Les Blancs Read online

  Lorraine Hansberry

  Les Blancs

  THE COLLECTED LAST PLAYS

  Lorraine Hansberry, at twenty-nine, became the youngest American, the fifth woman, and the first black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the Best Play of the Year. Her A Raisin in the Sun has since been published and produced in some thirty countries, while her film adaptation was nominated by the New York critics for the Best Screenplay and received a Cannes Film Festival Award. At thirty-four, during the run of her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer. In the years since her death, her stature has continued to grow. To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a dramatic portrait of the playwright in her own words, was the longest-running Off-Broadway drama of 1969, and has been recorded, filmed, and published in expanded book form, and has toured an unprecedented forty states and two hundred colleges. In 1986, following the stage production of the 25th anniversary of A Raisin in the Sun by the Roundabout Theatre in New York City, the play was widely acclaimed as in the foremost ranks of American classics. In 1990, the PBS American Playhouse TV adaptation of the 25th-anniversary version had one of the highest viewing audiences in PBS history. Les Blancs, her last play—posthumously performed on Broadway and recently in prominent regional theaters—has been hailed by a number of critics as her best.

  Works by Lorraine Hansberry

  A Raisin in the Sun

  The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window

  The Drinking Gourd

  The Movement

  What Use Are Flowers?

  To Be Young, Gifted and Black

  Les Blancs

  VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, DECEMBER 1994

  Copyright © 1972 by Robert Nemiroff and Robert Nemiroff, as Executor of the Estate of Lorraine Hansberry

  Introduction copyright © 1994 by Margaret B. Wilkerson

  Foreword copyright © 1994 by Jewell Handy Gresham Nemiroff

  Critical Backgrounds and Postscript Copyright © 1972 by Robert Nemiroff

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1972.

  CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers? being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America, the British Commonwealth, including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, are subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, electronic, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved, permission for which must be secured in writing from the author’s agent: the William Morris Agency, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10019.

  Particular emphasis is laid on the question of readings.

  The amateur acting rights of Les Blancs, are controlled exclusively by Samuel French, 25 West 45 Street, N.Y., N.Y. 10036. The amateur acting rights of The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers? are controlled exclusively by Jewell Gresham Nemiroff, Executrix of the Estate of Robert Nemiroff.

  The Drinking Gourd: Copyright © 1969 by Robert Nemiroff and Robert Nemiroff, as Executor of the Estate of Lorraine Hansberry.

  Portions of Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers? were first published in To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. Copyright © 1969 by Robert Nemiroff and Robert Nemiroff, as Executor of the Estate of Lorraine Hansberry.

  What Use Are Flowers? appeared in slightly different form in Works in Progress—Copyright © 1969, 1972 by Robert Nemiroff and Robert Nemiroff, as Executor of the Estate of Lorraine Hansberry.

  Notes on “Follow the Drinking Gourd” and “Steal Away” from Songs of the Civil War by Irwin Silber. Copyright © 1960 by Irwin Silber. Bonanza Books, a division of Crown Publishers. Reprinted by permission of Irwin Silber.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Hansberry, Lorraine, 1930–1965.

  Les Blancs: the collected last plays of Lorraine Hansberry.

  CONTENTS: Les Blancs.—The drinking gourd.—What use are flowers?

  I. Hansberry, Lorraine, 1930–1965. The drinking gourd, 1972. II. Hansberry, Lorraine, 1930–1965. What use are flowers? 1972. III. Title.

  PS3515.A515B5 1972 812’.5’4 69-16462

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81556-9

  v3.1

  IN MEMORIAM

  Robert Nemiroff (1929–91)

  To Bobby with love

  Mili and Leo with gratitude

  Hattie Handy Manning for unswerving support

  AND

  NELSON MANDELA

  with the fervent hope that the sun

  rising over the new South Africa

  will infuse the world with its glow

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  FOREWORD BY Jewell Handy Gresham Nemiroff

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION BY Margaret B. Wilkerson

  Les Blancs

  A Critical Background

  Les Blancs

  Postscript

  The Drinking Gourd

  A Critical Background

  The Drinking Gourd

  Notes

  What Use are Flowers?

  A Critical Background

  What Use Are Flowers?

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and—I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.…

  If anything should happen—before ’tis done—may I trust that all commas and periods will be placed and someone will complete my thoughts—

  This last should be the least difficult since there are so many who think as I do—

  —LORRAINE HANSBERRY

  The second excerpt of Lorraine Hansberry’s above comes from an undated journal entry, presumably written near the end of the playwright’s life. The first, however, was written not at the end, but at the beginning of her career. These thoughts were delivered on March 1, 1959, before an audience of her peers at a conference on “The Negro Writer and His Roots.”

