Sweet Lorraine

 

 Five years ago when I was gathering myself together to approach writing “Waiting for Giovanni” I only knew one thing for sure:  Lorraine Hansberry would be in the play.  I hadn’t much biographical information yet but since it was to be a ‘dream play’ I figured it was okay to create a friendship between them even if I found there was none.  (There was.)  The piece is meant to evoke an emotional crossroads not portray anyone’s biography so it seemed natural to have two of the most significant writers of the 20^th century be in the same play

Last week was Lorraine Hansberry’s birthday (May 19^th, the same as Malcolm X!) and it reminded me of why I wanted to include her in this piece.  Hansberry and Baldwin were both admonished to ‘mind their own business;’ that is to stick to writing about topics that directly and literally related to Blackness.

Most oppressed communities go through this. The ‘uplift literature’ of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries was de rigueur for the ‘Negro’ writers who were meant to show a good face for the ‘hood and gain sympathy for the Black plight.  Lesbian literature of the 1970s was often also focused on how ‘normal’ lesbians are.  Not necessarily a bad thing, certainly.  But all writers and their communities grow beyond victimhood if they grow healthy. They begin to see their victimization more than simply aimed at their small corner of humanity and can approach liberation as part of a global movement.

Hansberry was the first African American woman to be produced on Broadway (“Raisin in the Sun” 1959) which would automatically hand her the Race Torch.  Then she wrote “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” which told its story through an interracial set of characters.  The cry of protest went up: “What did that story have to do with the African American Story?” 

The truth is African Americans are unique (as are all people) and African Americans are also universal (as are all people).  The stories Black writers tell are theirs no matter the topic or the characters they create to tell it.

In “W4G” my character Lorraine says:

            “We are all our own topics.  Everything I see, hear, taste, smell and feel

            comes through me and out of me.  I can lift up this skirt and piss out

            the world.”

Critics are notoriously myopic, focusing on whatever detail that strikes a chord within them and often ignoring a larger context or topic. This was what happened and continues to happen with Hansberry’s classic play, “Raisin in the Sun.” 

The piece still crackles with life and ideas more than 50 years later yet most discussions only focus on one element of the story. Walter Lee needs to claim his manhood by using his late father’s insurance money to open a liquor store while his widowed mother insists the family escape the ghetto and use the funds to buy a little house in an all white neighborhood.  That is a formidable struggle but not the only one. 

Hansberry also presented us with other struggles:  Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth, is pregnant with a second child while they live in the crowded poverty of his mother’s tenement.  When she broaches the idea of an abortion she’s met with stony religious rebuke from her mother-in-law but now answers to the question of who has control over her body.  Walter

Lee’s sister, Beneatha, wants to use part of the money to go to medical school.  Beneatha has to suffer the condescension of not just her brother but also of her enthusiastic African beau who thinks women were invented to be wives. 

So many academics and critics follow the same path laid down by the dominant culture the emotional core of writers’ work can be totally buried under archaic interests like how women must stay in a specific role or that there are no gay people in a community.  Hansberry and Baldwin resisted that worn path as much as they could.  When Hansberry wrote to the lesbian journal The Ladder in 1957 she was clearly searching for places to feel free to speak her mind…her full mind not just the Black playwright who gets to be a ‘first’ mind.  She wrote:

…”moral conclusions-based on acceptance of a social moral superstructure

which has never admitted to the equality of women [and] is therefore immoral

itself.”

A rebellious spirit and great vision pushed Baldwin and Hansberry to write what was in their hearts. Hansberry didn’t live along enough to further express her love for women (as far as we know…but more information is sure to come). Baldwin himself was ever the rebel that made it possible for him to state that he didn’t want to have to belong to a club to be himself.  However, he lived his life, ultimately, in line with the belief that:

"Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we

cannot live within."

In reaching out to the first national lesbian magazine Sweet Lorraine, as James called her, allied herself with a community which was barely on the radar screen for the Civil Rights Movement of that period.  At least not out loud.  At least not yet.

