Deferral and the Dream

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2021-06-01
Journal	GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
Authors	Jennifer DeClue
Citations	1

Abstract

Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart (2017), directed by Tracy Heather Strain, recounts the storied life and dissembled desire of insurgent playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry. My analysis of Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart pulls on a thread tucked into the title of Hansberry’s famous play. The concept and problematics of deferral not only punctuate the narrative of A Raisin in the Sun but hug the contours of Hansberry’s life as an activist, outline the closeted confines of her sexual desire, and concretize with the impact of her untimely death. The phrase “a raisin in the sun” appears in the third line of the first stanza of Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem [2],” which is one of the eighty-seven poems that comprise Hughes’s book-length serial poem “Montage of a Dream Deferred” (1994: 426).Harlem [2]What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry upLike a raisin in the sun?Or fester like a sore—And then run?Does it stink like rotten meat?Or crust and sugar over—Like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sagsLike a heavy load.Or does it explode?The dream deferred, or, more appositely, the refusal to accept deferral any longer, is the imperative that sears her famous play, her radical resistance, her love life—and deferral is what we are left with in the wake of her death. In my discussion of Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart, I track the way this deferral, along with an attendant refusal to defer, reverberates through Hansberry’s celebrated play and emerges in Strain’s film. My analysis pays special attention to the inclusion of photographs and rare archival footage of Hansberry at her Croton-on-Hudson home. I consider the ways that, even though she cloistered herself, sumptuous visual evidence of Hansberry’s refusal to defer her lesbian life is burned into the photographs and silent film footage captured in and around her upstate New York sanctuary.Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2017. Over the next several years the documentary was broadcast on PBS, exhibited at museums and colleges across the country, and screened at historic venues like the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and significant locations like the Croton Free Library in Croton-on-Hudson, where Hansberry lived at the time of her death. Given that Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart is the first feature-length documentary film about Hansberry’s life, it is noteworthy that very little buzz has surrounded this film. While the documentary had an impactful presence at film festivals with screenings at the Chicago International Film Festival, DOC NYC, and Festival International des Films de la Diaspora Africaine in Paris, the film has gained very little notoriety beyond the festival circuit. The general lack of knowledge about the first feature-length film that chronicles the life of one of the greatest African American playwrights is curious; it appears that while A Raisin in the Sun is world renowned, its playwright may not yet be a household name. As a PBS American Masters production, this documentary’s primary outlet was television; Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart did not enjoy a theatrical showing like the documentary films that captured the lives of other Black luminaries from her generation, such as the twenty-first-century documentary about James Baldwin’s life, I Am Not Your Negro (2016), Toni Morrison: The Pieces That I Am (2019), and Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (2019). While the obscurity of Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart can be attributed to its sparse programming on PBS, the limited audience of film festival screenings, and the exclusivity of academic streaming services, which have been the primary platforms for accessing the film in the years after its release, the limited knowledge of and access to this film reflect and redouble the shroud of secrecy that surrounds aspects of Hansberry’s life—namely, her sexuality. The film’s treatment of Hansberry’s lesbian relationships further compounds the dissemblance and mystery that haunts this facet of the playwright’s legacy. Despite the murkiness that envelops Hansberry’s sexuality in this film, Strain creates the cinematic space to appreciate the life and legacy of this dynamic and courageous Black woman playwright who is an underrecognized American treasure. A chance to screen Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart is a chance to hear the voice of an artist gone too soon, to learn about her life outside her famous play, and to spend time with a brilliant, pathbreaking Black woman playwright who was just finding a way to become her own.The title of Strain’s documentary is an extraction from a quote by Hansberry that appears in the film. In an interview, she is recorded saying, “One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which affect this world.” Hansberry’s imperative to see, feel, and react to the miseries of the world as an activist, writer, and lover comes through in this documentary film. Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart captures the vicissitudes of Hansberry’s magnificent life and the heartbreak of her untimely death. The traditional style of framing expert interviews is made exciting by the cast of Black celebrities and the expertise of scholars who knit together this illustrious story.The film moves chronologically, beginning with Hansberry’s early life in Chicago. Family photographs, archival footage, and photographs of everyday Black life on the South Side of Chicago in the 1930s accompany the array of interviews, narration by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, and recitation of personal papers performed by Anika Noni Rose. The film incorporates archival footage of interviews with Hansberry herself as well as reenactments of pivotal moments in her life and the priceless home footage of her in Croton-on-Hudson. All of these elements come together to chart the trajectory of Hansberry’s life as the youngest daughter of the prominent Black real estate broker Carl Augustus Hansberry. As the film recounts, Lorraine’s father loomed large in his family and was a powerful figure in Chicago. He served as the secretary of his local NAACP chapter. He was a philanthropist committed to ending segregation, and to that end he created the Hansberry Foundation to resist racial discrimination with a $10,000 endowment.The documentary spends time exploring a monumental and terrifying moment in Lorraine’s young life when her family moved from the South Side to a home in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago, a white neighborhood under a racially restrictive covenant.1 Carl Hansberry would not be intimidated into moving out of the neighborhood by the pressure of white supremacist vigilantism; he and his family lived for several months under imminent threat of violence. Lorraine’s memory of this period is distilled in a quote performed by Rose: “My memories of the correct way of fighting white supremacy in America included being spat at, cursed, and pummeled on the daily trek to and from school.”The interviews with Lorraine’s sister Mamie and cousin Shauneille Perry, who, as it happens, is herself a playwright and theater director, convey family stories from Lorraine’s early years.2 Mamie recalls one terrifying evening when the family was living in their Woodlawn home and a gang of white supremacists descended onto their property. Lorraine was nearly killed when a vandal threw a piece of mortar through their living room window; it narrowly missed her head. The stone was thrown so hard that it lodged into the wall on the opposite side of the window. Leading Lorraine Hansberry scholars Imani Perry and Margaret Wilkerson, given prominent voices in this documentary, describe how this harrowing chapter in the family’s life left a lasting impression on Lorraine and became fodder for her landmark play. Eventually, a court order demanded that the Hansberrys leave their Woodlawn home, but Carl Hansberry appealed the order, which led to a hearing before the United States Supreme Court. Hansberry v. Lee (311 U.S. 32) was heard in 1940. Though Carl Hansberry won that case, racially restrictive covenants would not be made illegal until the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968.3An array of interviews with scholars, family members, and theater producers convey Hansberry’s biographical details before, during, and after her rise to prominence.4 They describe how she moved to New York City after spending two years studying at the University of Wisconsin. In 1950, when she was twenty years old, Hansberry moved to Harlem as an aspiring journalist full of radical ambition. She began working for Paul Robeson’s Freedom, a Negro publication that was new to the scene. She met her soon-to-be husband Robert Nemiroff during this time. They were married in 1953, when interracial marriage was still illegal in many US states.5 Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun while living with Nemiroff in their Greenwich Village apartment at 337 Bleeker Street. These biographical threads are complemented by interviews with Hansberry’s contemporaries and confidants, from the late Ruby Dee, Amiri Baraka, and Lloyd Richards to Sidney Poitier, Glenn Turman, and Harry Belafonte. These interviews weave together a behind-the-scenes narrative about the casting, production, and opening of A Raisin in the Sun. The prospect of launching the first play written by a Black woman to open on Broadway gave producers such pause and trepidation that they nearly missed the opportunity to stage this groundbreaking production.6 In fact, A Raisin in the Sun first opened in Philadelphia, because Broadway producers were not willing to take the risk on a play written by a Black woman. The run in Philadelphia was such a rousing success that Broadway was compelled to have a change of heart; on March 11, 1959, A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore theater in New York City. In their retelling of the origin story of this production, the interviewed Black Hollywood legends describe how a bashful Hansberry handled her newfound influence and fame. Such stories told by friends, fellow playwrights, actors, directors, and producers pull back the curtain on the life of a reluctant star on the rise.After moving through the remarkable story of how A Raisin in the Sun came to be, the film connects the play’s narrative with Hansberry’s commitment to activism and Black liberation. The issue at the center of A Raisin in the Sun, what catalyzes the dramatic twists and turns in this play, is the peril of housing, space, and quality of life for a Black family, the Youngers, during the era of jim crow7 segregation. When the life insurance policy of the recently deceased patriarch of the Younger family returns ten thousand dollars, the family becomes fractured: Mama would like to purchase a house; Walter Lee, her son, would like to open a liquor store; Beneatha, her daughter, aspires to go to medical school and would like to use the money to that end. Walter Lee’s wife Ruth and son Travis live in the small apartment as well. After Ruth discloses that she is pregnant, Mama makes the choice to buy a house in Clybourne Park, an exclusively white Chicago neighborhood. A representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association pays the Younger family a visit to their South Side apartment in order to persuade them to change their minds, to not move into Clybourne Park, and to accept instead a refund for the purchase of their home. The Youngers refuse. The play ends with the Youngers moving out of their South Side Chicago apartment and into an uncertain future in their new Clybourne Park home. The expectation of Black deferral for the sake of white comfort is the pressure that drives the action of A Raisin