CHAPTER 1

A Sweet Promise

It has become a sweet promise, hiding, whispering to me daily ... fame! I shockmyself with such thoughts and shake my head with embarrassment ... fame!

—Lorraine Hansberry,To Be Young, Gifted, and Black

Lorraine Hansberry, twenty-eight years old, Was back in Chicago, and she wasabout to become a star. Everyone around her could feel it; she could, too. Herplay A Raisin in the Sun was scheduled for a brief run at the Blackstone Theaterand would then move to Broadway in early March. Its success was, as one reporterwrote, the story of an "emerging bombshell." Not only did everyone want tointerview Lorraine, they seemed to crave her opinion on everything—theater,life, and, most of all, what it was like to be black in America in 1959.

So Lorraine was almost relieved when she walked into her mother's house on SouthPark Way and her older sister Mamie immediately began to complain aboutLorraine's sloppy clothes and careless grooming. "Just like old times," Lorrainethought. She only shrugged, mumbling something to Mamie about not having hadmuch time to think about her clothes, what with all the rehearsals, tryouts inNew Haven and Philadelphia, meetings, and late nights. She hoped Mamie wouldtake the hint and drop the subject.

"This is Chicago!" Mamie threw her hands up in despair. "You're not really goingon to the stage in blue jeans!" she exclaimed, and then begged Lorraine to lether pick out a new dress for the opening. She knew just where to go to findsomething really chic. The family didn't want her to embarrass them, after all.

Yet Lorraine hardly needed to be reminded of where she was. Didn't her ownnerves, wound much more tightly now than at any time during the last six weeks,tell her that? A Raisin in the Sun, after all, was set in Chicago. It was aboutChicago, at least a certain part of it-the South Side's so-called BlackMetropolis, where the Hansberry family still lived. It was also about a certainfamily, the Youngers, who were poor and working class, and had only a flickeringhope that life could match their dreams.

Lorraine Hansberry had spent her entire Chicago childhood looking into the livesof her South Side neighbors, people just like the Youngers. She'd listened tolittle boys talk tough and watched them shadowbox like their idol, Joe Louis.She'd stood close by while skinny-legged girls jumped double dutch to rousingsingsongs that made them go faster and faster. How Lorraine had envied theneighborhood kids their independence, brashness, even the violence that was partof their daily lives!

She had rarely been asked to join in the games, though; she couldn't get thesteps or the words just right. She'd been different. She'd been a girl whosefather had scratched out the word "Negro" on her official State of Illinoisbirth certificate and written in "black" instead. "Black must mean that I'mdifferent," she thought, when she was old enough to hear about how Carl hadchanged the birth certificate, but still too young to understand its meaning.Black and proud and different. So she'd stood by and watched, as though her nosewere pressed hard against a windowpane.

People like the Youngers didn't try to hide the shabbiness that was everywherearound them. Porches sagged, unpainted steps split and broke apart. Fullclotheslines waved in the dirty Chicago wind. As Lorraine saw it, theirsegregated lives were a form of protest, the sooty clothing their banners.

Yes, here in Chicago, everything would be much more personal. The audienceswould be full of people who had known her as a shy, chubby, serious-talkingyoung girl. There would be many, too, who remembered her father Carl Hansberry,a successful real estate broker. Carl had devoted years of his life tochallenging the city's restrictive housing laws and, more than twenty yearsearlier, had enlisted his whole family in the battle.

In the summer of 1938, the Hansberrys had bought a home in Chicago's all-whiteWashington Park neighborhood, which bordered the University of Chicago. It hadbeen, as Lorraine remembered it, a "hellishly hostile" place. One day soon aftermoving in, she and Mamie sat on their front porch, passing the afternoon on ahanging swing. Suddenly, a large, angry crowd gathered. The two sisters raninside the house and, as they stood in the living room with their mother,someone hurled a brick through the front window with such force that it lodgedin the plaster wall. It had missed Lorraine's head by less than an inch.

By the end of that summer, the Hansberry family had been given a court order toleave the neighborhood. Carl, along with the National Association for theAdvancement of Colored People (NAACP), filed suit. They took the case, Hansberryv. Lee, all the way to the Supreme Court and won in 1940. Within a few years,however, as Carl faced the realization that changing laws and changing attitudesare two different struggles, the victory became hollow. Before he died in 1946,Carl became discouraged and disillusioned, uncertain if there was such a thingas justice for the black man in America.

Reporters always seemed to want to know the whys and hows of A Raisin in theSun, and Lorraine scarcely knew what to say. Should she talk about her ownfather and mother, and their tremendous persistence and courage? Or, should shetalk about the time she was an eighteen-year-old college student who walked intothe rehearsal of a student production of Juno and the Paycock at the Universityof Wisconsin Theater? As soon as she heard playwright Sean O'Casey's richdialogue, his exquisite melody, she knew that she, too, would try to write herown melody one day, but "as I knew it—in a different key."

In truth, though, she hadn't thought much about the whys, hadn't separated outthe momentous events from the trivial. "Wasn't that for biographers andcritics?" she thought, laughing at her own pretentiousness. All she knew wasthat after years of letting the story slosh about in her head, she had juststarted in and written it. For eight months in 1956 and 1957, she sat in thelittle study off the kitchen of her Greenwich Village apartment and typed. Sheslept little, smoked countless cigarettes, and drank pots of coffee.

There had been many, many times she thought she wouldn't be able to finish.Once, in an explosion of desperation, she tossed the entire manuscript high inthe air and stomped out of the room. Bob—her husband,...