Trading your life for a sandwich

 This month we're commemorating the 50 anniversary of the Freedom Rides which helped desegregate the south.  The PBS program, American Experience, is showing a documentary about the Freedom Rides also in May: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/

Oprah, on May 4th, will have 150 folks who traveled around the southern states to bring the spot light to the insanity of Jim Crow laws which forbid blacks and whites from eating together publicly.

That makes sense but there's something oddly surreal about the colored queen of daytime TV with all of her international star power sitting down with those who risked their lives when they sat down at segregated lunch counters in the summer of 1961. I'm happy that finally their service to the civil rights movement is being celebrated.  Mostly they were young college students or working people who committed themselves to nonviolence in the face of direct verbal and physical abuse. 

And there was nowhere to turn if you were being beaten or spat on at a lunch counter. The white southern sheriffs were not going to come to the aid of any civil rights activist—black or white.

As a teenager I watched the heroics of the demonstrators on the evening news every night and, was moved to tears.  I was also inspired to participate in demonstrations in my own home town, Boston, often more subtly but just as strictly segregated. 

James Baldwin was deeply imbedded in the Civil Rights Movement of that time, talking with leaders regularly, gauging when his prestigious presence would be a valuable element to the team strategy. His participation was intellectual as well as physical.  His essays helped frame the discussion of racial politics for the entire country.

It was a heady time when we all saw the world changing around us faster than it ever had before.  Every day held hope that equality was just up the road if we kept marching.  But there is always a price to pay for commitment.  The files that the FBI kept on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were spiteful attempts to prove he was at the very least a Communist. If the US government had spent as much time protecting the rights of African Americans as it did peeking through the curtains of black leaders, desegregation might have been less bloody and certainly more speedy.

James Baldwin was also, like most activists, the object of FBI surveillance; but even more damaging than that perhaps was the disapproving eye fellow black activists kept on Baldwin and other ‘known’ gays.  A NY Congressman threatened to spread a rumor that Dr. King was having an affair with Bayard Rustin if King didn't fire his gay colleague.  (Rustin went on to organize the original March on Washington. See the Nancy Kates documentary "Brother Outsider.") At the same time other black activists tried to undermine any influence that Baldwin had.

There's a lovely documentary about Baldwin by Karen Thorsen, “Price of the Ticket,” in which many black activists appear at Baldwin’s memorial in Manhattan to praise their brother.  As I watched it I thought about their severe lack of brotherhood when Baldwin was alive. In his lifetime the nationalist element treated him like the FBI treated them and other black activists.

All of us carry those scars from what sometimes might seem like harmless wounds. We just don t know what residual affects we’ll end up carrying around with us.  Maybe that's what made James Baldwin such an overachiever.  Who knows? 

These were the treacherous waters Baldwin navigated as he wrote “Giovanni’s Room.”  People were risking their lives; demonstrators were being maimed and killed.  How important was it for him to write a book his brothers thought would set back the Civil Rights Movement?

Reflecting on Baldwin’s dilemma does make me wonder what is different today in our many movements.  How dismissive are we with each other? Recent reverberations from the fight against Proposition 8 in California in the hope of legalizing marriage equality was a good reminder of how insular communities can be.  The black community may feel that the gay movement is riding on its accomplishments as if all movements are not made from the same bricks. 

 The gay community may feel so hip it doesn't have time to really look at the past and honor what went before.  But if we can honor that past and invest in a future that includes us all there might be something worth fighting for.  The hard road that Baldwin walked may have been worth it. 

It’s weirdly great that Oprah is honoring the Freedom Riders.  Yes, it’ll be sudsy and glitzy at the same time. But truth is the heartland watches Oprah!  It’s crucial that they and we remember.

Drama Queen

 

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”

                                                                                             Audre Lorde

 When James Baldwin’s first play, “The Amen Corner,” opened in 1965 its neighbors on Broadway represented the spectrum of dramaturgy: from “Danton’s Death” to “The Zulu and the Zayda” with Maurice Chevalier somewhere in the middle.  Coming as it did from the pen of one of the major African American political essayists in the U.S. “The Amen Corner,” must have been kind of a surprise because the story’s central theme was not the internal workings of the Montgomery Bus Boycott or development of the sit in as strategy but rather the personal struggles of a woman preacher and her family.  It felt almost like soap opera to some critics.

