Les Blancs (2 page)

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:

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, shouting “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.

This “fable” was originally conceived for television, then reconceptualized for the stage. As of this writing, I have just witnessed the first staged reading of
What Use Are Flowers?
in which the directorial periods and commas were inserted by Harold Scott, who directed the award-winning twenty-fifth anniversary production of
A Raisin in the Sun
and the 1988 and ’89 productions of
Les Blancs
for Washington’s Arena Stage and Boston’s Huntington Theatre, respectively. Shortly (also in 1994), a full-fledged production of
What Use Are Flowers?
will be presented.

Viewing it, as it begins to emerge on stage for the first time, one is struck again by Hansberry’s creative powers: the quality and force of her language and the playwright’s intuitive grasp of what makes for heightened dramatic action.

One is also reminded of the timeliness of this artist’s vision. In the interaction between the hermit—who, in fact, is the world’s last teacher—and children to whom he must impart sensibilities of beauty and truth, there is a particular poignancy for our time, when the world’s children are not being served well by their elders and the world teeters precariously as a result. In this play, the artist as humanist was never more strikingly revealed.

The Drinking Gourd
, originally commissioned for television to celebrate the centennial year of the American Civil War, has not yet been produced on film or stage. The reason, I think, is simple. The subject matter is American slavery; the nation has not yet come to terms with the terrible system of human bondage that has left us with so weighty a legacy still to be resolved.

A journal entry from Hansberry on this subject is uncompromising:

The record of whites in South Africa goes almost as far back as that of the presence of black and white peoples on American shores; hence the magnitude of the announcement of reconciliation from across the seas—and the promise.

In this soon-to-be thirtieth anniversary of Hansberry’s death, history has moved from the independence of Ghana in 1957 and that of Kenya in 1963 (Jomo Kenyatta was on Hansberry’s mind in the writing of
Les Blancs
), to the rise of the new republic of South Africa as a phoenix from ashes in 1994, a testament not merely to human struggle but to the human will to triumph.

Hansberry once said in an inteview that her goal as a dramatist was to “reach a little closer to people, to see if we can share some illumination about each other.”

It will be interesting to keep
Les Blancs
within our purview for another thirty years, an ultimate milepost that will take us well into a new century and millennium to measure how far we and the world have come in sharing illuminations. Perhaps within this time frame, many more periods and commas will have been placed to shape the kind of world that Lorraine Hansberry in her brief life emphasized again and again was possible.

—J
EWELL
H
ANDY
G
RESHAM
N
EMIROFF
May 1994

My first tribute here is to Lorraine Hansberry, the young African American woman playwright to whom the American theater and African American theater owe so much. It is impossible to read her words in work after work—or see her plays on stage or film—and not feel astonished anew at the depth of the perception and powers of expression of this artist.

My second tribute is to Robert Nemiroff for the dedication and integrity of his work on behalf of the playwright and lovers of art and beauty everywhere. Now, in reviewing his acknowledgments in
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
(1969), his seminal work portraying Hansberry in her own words, I am struck by how much theater and personal history is incorporated in his prefatory pages as he listed the extraordinary numbers of people (from the beginning, following the loss of the playwright) who have contributed to the perpetuation of the Hansberry legacy.

Two of the persons who, like Bob, are no longer with us, I should like to again recall: his assistant Charlotte Zaltzberg, who worked with him unstintingly in mutual love for a project in which both joy and satisfaction could be derived from the very exposure to so rich a lore of human creativity. The second person, the late Howard Hausman, whom Bob described as “the first agent I ever met who proved not a ‘necessary evil,’ but a true friend of art.” Howie and his wife, Marie, became equally my friends. I will be forever grateful for Howie’s deep appreciation of Hansberry’s genius and Bob’s commitment, and his never-failing encouragement of my work.

Others to whom I am indebted who were present at that time—or entered the picture shortly thereafter—are Seymour Baldash, Bob’s friend and accountant (and mine); Alan Bomser, our lawyer
and friend; and Samuel Liff, faithful agent and friend. All three have helped to sustain me and assisted me in carrying Bob’s work forward.

Two patrons who believed in my husband provided invaluable assistance. Without them, the difficulties of getting Hansberry’s work before the public would have been infinitely harder. They are Estelle Frank, a longtime friend, and Sol Medoff (and his wife, Faye), committed human beings who simply believed in Hansberry and Bob and acted on the strength of the belief.

Other special persons to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude include the husband and wife team Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, perhaps the most legendary of African American artists of stage, screen, and television of our times. Both Davis and Dee are also writers (Ruby Dee is a lyrical poet; Ossie Davis, an essayist and playwright). From the time of Lorraine’s death, they responded whenever Bob called (which was often) and have continued to do so for me: responded with love, and patience, and instant dedication to whatever project from our household is underway. Their support of me on Bob’s death was, as their lives are, deeply affirming.