in the Sun.The family’s concerted and collective resistance to that expectation indexes not only the biographical parallels of the Hansberry family’s choice to move into the hotly contested space of the racially restricted Woodlawn neighborhood, it also reflects the writer’s life as a radical activist. Like her father, Lorraine deplored segregation; but unlike her father, she was less convinced by the promise of the American Dream. Perhaps witnessing her father’s struggle to achieve that dream activated a more radical tack in the journalist-cum-playwright, who was flagged by the FBI because of her political alliances and movement-building activities. To contextualize the racial and political climate out of which Hansberry was writing, Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart uses photographs and newsreel footage of the attacks by police on civil rights protesters in 1963 and 1964. These images show the police in Alabama using German Shepherd hounds and high-powered water hoses to attack, brutalize, and subdue the Black citizens who refused to comply with racist segregationist laws. The documentary includes photographs of Hansberry in action at protests with friends like Nina Simone, and sound recordings of her giving speeches on the utility of violent resistance to white supremacy. Strain focuses in on Hansberry’s work in the movement after the acclaim of A Raisin in the Sun and recounts how the playwright used her newfound celebrity and influence to help raise funds for the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress of Racial Equality. One such enterprise raised $5,000 to purchase the station wagon that James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwermer drove to Mississippi in 1964. These freedom fighters were abducted by police on a Mississippi highway and killed. The burned car was found days after their abduction, and their bodies were discovered several months later. This set of events was devastating for Hansberry. The cost of the refusal to wait, to prolong, delay, or defer a dream of freedom was born out in the lives and murders of freedom fighters who did not adhere to the tacit or explicit, violently enforced expectation for Black people to save liberty for another day.The photographs and archival footage not only historically situate the racial and political climate within which Hansberry existed, they also visualize the collective refusal to defer freedom that powered the civil rights movement. The scenes of Black resistance to white supremacy from the civil rights era included in Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart carry an intensified meaning in the contemporary moment. The national uprisings and global protests that erupted in the summer of 2020 after the murders by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta have an incendiary tether through time and space with the civil rights protests of the 1960s in this country. In the summer of 2020, there were lynchings of Black men in California, Texas, and New York (Democracy Now! 2020), while KKK members were making themselves unabashedly visible in public places, and armed white supremacist militias were welcomed by police at Black Lives Matter protests. These horrific realities make perfectly clear that the terror of anti-Black racial violence that Black protesters fought in the mid-1960s is still being battled two decades into the new millennium.8 The refusal to defer resistance to white supremacist violence that mobilized the protests of jim crow segregation during the civil rights movement had been reawakened in recent years by the state-sanctioned murders of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Eric Garner, Mike Brown, and Tamar Rice in 2014, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray in 2015, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016. Tony McDade, a Black trans man, was murdered by the police in Florida two days after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Black trans people who are murdered receive very little attention outside the queer community; by the summer of 2020, the year had already seen twelve trans people of color murdered: Dustin Parker in Oklahoma, Neulisa Luciano Ruiz in Puerto Rico, Yampi Mendez Arocho in Puerto Rico, Monika Diamond in North Carolina, Lexi in Harlem, Johanna Metzger in Maryland, Serena Angelique Velazquez Ramos in Puerto Rico, Layla Pelaz Sanchez in Puerto Rico, Penelope Diaz in Puerto Rico, Nina in in Texas, in in in and in Chicago The terror of white anti-Black police and is at a and the national and global movement that is to this of violence has to delay, defer, or comply any The newsreel footage that appears in Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart of Black and being and by police is to contemporary moment. are are living in the legacy of freedom collective at any to defer Eyes | Feeling Heart then together Hansberry’s movement-building work as a radical civil rights activist, her lesbian and love her with her in Sidney her with visual and of from her stories and personal the documentary Hansberry’s marriage to Nemiroff with the playwright’s of her love for learn that Hansberry her lesbian even while this she used had and to move out of the for more While Hansberry and Nemiroff were and even after their he her in this facet of her life and in her by making public with a in which Hansberry to a about her sexual desire and her and I have been for years we the friends of I I know that what I have before that it has to be I the woman. not be the for they had been lives Hansberry and Nemiroff in when she moved to the home that she in Croton-on-Hudson, outside New York City. While the and biographical elements of Hansberry’s life are the of Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart comes through in the footage of Hansberry at her Croton-on-Hudson home and on a in a In a cinematic that to the documentary film used to the details of her public life as an playwright and radical activist, these scenes open of life that were as full of as they were with with what appears