But soap is how the world turns!  In many ways it is in the theatre that Baldwin most reflects his dramatic interior life that is kept at bay in his more intellectual essays and in his novels. Both “The Amen Corner” and “Blues for Mister Charlie” (1964) dig into the frayed emotional lives of the characters and the ‘movement’ is the context not the total content.

Baldwin’s approach presages Robin Morgan’s feminist credo: ‘the personal is political.’  Baldwin understood that “Freedom is personal… [it is]…a complex, difficult—and private—thing .”  It is in his drama that Baldwin reveals a variety of personal vulnerabilities that might remain cloaked by his intellectual acuity in his books of essays.

“The Amen Corner” is, at its heart, an exposition of Baldwin’s personal struggle with religion and his family, especially his (step) father David.  “Blues for Mister Charlie” is the cri de coeur of a man who’s spirit lives despite the brutal murders around him.

Baldwin’s other (and more obscure) play “Giovanni’s Room,” (WHOSE SCRIPT I’M SEARCHING DESPARATELY FOR!!!) is based on his novel.  And despite it being set in Paris and its characters being white, not black, perhaps, it is the most personal of them all.  The parallels between the novel’s progress and that of Baldwin’s emotional relationship with lovers in general and with the younger Swiss painter, Lucien Happersberger are both tenuous and obvious. Even though the novel predates their break up by several years I think it illuminates the kind of rejection Baldwin lived with all of his life and had come to anticipate.  Certainly Lucien’s ambivalence about his sexuality didn’t inspire confidence in Baldwin.  But evidence of the depth of Baldwin’s love for Lucien lies in the fact that he maintained a profound relationship with him despite his desertion of Baldwin to marry not just anyone—but Diana Sands, the star of Baldwin’s play, “Blues for Mister Charlie.”

The dramatic conclusion of the novel and the play—the death of Giovanni—does not neatly represent the more mundane resolution of Baldwin’s heartbreak—the two remained close friends as only queer people can do. The ending can, however, be read as a powerful evocation of the emotional turmoil through which Baldwin lived when, like his character Giovanni, he is abandoned by his lover and by the Black writers he admired.

It was with the publication of “Giovanni’s Room,” despite warnings that the homosexual nature of the central relationship would ruin his career that Baldwin finally comes fully into himself as an adult, African American man.  The ghosts of religion, of his father (as represented by the many Black militants who disparaged him) and his own reservations are vanquished.  It is this wholeness that might have aided him in living through the enormity of his heartbreak(s).  Baldwin worked for many years on the theatrical adaptation of the book.  The workshop production at the famed Actors Studio in New York in 1965 as well as another in Turkey did not result in the Broadway production Baldwin had hoped for.  It did, however stand as a testament to the deeply emotional life that Baldwin lead and how insistent he was that the personal journey he made as a lover of men not disappear under his reputation as a writer of and about the Civil Rights Movement.

Having spoken out loud, Baldwin insures that his passion for life live on—both on the page and on the stage.

Toujour l'amour

 

 “I starved in Paris for a while, but I learned something. For one thing I fell in love.”

So James Baldwin is quoted in Randall Kenan’s biography (Chelsea House), and it’s there that I started thinking about Baldwin’s relationship to his novel, “Giovanni’s Room.”

The beautiful symmetry of the idea of starving being balanced by falling in love is amazingly simple yet fully expressive of the experience.  Love fills you up in a way that nothing else can…not even French food.

“Giovanni’s Room” was a revelation in 1957—it was written by an African American man; was set in Paris and about the love affair between two men...not African American men.  Editors, activists, anyone who could catch his ear warned Baldwin against publishing the novel.  It would ruin his career…they said.  Writing for magazines; activism in the Civil Rights Movement; career as a novelist—all threatened according to naysayers.

In some ways that response is not surprising in the context of the brutality evidenced in that historical moment: The US military had to be used to escort young Black kids to whites-only schools.  Fourteen-year old Emmett Till was murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi because he was suspected of speaking to a white woman. Demonstrators found themselves assaulted by bone-cracking fire hoses. Realtors and neighborhood associations conspired to keep neighborhoods white.  Every ugly impulse that had remained unspoken was now howling across the country.