  Two weeks later, her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, opened on Broadway. Two months following that date, she became the youngest American playwright, the fifth woman,* the only black writer ever to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of the Year.

  Six years later, at age thirty-four, she was dead of cancer.

  We are indebted to the late Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry’s former husband and literary executor, to whom she entrusted all her works, as the person most singularly responsible for perpetuating her legacy. He was not alone: actors, directors, other stage professionals, journalists, critics, and, above all, audiences have kept the playwright’s works alive. But Nemiroff spent the twenty-six years that he survived Hansberry meticulously placing the “periods and commas” necessary to provide the living evidence that the artist who died too soon was a major American writer.

  My Foreword here is a tribute to them both. For if in her short life the prolific Hansberry created far more than her now-classic first work, A Raisin in the Sun, and her second, The Sign in Sidney Brustein�
�s Window—which was playing on Broadway at the time of her death—the very richness of her output deserved the commitment of one equally dedicated to effecting wide recognition of the extent and range of her legacy.

  Shortly after the playwright’s death, Bob Nemiroff began the process of making her works widely known by creating—in dramatic and literary form—a portrait of the artist drawn entirely from her own words. He called both the play and the book To Be Young, Gifted and Black (YGB)—a phrase of commendation taken from Hansberry’s last speech, delivered to young winners of a United Negro College Fund writing contest.

  The collection of the artist’s range and genius provided in YGB was drawn from her unpublished plays in progress and from completed essays, speeches, fiction, and poetry as well as from the play through which she first gained recognition, A Raisin in the Sun, and the one that closed on Broadway on the day she died, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.

  Among the plays Hansberry left were several incomplete versions of Les Blancs, the title play of this new Vintage edition of The Collected Last Plays. Les Blancs is the only Hansberry work that Nemiroff adapted into a final version; its dramatic life continues to evolve as the values of the play are directorially realized on stage through successive productions. In her comprehensive Introduction to this Vintage collection, Margaret B. Wilkerson, Hansberry’s biographer, provides a history of each of the works as part of her critical treatment of each; Robert Nemiroff earlier provided “A Critical Background” that includes invaluable personal accounts of the emergence and development of each work in the playwright’s consciousness.

  The background notes that Nemiroff wrote for Les Blancs serve virtually as a prologue for the play. Through his exposition, the realization can be gained of a key aspect of Hansberry’s life that is germane to all her writings.

  Lorraine Hansberry walked in dazzling history—was a creature of it, a portrayer and interpreter of extraordinary times. Her works—in keeping with her philosophy of the obligation of the artist—illuminate her world and ours, and chart directions. Hence the frequent critical references to this playwright’s “prophetic voice.”

  Next year (1995) will be the thirtieth anniversary of Hansberry’s death. In this year (1994) of the new edition of Les Blancs, the sun has just risen on the installation of a black President of South Africa following more than a century of turmoil, blood, and agony in that exquisitely beautiful country.

  This playwright was one of the first African American dramatists to create a major work addressing the issues at stake in colonial Africa and what surely lay ahead for colonizers and colonized in the inevitable struggles for liberation. She remains one of the handful of playwrights in any country outside Africa who have, to date, addressed this subject matter.

  Nemiroff began his notes on Les Blancs and its author with an account of Lorraine Hansberry’s immersion in African history from an early age. These were not experiences shared by most African Americans—and certainly not by Americans in general.

  But it is her own direct exposure to major participants in the United States that was most remarkable. As a very young woman, she served first as a reporter and then as an associate editor for Paul Robeson’s newspaper, Freedom. The staff shared offices with brilliant African Americans involved in the liberation struggles of Africa—involved at high cost. Several, like Robeson, were cruelly Red-baited before, during, and after the McCarthy period; some went into exile.

  Above all, the budding young playwright experienced the excitement and stimulation of taking courses on Africa under William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, father of Pan-Africanism and one of the most brilliant scholars America has ever produced. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and educated at Fisk University, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois produced more than twenty volumes of work over a lifetime spanning almost a century (1868–1963), beginning just after the Civil War of one century and continuing into the years of the Civil Rights Movement of the next. Few fields of knowledge in the social sciences, humanities, and literary world were exempt from the prolific pen of this intellectual giant, while the measure of his organizational skills on behalf of Africans, African Americans, and Africans of the diaspora is incalculable.*

  In her library, on the inside flap of Du Bois’s Black Folk Then and Now (1939, begun as The Negro in 1915), the playwright-to-be left a handwritten description of the man as seen from her classroom seat: “Freedom’s passion, organized and refined, sits there.” She was an anguished observer during the McCarthy years, when the political attempt was made to disgrace the esteemed senior spokesman, to cries of dismay and protest from around the world. At ninety-three, undiminished, Du Bois left the United States for Ghana and a setting made available to him by head of state Kwame Nkrumah to work, with other scholars, on his monumentally conceived Encyclopedia Africana.

