A raisin in the sun can dry up – as can a dream deferred, according to the classic Langston Hughes poem that inspired the title of this great 1959 plaA raisin in the sun can dry up – as can a dream deferred, according to the classic Langston Hughes poem that inspired the title of this great 1959 play by Lorraine Hansberry. But in that same poem, Hughes evoked other possible scenarios of what can happen if a dream is forever deferred, always put off for another day. Hughes suggests that a dream deferred can fester, like an untreated sore; or it can come to stink, like unrefrigerated meat allowed to rot; or it can crust over, like a piece of candy left out in the open; or it can sag and weigh upon one’s shoulders, like an unbearably heavy load carried forever. Or it can explode. Named for the first of those possibilities, A Raisin in the Sun explores them all with singular intensity, as it dramatizes the challenges facing the Youngers, a mid-20th-century African American family whose dreams of escaping the slums of Chicago’s South Side seem for a time likely to be forever deferred.
I began re-reading A Raisin in the Sun on a Mother’s Day some time ago because of the character of Lena Younger, the matriarch of the Younger family. Lena -- or "Mama," as she is customarily called by the other characters -- is, to my mind, one of the truly great mothers in all of literature. The stage directions that accompany Lena’s first entrance in the play emphasize author Hansberry’s love and reverence for the character – and make me wonder if Lena Younger was based on some real-life family member for whom Hansberry felt comparable tenderness:
She is a woman in her early sixties, full-bodied and strong. She is one of those women of a certain grace and beauty who wear it so unobtrusively that it takes a while to notice….[B]eing a woman who has adjusted to many things in life and overcome many more, her face is full of strength. She has, we can see, wit and faith of a kind that keep her eyes lit and full of interest and expectancy. She is, in a word, a beautiful woman. Her bearing is perhaps most like the noble bearing of the women of the Hereros of Southwest Africa… (p. 23).
In the character of Lena, we see a looking-back to the strength of character of African American women of the past – brave matriarchs who worked to hold families together against the horrors of slavery and the indignities of segregation. And her character takes us even further back in time: to traditional tribal nations of West Africa where women’s wisdom and leadership were respected and valued, in stark contrast with the “man’s world” mentality that has permeated too much of American life for too many years.
As the play begins, Lena and the members of her household – her daughter, Beneatha; her son, Walter Lee; Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth; and Travis, Lena’s grandson and the son of Walter Lee and Ruth – are awaiting a $10,000 insurance check attendant upon the passing of Lena’s late husband. All are in agreement that they want to make a change from their current circumstances – a South Side apartment building where the facilities are so substandard that the Youngers must share a bathroom with other families on the same floor, and where children chase rats through the alleys for play.
Disagreement occurs with regard to how to make a change, what to do with the money. Lena dreams of moving the whole family out of the inner city, to a new home in a nicer area. Beneatha, age 20, whose intellectual gifts are considerable, but who has flitted from one interest to another – drama, guitar, horseback-riding, photography – dreams of becoming a physician. Her two suitors show radically different responses to this dream: George Murchison, from a wealthy family, pooh-poohs her dream as assiduously as he puts down the West African heritage in which Beneatha takes pride. By contrast, Joseph Asagai, an international student from Nigeria, encourages Beneatha to follow her dreams, even as he pokes gentle fun at her dilettantish ways.
Most crucially for the dramatic action of the play, 35-year-old Walter Lee, dissatisfied with his work as a chauffeur, dreams of becoming a wheeling-and-dealing entrepreneur by buying into a liquor store with some friends – never mind that the reader or viewer wonders at once, as Lena wonders aloud, whether the South Side of Chicago needs another liquor store. Both slavery and segregation were all-out assaults on the manhood of the African American man; and in the character of Walter Lee, we see someone who is desperate to prove that he is a man, and who may not see that he is trying to prove his manhood in all the wrong ways.
Given the money by Lena as a sign of her trust, Walter Lee makes a critical, and critically bad, choice that makes it seem for a time as though all of the Youngers’ dreams will go forever unfulfilled. The passages of the play in which Walter Lee confronts the unraveling of his liquor-store dream are among the most painful in the play. And as if there wasn’t enough going on in the Youngers’ lives, they receive a visit from one Karl Lindner, a representative of the Clybourne Park “welcoming committee” who announces that the committee is willing to pay the Youngers not to move into the hitherto all-white community.
Advantages of this Modern Library edition of A Raisin in the Sun include an introductory essay by Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry’s widower and literary executor, who provides helpful and informative insights into how the play came to be and how it fits into Hansberry’s too-short literary career (she was only 34 years old when she died of cancer). Another added strength of this edition is that it includes a scene that was excised from the original play for time reasons, but that makes a critical contribution to the thematic unity of Hansberry’s drama.
In this scene, a neighbor of the Youngers, one Mrs. Johnson, pays the family a visit; while ostensibly she wishes to congratulate the Youngers on “getting ready to ‘move on up a little higher’” (p. 83), she makes a point of imagining a newspaper headline about the Youngers’ new home being bombed, and ends up denouncing the Youngers as “one proud-acting bunch of colored folks” (p. 87). Lindner’s willingness to offer a bribe to maintain Clybourne Park’s all-white status is thus complemented by Mrs. Johnson’s resentment of an African American family that is not content with their circumstances – and the challenges facing the Youngers are doubly emphasized.
In his foreword, Nemiroff expresses muted respect for the 1961 film version of A Raisin in the Sun, but shows a decided preference for the 1989 American Playhouse version, with Esther Rolle as Lena and Danny Glover as Walter Lee. I respectfully disagree. I think Daniel Petrie’s 1961 film is a masterpiece; its stark black-and-white photography captures beautifully the Youngers’ struggles against a world that divides everything into black and white. Amid an array of gifted actors in great performances (including Ruby Dee as Ruth and Louis Gossett Jr. as George Murchison), Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee delivers one of the most focused and intense portrayals in the history of American cinema. Poitier’s performance is a tour de force, and is not to be missed.
When I consider Lorraine Hansberry’s work, I continually find myself coming back to the tragedy of her early demise. Only 34 years old – so very young. Imagine if Shakespeare had died when he was 34, in 1598. No Hamlet then, no King Lear, no The Tempest. What great plays were our nation and the world denied by Hansberry’s dying before her time? But even more than that, I feel saddened that Hansberry was not able to live out her full span of years for her own sake. I like to imagine her living on for many decades more, having children of her own if she wanted to, becoming a real-life Mama Younger in her own right and sharing her wisdom and insights with future generations. Sadly, that was not to be. But A Raisin in the Sun endures, as an undying testament to Hansberry’s literary talent, and to the imperishable African American dream of which Hansberry, like Langston Hughes before her, wrote so eloquently....more
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