Underlying much of the anxiety, treachery and betrayal of human rights was/is acute erotophobia.  The Puritan roots of US culture are insidiously destructive; they helped keep women in the kitchen, to make birth control almost unattainable, keep victims silent about sexual abuse, prevent sex education in schools…and on and on.  All this while women were increasingly objectified as if that would contain and control the danger of sexual desire.

The convoluted nature of this culture’s relationship to sexuality and how it was visited on Black slaves makes it understandable that African Americans did not want to hear a story about sexual desire and certainly not between two men.

But as Baldwin said: he fell in love.  It was with Lucien, a charming, handsome Swiss nascent painter, eight years his junior who he met in a sketchy Parisian bar frequented by what he called “ambivalent men.”  It was the full feeling of love that Baldwin was working his way toward expressing. 

“Giovanni’s Room” is not a happy-forever-after tale but the core of the story is the inexorability of love.  It is a love that has the certainty of the tides which must be recognized.  This is what people were afraid of in the 1950s as they warned Baldwin not to publish his book.  This is what people are afraid of today when they pass laws decreeing who can be family to whom. Or when they bash queer people on the street.  

Things have changed and yet they haven’t. 

But Baldwin published the book and it’s still in print more than 50 years later. Giving credence to one of my favorite rallying cries from the early Gay Pride marches: An army of lovers can not fail!

The Cross of Redemption

Randall Kenan says in his introduction to his new collection of James Baldwin’s essays “…he was audacious in his love for complex sentences; one might say even fearless in the way he deployed the English language.  Reading a Baldwin sentence can feel like recreating thought itself.”

It's true; and that’s the key to the revelatory nature of his writing and thinking.  If we look to literature to help us open our minds Baldwin’s words reveal that he is taking that journey as well.  In his sentence structure, love of words, and ideas he creates a synergy that enlivens the reader making the engagement an active, not passive one.

That’s what I felt the first time I read Baldwin.  That was before I knew anything of his biography.  And the biography only adds to an understanding of his complexity.

Born into a working poor family in Harlem, Baldwin lived through the Great Depression, the open racism which saw lynching still a sport in the south and the seditious Jim Crow of the north.  Yet his capacity for optimism and believe in human possibility is evidenced in all of his work, even when he portrays the sorrows of loss. Even when others try to dissuade him from his love.

That’s one of the things that makes “Giovanni’s Room” such an amazing novel.  There is no happy, candy coated ending, (spoiler alert) Giovanni goes to the guillotine and his true love remains as faithless as ever. Yet Baldwin’s sense of the power and importance of love remains.  Below is a draft of the monologue which I’m working on for the play for the character, Giovanni who is Jimmy’s muse in the play.

I’ve rewritten it several times after the readings of the play over the past two years and am still honing in on it. Here he rails against those who would suggest Jimmy burn the novel rather than publish it.

            GIOVANNI:

Why would he say that! A burned book is…a burned life isn’t it? 

It’s an entire village of lives tossed on a funeral pyre.  And what of the

bitterness that rises in the smoke? Do we breathe that in?

            A book is a holy vessel carrying into the world what we need.

            This is no a medieval story where the villagers race toward us with

            torches blazing with righteousness.  Do they expect my silence as they tie

            me to   the stake and light the funeral pyre?   Who is the monster here?

           

Some of them are afraid to be revealed…as either loving or not loving

souls.  That’s why they wave their torches at you and scream betrayer.

But revelation is why you write.  The light thrown from their torches can’t

be contained to just one story or another.  All stories are revealed.  If you

find fear and bitterness they stare out from the receding dark.  If you find

love it shines brighter than all fire.  

You can not hide from yourself or from them and hope to ever really see

anything.  If they do not care for who I am, then they certainly don’t care

for who you are.  In truth they do not care for themselves at all. 

And so you must write.

            Before we are words on a page…it is there…our need for each other.

            You ask what should you do with such monumental need? There is only

            one thing: write.