  Two years later, he died in Ghana on the very eve of the March on Washington, during which tens of thousands of his fellow Americans vindicated his vision and long years of commitment to the freedom of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora and of human beings everywhere. Given all that he had known and experienced over so long a lifetime, the message of hope and optimism that he left behind as his letter to the world is one that his former pupil also profoundly understood.

  At the 1959 conference of writers where Hansberry addressed her peers, she listed all the dismaying factors (the list was long) that characterized the world into which she was born. The list completed, she continued:

  I have given you this account so that you know that what I write is not based on the assumption of idyllic possibilities or innocent assessments of the true nature of life—but, rather, my own personal view that, posing one against the other, I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars.…

  Hansberry began working on Les Blancs (The Whites) in 1960. (Responding to a fan letter from a Chinese woman professor at the University of Peking after the success of A Raisin in the Sun, she parenthetically used the title The Holy Ones, perhaps facetiously, in referring to Les Blancs among the works she was planning to write.) Nemiroff states that the impetus that sent her into deeper involvement was her immediate “visceral response” to the U.S. production of Jean Genet’s powerful play Les Nègres (The Blacks).

  The African American playwright felt that the Frenchman’s treatment of European oppression in Africa took refuge in a romantic exoticism superimposed upon the Africans, which permitted the artist, in fact, to evade the real issues at stake. She had seen at firsthand too much of both the strength and the cost of human commitment to accept Genet’s thesis that power, whether in white or black hands—metaphorically in The Blacks, with a simple change of masks—operates the same way, which is to say ruthlessly.

  Always where human beings oppress each other, she felt, that which is central to the oppression can be defined and confronted. Only in the recognition and confrontation is there any chance of defeating the enemies of humankind. She abhorred any suggestion—as she felt permeated Genet’s drama—that life is “absurdist” and that man (in the words of one of William Faulkner’s despairing characters) “stinks the same no matter where in time.”

  Hansberry walked in history, I have said, particularly in the intermingled history of Africans and African Americans. The threads run throughout her works. In A Raisin in the Sun, Walter Lee Younger, Sr., and Lena, his wife, were among the great body of Southern black migrants from South to North before World War I, making their way to what they hoped would be better lives for themselves and their children and children’s children.

  Walter Lee Younger, Jr., the Chicago chauffeur who dreams of being a Chicago tycoon, holds in his consciousness the powerful, throbbing sounds of African drums and the shadowy shapes of African freedom fighters. During a poetic scene in which he is intoxicated with liquor and his younger sister, Beneatha, is intoxicated with life, the brother leaps onto the family’s kitchen table, shouti
ng “FLAMING SPEAR! … OCOMOGOSIAY … THE LION IS WAKING …”

  The playwright tells us that on his summit—as below him Beneatha dances a dance of welcome to warriors returning to the imaginary village—Walter “sees what we cannot, that he is a leader of his people, a great chief, a descendant of Chaka, and that the hour to march has come.”

  In Les Blancs, the hour to march comes unmistakably for Tshembe Matoseh, Africa’s son returning home for his father’s funeral from his new life in London, only to find himself irrevocably enmeshed in the liberation struggle of his people.

  Readers and viewers should take care not to impose stereotypical thinking on Hansberry’s work; the vision of this artist is global. When Tshembe confronts his brother, Abioseh, who has chosen to forsake his African ways in favor of becoming a Catholic priest, the one brother scorns the choice made by the other not only because Abioseh believes in a white man’s God—but also because converting to the new faith offers a route, he hopes, to some degree of power sharing with whites.

  One suspects that in her choice of Christian sects—Catholicism instead of Protestantism—to bestow on Abioseh, Hansberry remembered (from the age of five) her mother telling her never to forget the invasion of Ethiopia by Italian soldiers blessed by the Pope. But the playwright’s choice in this instance should never be confused with a condemnation of Catholicism. Had she lived, without a doubt Hansberry would have been particularly conscious and admiring of the role of Catholic priests and nuns in freedom struggles in South America and would have seen in that participation the affirming forward sweep of history.

  Of Hansberry’s two other plays in this edition, What Use Are Flowers? goes beyond Les Blancs in exploring a world in which human failures turn into catastrophe and the world is destroyed by a nuclear blast. In the play, which Margaret B. Wilkerson discusses in detail, the plot turns on an old hermit who emerges from a forest remote from civilization and discovers that the only survivors are wild children whom he, nearing the end of his life, has to teach all the wonders that humankind had produced.