It’s an absolute shame that Lorraine Hansberry died so young at 34. She was so intelligent and insightful, and as these last plays of hers show, quite a playwright. There are three plays in this collection, with substantial background and contextual material, and I’ll comment on each.

Les Blancs – finished by her ex-husband after she passed away, this play deals with colonialism in Africa. While it made people uncomfortable or delighted when it was first performed (often depending on their race, or at least, their political views), I found it quite balanced. She gives us African characters who are simmering with resentfulness for the exploitation their continent endured for centuries, but she also gives us one who left to travel and get educated in Europe, as well as another who converted to Christianity and sees the missionary’s perspective. She gives us Caucasian characters who are condescending and who thinly veil their racism, but she also gives us those who did charitable work for years, and one who seems to want to engage in dialogue. Hansberry had a knack for putting her finger right on the nub of issues, and it’s through this range of characters that she reveals racial and power dynamics. This passage was fantastic:

“I do not ‘hate’ all white men – but I desperately wish that I did. It would make everything infinitely easier! But I am afraid that, among other things, I have seen the slums of Liverpool and Dublin and the caves above Naples. I have seen Dachau and Anne Frank’s attic in Amsterdam. I have seen too many raw-knuckled Frenchmen coming out of the Metro at dawn and too many hungry Italian children to believe that those who raided Africa for three centuries ever ‘loved’ the white race either. I would like to be simple-minded for you, but … I cannot. I have … seen.”

You see in this comment the universality behind what seems to be a specific context. Additionally, while the play is set in Africa, the link to America is clear, especially when one character points out that the American South was itself an apartheid system, and then asks:

“And just why should we be able to ‘talk’ so easily? What is this marvelous nonsense with you Americans? For a handshake, a grin, a cigarette and half a glass of whiskey you want three hundred years to disappear – and in five minutes! Do you really think the rape of a continent dissolves in cigarette smoke?”

Later one of the white doctors makes this point: “They [the courts] are not ideal, if that is what you mean. But I expect our standards of jurisprudence in matters of race will compare favorably with America’s any day!”

It’s a play with a viewpoint to be clear, stating that those in power will never voluntarily give it up unless forced to in the quote by Frederick Douglass in the preface (which I extract below), and in the comment a white character makes towards the end that Africa needs warriors, because “a line goes on into infinity unless it is bisected.” Plays with viewpoints are likely to challenge or provoke us, and this one does that, and in very good ways. (4 stars)

The Drinking Gourd – this play was written originally on commission for a television event to honor the centennial of the Civil War, one that was ultimately cancelled as network executives feared offending Southern viewers and going near the powder keg of race issues that Americans had still not confronted (and haven’t fully to this day). I was blown away by how good this one was. Meticulously researched, Hansberry doesn’t simplistically give us just the physical cruelty of slavery, she also reveals the economic realities of life in the South, and engages in the psychology of all of her characters, black and white. She correctly understood that a critical aspect to keeping four million slaves and the system in place was to keep six to seven million poor whites in the mindset of protecting the system, even if it was one that also impoverished them (recognize any parallels to today?)

She doesn’t reduce any of her characters to simple types, and most tellingly, avoids even what may seem like positive African-American character types – for example, the ‘Mammy’ type. What I hadn’t fully appreciated was an aspect of psychology that went into the creation of this tough but sweet and forgiving character type, often by well-intentioned and liberal white writers. It is just so hard to confront the horror of slavery, to stare it completely in the face, and one of the coping mechanisms is to consciously or subconsciously make those who were so cruelly subjected to it somehow different from other people. An outright racist makes them lesser, inferior beings. A well-intentioned person might embrace the idea that these were simple, gentle people, steeped in Christianity, and had a deep wellspring of forgiveness. Either robs them of their humanity, and softens the blow for us today which should not be softened. Hansberry recognized this, and in a critical insight wrote:

“Guilt would to bear too swiftly and painfully if white America were really obliged quite suddenly to think of the Negro quite as he is, that is, simply as a human being. That would raise havoc … White America has to believe not only that the oppression of the Negro is unfortunate (because most of White American does believe that), but something else, to keep its sense of the unfortunate from turning into a sense of outrage … White America has to believe that Blacks are different, and not only so, but that, by the mystique of this difference, they actually profit in certain charming ways which escape the rest of us with all our engrossing complexities.”

The play was eye-opening to me and made me challenge the things I had grown up with and seen, even material that was trying to communicate that slavery and racism are wrong. The background material was also fantastic, and I quote from it extensively below. (4.5 stars)

What Use are Flowers? – This short play is set in a dystopian future where an old man who has been away for decades comes down out of the woods ala Rip van Winkle to find that civilization is gone, and only illiterate, animalistic children remain. It reminded me a little of Jack London’s ‘The Scarlet Plague’, and while the concept is solid and it served as a delivery vehicle for some of Hansberry’s deepest personal convictions about life despite all of its struggles, I just don’t think it was developed as well as it could have been. (3.5 stars)

Summing up - Hansberry was not resigned to despair, a pessimist, or an absurdist, despite all of the evil she had seen in life. In one speech she outlines this, saying “I have, like all of you, on a thousand occasions seen indescribable displays of man’s very real inhumanity to man, and I have come to maturity, as we all must, knowing that greed and malice and indifference to human misery and bigotry and corruption, brutality, and perhaps above all else, ignorance – the prime ancient and persistent enemy of man – abound in this world.”

In spite of all that, she was an optimist, writing so poignantly “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 reason enough and – I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations.”

She was also an activist, and a fighter, one who fought with her intellect, words, and the unvarnished truth. She believed that honest dialogue would lead to clarity and then ultimately action, preferably peaceful action, but knowing that that wasn’t always possible.

Quotes:
On struggle and progress, from Frederick Douglass, quoted in the preface to Les Blancs:
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both … Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do that by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”

On slavery:
“Some scholars have estimated that in the three centuries that the European slave trade flourished, the African continent lost one hundred million of its people. No one, to my knowledge, has ever paid reparations to the descendants of black men; indeed, they have not yet really acknowledged the fact of the crime against humanity which was the conquest of Africa. But then – history has not yet been concluded … has it?”

And in this searing passage from a letter from January 11, 1964:
“But I have long since learned that it is difficult for the American mind to adjust to the realization that the Rhetts and Scarletts were as much monsters as the keepers of Buchenwald – they just dressed more attractively and their accents are softer. (I know I switched tenses.)”

On the Civil War and slavery, which I found far ahead of its time, and something we still see as a problem reaching a melting point today:
“And I am so profoundly interested to realize that in these 100 years since the Civil War very few of our countrymen have really believed that their Federal Union and the defeat of the slavocracy and the negation of slavery as an institution is an admirable fact of American life. So that it is now possible to get enormous books on the Civil War and to go through the back of them and not find the word ‘slavery,’ let alone ‘Negro.’
We’ve been trying very hard – this is what Jimmy and I mean when we speak of guilt – we’ve been trying very hard in America to pretend that this greatest conflict didn’t even have at its base the only thing it had as its base: where person after person will write a book today and insist that slavery was not the issue! You know, they tell you it was the ‘economy’ – as if that economy was not based on slavery. It’s become a great semantic game to try and get this particular blot out of our minds, and people spend volumes discussing the battles of the Civil War, and which army was crossing which river at five minutes to two, and how their swords were hanging, but the slavery issue we have tried to get rid of. To a point that while it has been perfectly popular, admirable, the thing to do – all my life since Gone with the Wind - to write anything you wanted about the slave system and beautiful ladies in big, fat dresses screaming as their houses burned down from the terrible, nasty, awful Yankees…” ( )

First edition