            Without the sound of Luc’s breath on the pillow next to you…you write.

            Against these men who juggle the fires of your destruction as if they are

            in the center ring of a circus… you write.  When the sound of mourning

is so deep the mourners can barely breathe…you write. 

            It is the thing you do to turn torches into lanterns. 

The words wring life from death. 

                                                                        ***

Home Sweet...

Homemaking is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about James Baldwin.  Cafés, voluminous cigarette smoke, cocktail parties, literary debates, handsome young men, civil rights passion, yes.  But domestication has not been on the long list of ideas that Baldwin’s name evokes for me. 

After I devoured “The Well of Loneliness” when I was about 14, I discovered “Waiting for Giovanni” and was relieved to know that there were more than just white ‘homosexuals’ in Victorian garb; we could also be a black and from Harlem. It was important (back in the day) to know we came in all colors; although happy endings were still far in the future.  The world of Baldwin seemed to me one of danger, emotional endurance and melancholy; there was not a whiff of home baked cookies. 

But two things added more texture to the picture I had of Baldwin.  “James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade” by M.J. Zaboroska, is a very readable exploration of his life and writing between 1961 and1971.  That was, coincidentally, the beginning of my devotion to his work…from my first desperate search for like beings to a mature appreciation of his creative skills and political astuteness.

One of the many wonderful revelations Ms. Zaboroska explores is how the theme of home and homemaking “weighed increasingly on Baldwin throughout his Turkish period.” She also reveals how, in letters over the years, Baldwin discussed his appreciation of the cozy, home qualities of his apartment in Turkey as well as some writing colonies he worked in. 

This view helped me form an idea about the interior life of my main character, Jimmy, and what are some of the needs that drive him.  On the exterior he is erudite, sharp tongued, exquisitely perceptive, all qualities which place him apart from others.  Internally he yearns for the closeness of relationships and homecomings the way that most of us do.

The second thing which helped confirm the direction I was going in was meeting James Baldwin’s “sister-out-law,” Carole. (We say “sister-out-law” since she and JB’s brother, David, never legally married.) This was an amazing experience, partly because Carole is great fun and we could reminisce about the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1970s as if we’d known each other then. And her life with David and close relationship with JB gave her a unique perspective.  She, David and their son sometimes spent summers with JB in Turkey and France providing some of that ‘home’ JB yearned for. A young, artist herself, living on the vibrant art scene, Carole saw up close the Jimmy that I was creating on the page. 

During our meal together at one point she mentioned JB’s ‘fragility’ and my heart leapt.  That was exactly the quality I’ve been trying to define but I hadn’t gotten to that word yet.  How could I portray a hugely successful intellectual activist from the inside out so the audience can feel the fragile place where he yearns for ‘home?’

The lovers, the books, the cafés were all pointing him in that direction; that place—either physically or emotionally—where he could feel at home with himself and with the world.   

In April “Waiting for Giovanni” will have a reading in Minneapolis at Macalister College where my collaborator, Harry Waters Jr. teaches. Carole, who’ll be in town for a conference, will have a chance to hear if I’ve captured the Jimmy she knew and loved.  Her stories of those times do make his domestic aspect seem more recognizable and make Baldwin feel more familiar.  It is, after all, from that core fragile place of need that all his passion flowed. Which may be true for many of us.

 

Six degrees of Giovanni...

…or the people on my road to writing a play about James Baldwin. 

Sometime in the 1960s my high school in Boston took us on a rare class trip.  Our school was not among the most well endowed…I can count the school trips we made in my four years on one hand.  However, this one was memorable. 

We went downtown to see a professional production of “Miss Reardon Drinks a Little.” I don’t think it was the best play but it was so professional and magical I never forgot the thrill of it.  So when I got to college I signed up for the practical major, sociology, and the heart minor, theatre.

After graduation I left home and moved to New York City thinking I was going to work in journalism but I took a job teaching theatre to youth while I was in grad school. My career as a Barbara Walters replacement receded with each theatre workshop I taught.

