting Beneatha. He longs for his country's independence from Britain, but the playwright allows him no self-deception about freedom's glory. Asagai tells Beneatha that "perhaps the things I believe now for my country will be wrong and outmoded, and I will not understand and do terrible things to have things my way or merely to keep my power. Don't you see that there will be young men and women, not British soldiers then, but my own black countrymen...to step out of the shadows some evening and slit my then useless throat?" Lorraine Hansberry could not have known the names of the criminals who would eventually rule Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and Zimbabwe. Yet she saw them coming. She had no naivete about Africa or about African-Americans, trapped in ghettos where the strong among them cheated the weak. Walter Lee's black friend steals all his money and thus his hope of escape.

The play stands up after 42 years. Its eternal themes transcend race relations: life and death, mothers and sons, sons and fathers, brothers and sisters, love and blood, destiny and free will. Her Chicago tenement could have been the gates of Troy. One issue will annoy the politically correct. Mama Younger berates Walter Lee for his silence over his wife's disclosure that she has made a down payment of $5 for an abortion, illegal in 1959: "Well?son, I'm waiting to hear you say something... I'm waiting to hear how you be your father's son. Be the man he was... Your wife say she going to destroy your child. And I'm waiting to see you stand up and look like your daddy and say we done give up one baby to poverty and that we ain't going to give up nary another one... I'm waiting."

Mama is one hell of a woman, and I guess Lorraine Hansberry was too. Looking around today at race, family and the war between men and women, I'd love to see what she'd write. It would not be conventional.