Something Glorious to Draw On: James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry Now

The proliferation of projects spotlighting the ever-vital contributions of James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry has been a source of optimism and inspiration amid all the angst, grief, and other ugly feelings the past few years have wrought. From the spellbinding reworking of Hansberry's Les Blancs at London's National Theatre in 2016 to the equally affecting revival of Baldwin's The Amen Corner at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in 2020, theatre-goers, in particular, have been afforded rich opportunities to experience the vastness of Baldwin and Hansberry's dramaturgical imaginations.¹ Exhibitions like Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry's Letters to The Ladder, which was on view at the Brooklyn Museum from November 2013 to March 2014, and God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin, which David Zwirner presented from January through February 2019, have served to shed additional light on the revolutionary work and complex interior lives of these pathbreaking black, queer writers.²

Baldwin and Hansberry were notably the closest of friends. Theirs was a bond formed through mutual respect and admiration for each other's intellect and artistry, as well as a love for the theatre, language, and, perhaps above all, black people. Baldwin reflected on the intensity of their too-brief relationship in "Sweet Lorraine," the essay he published in Esquire four years after Hansberry's premature death in 1965 at the much-too-young age of thirty-four:

We spent a lot of time arguing about history and tremendously related subjects in her Bleecker Street and, later, Waverly Place flat. And often, just when I was certain that she was about to throw me out, as being altogether too rowdy a type, she would stand up, her hands on her hips (for these down-home sessions she always wore slacks) and pick up my empty glass as though she intended to throw it at me. Then she would walk into the kitchen, saying, with a haughty toss of her head, "Really, Jimmy. You ain't right, child!" With which stern put-down, she would hand me another drink and launch into a brilliant analysis of just why I wasn't "right."³

As Imani Perry observes, "The friendship that grew between Lorraine and Jimmy is storied. It was both an intellectual and soulful partnership."⁴ Perry's Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry is just one of the many books to emerge in recent years that have served to expand our knowledge and deepen our understanding of two of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century. Others include The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin edited by Michele Elam, Eddie Glaude's Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Lessons for Our Own, and Soyica Diggs Colbert's Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry.⁵ Striking about each of these texts are the ways in which they reveal Baldwin and Hansberry's prescience and, indeed, the profound relevance of their work for our time. Glaude makes the case explicitly in Begin Again, asserting: "Ours, like the moments after the Civil War and Reconstruction and after the civil rights movement, requires a different kind of thinking, a different kind of resiliency, or else we succumb to madness or resignation. Baldwin, I believe, offers resources to respond to such dark times and to imagine an answer to the moral reckoning that confronts us all."⁶ A similar thing might surely be said of Hansberry, who, like Baldwin, used her talent and craft to insist that another kind of world was yet still possible. Of course, what endeavors such as the Good-man Theatre's 2016 mounting of The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (which, in 1964, became Hansberry's second play to reach Broadway), and Barry Jenkins's 2018 film adaptation of Baldwin's novel If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) remind us that both writers left behind resources that have lost none of their urgency.⁷

This urgency is brought into even sharper focus in Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro and...