Once I completed my journalism degree I joined a new theatre group while I waited for a network news executive to discover me. American Theatre Experiment (whose founder, Richard Gaffield, introduced me to one of the owners of Cornelia Street Café where I later did my first poetry reading—but that’s another blog) became my home where I worked on lots of readings and several productions, one of which was an historic (and impressive) restaging of an adaptation of Richard Wright’s novel NATIVE SON. 

There I met a wonderful actor/writer with Irish charm and a grand sense of adventure, Shawn McAllister   http://www.shawnmcallister.com/.  He befriended this anxious little colored girl and taught me how to shoot pool and drink whisky.  We talked about theatre and our lives---present and past--- and finally uncovered an odd confluence of things: Shawn knew folks connected to the same production of “Miss Reardon Drinks a Little” that I’d seen years before in Boston.  In that moment of connection I understood the profound bridges between people that theatre can build.  Without theatre Shawn and I probably would never have met, and that meeting confirmed the possibilities that my youthful theatre experience had sparked.

Shawn’s friendship along with others a made at ATE gave me the courage to seek out the Frank Silvera Writers Workshop which read new plays by writers of color every Monday with great actors like Morgan Freeman. It was working as a stage manager for the workshop and for Off and Off Off Broadway productions that I met Harry Waters Jr.

Harry had recently graduated from Princeton and come to New York City at a magical time in theatre.  The high point of the Black Theatre Movement of the 1960s in NYC was fading, but some of the companies and actors were still bright lights in the firmament.

By the mid-1970s the iconic New Lafayette Theatre was dissipating but the Negro Ensemble Company and the National Black Theatre were still producing.  The history of the work each did and the influence on U.S. theatre and film is still to be fully analyzed.  But the lasting effect on me shows up in everything I do.  Whether being in the audience of a New Lafayette Theatre ritual/play in Harlem or stage managing for a new Ed Bullins play in the West Village or helping designer Sandy Ross hang lights at the Negro Ensemble Company or watching Alfre Woodard in her formative stage acting in a little play…it’s all in here and comes out in the writing. 

By the 1980s I was so ready to write I must have been sweating ink, but I was having a difficult time figuring out what to write about.  Who would care about my life?  Little art that I saw or worked on reflected who I was as a raised poor, colored lesbian feminist; so I turned to fiction and was embraced by the women’s presses and magazines.

Soon two other things happened to close the circle on this path (I know: too many metaphors in one blog).  I wandered into the lesbian/feminist theatre on the Lower East Side, WOW Café, where I met Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. Then I saw Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf” (the play not the T. Perry movie!) about 10 times.

From Miss Reardon to that moment I had not understood that I just needed to write from inside myself about anything I wanted.  It would start with me and the women who raised me, my multi-ethnic family, and our neighborhood.  I could use any forms I wanted…poetry, memoir, vampire stories.  Plays.

All of these disparate people, most of whom never met each other, many of whom probably don’t remember me brought me to this moment where Harry and I are taking this journey to explore James Baldwin’s mind.  When I first picked up the copy of “Giovanni’s Room” when I was a teenager in my father’s flat it was a personal revelation …and what isn’t when you’re a teenager.  But I had no reason to believe the novel would turn into such a professional passion. 

In the reading about Baldwin’s life I’ve done to prepare to write this piece, I’ve found so many of the anxieties and uncertainties that I carried inside myself through those years working in NY theatre…who am I, why was my vision valuable, will people care, will people of color hate me?  Insecurity is not the first word that comes to mind when anyone thinks of James Baldwin.  But he was a short, small built, dark-skinned, not traditionally (Western-wise) good looking, gay man in the 1950s and 60s.  Insecurity would be the least of the things anyone in his right mind might be feeling, whatever the persona he projected, whatever his brilliance on the page.

Because Harry and I had worked ‘in the trenches’ as they say, toiling in NYC theatre side by side we reconnected with a sense of trust.  When he asked me to write something about Baldwin…I had no idea it would turn into a journey lasting so long or one so full of love.

Next week we’re casting for the final two parts, including GIOVANNI!  And next month we’re doing another reading of the play in Minneapolis so I’ll get to hear my most recent version of the script.  Wish us luck!  More next Tuesday.