to be a or the of color with a Hansberry. is footage of her at her Croton-on-Hudson home her a German Shepherd the another she into the then turns As seen in and there are of her for the before into the of her and show that Hansberry was in the of on an this of the film we a woman on the at the Hansberry the is footage of Hansberry on a next to a woman with that woman into the and makes Perhaps Hansberry is the one the at that moment as well. the of still and moving and the it appears that Hansberry as and in the archival footage and photographs during these the of this footage, the locations and of captured on film with Hansberry on a and are this footage for and cinematic Strain’s treatment of this exciting footage these scenes into a trajectory of Hansberry’s life and very little about the footage more details about these it is how to this visual evidence of her life as a scenes of play, and to the freedom captured in the footage of through a and at a house in in the film These scenes images of James through the in Paul de in James The of the The of Black queer documentary film from the and beyond a that through and the imperative to defer and desire for the sake of a collective freedom that is with a deferral that at the heart of Black of any of these scenes is freedom at The film that Hansberry was surrounded by white that she was and did not have a Black the film that James on her to with the US Robert in to about the Negro not a of her Black she know from A New of My that was out in lesbian in Greenwich Village during the and the film had been more in exploring Hansberry’s lesbian life, her queer future would have the the film had her as a Black lesbian then her legacy on that have had a in this film. would have been to together Black queer working who Hansberry as their Black queer as a lesbian and a so that they to her in the film and the playwright’s impact on their This cinematic have to and scenes of Hansberry on her and at her Croton-on-Hudson home with the documentary’s that she led a life of stories under the and that she to the lesbian publication The Strain archival footage of Hansberry in into the and to the then an of one of Hansberry’s as it is by Rose: I on and been with the third for days is a stone been She was for love to what not the play. I on it with of my is so This quote the who is The film around the Though Hansberry’s in this film, one of her be the one who has access to this of her The mystery with which Strain Hansberry’s love life a of The change in in this of the film, the in is in by the of the archival footage yet Strain’s treatment of this its The film moves from details about Hansberry’s public presence and of her personal life to using archival footage in locations with The choice to a cinematic a mystery about Hansberry’s lesbian The audience is left who she or she in love with any woman. The in the documentary about who Hansberry’s appears in the of a from one of her of and the of and make Strain does not the but includes of what Hansberry under which appears on its She also includes from the Am to and which on the back This of Hansberry’s of does a to one of the film’s In the from she wrote that had her and made love to to the who is on Hansberry’s of is she one of the who are recorded in the archival footage of Hansberry on her Hansberry’s is in its more is This archival captures the desire and and that she with As figure Hansberry wrote that she her husband of the she also and and further the “My way to the of on this Hansberry also that she her also appears under that from her Hansberry that she also love and The that comprise her of move from and to about and has to Sidney the back side of this what figure Hansberry other that she is to with Raisin in The a white and American of is only in yet the documentary only the first and be in The third more about the of her she also the in this that Hansberry’s about herself, an of deferral The documentary film that a very in Hansberry’s love Hansberry not only her and her she also Strain back and this about Hansberry’s desire, and it is this choice was To know that Hansberry was not in stories and that she did not just have lesbian but that she had a with a woman was or makes her Black lesbian Strain Hansberry’s love in such a way that her film the deferral of of Hansberry’s life as a of this film to any about Hansberry’s sexuality may from the Hansberry of this Though the estate the playwright’s to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in a restricted within that The of that which Hansberry’s personal papers and her lesbian life, would not be until The access to the restricted the of archival deferral that Black queer from their and after their While the archival is not in Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart, the film does that was during the and who were found to be during this time their and their and be by the for of and The of being an out lesbian were for during this but for her and as a of Black and in the Black her to her sexuality. This to the by the details about Hansberry’s lesbian Despite the tacit not pressure to her sexual desire, Hansberry did not defer this of her The to her sexuality from the of public knowledge with it a that is by a of that Hansberry did not to herself but that was onto her legacy by her This of archival deferral her from her legacy and of Black queer the opportunity to her as an who a that they The expectation to defer Black that is at work in Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is also in this documentary film, in the restricted access to the playwright’s and in Hansberry’s life as a Black

Tech Support

Original Source

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8994140

References

2012 - Audre Lorde—the Berlin Years: 1984-1992
2017 - Listening to Images [Crossref]
1993 - Stone Butch Blues: A Novel
1994 - Montage of a Dream Deferred
2016 - I Am Not Your Negro
1989 - James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket
2006 - The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics
1983 - Zami: A New Spelling of My Name