Lorraine
Hansberry from To Be Young, Gifted and Black
For
each section, annotate it the following way:
·
C: parts that were confusing
·
E:Parts that explain who Hansberry was
·
R: Parts that remind you of your own life/experiences
Chicago:
South Side Summers
Chapter 1.
For some time now -- I think since I
was a child--I have been possessed of
the
desire to put down the stuff of my
life.
That is a commonplace impulse,
apparently, among persons of massive
self-interest; sooner or later we all
do it.
And, I am quite certain, there is only
one
internal quarrel: how much of the
truth to
tell? How much, how much, how much! It
is brutal in sober
uncompromising
moments, to reflect on the comedy of
concern we all enact when it comes to
our
precious images!
Even so, when such vanity as
propels the writing of such memoirs is
examined, certainly one would wish at
least to have some boast of social
serviceability on one’s side. I shall
set
down in these pages what shall seem to
me to be the truth of my life and
essences... which are to be found,
first of
all, on the South side of Chicago,
where I
was born. . . .
Chapter 2.
All travelers to my city should ride
the elevated trains that race along
the
back ways of Chicago. The lives you
can
look into!
I think you could find the tempo of
my people on their back porches. The
honesty of their living is there in
the
shabbiness. Scrubbed porches that sag
and look their danger. Dirty gray wood
steps. And always a line of white and
pink
clothes scrubbed so well, waving in
the
dirty wind of the city.
My people are poor. And they are
tired. And they are determined to
live.
Our South side is a place apart:
each piece of our living is a protest.
Chapter 3.
I was born May 19, 1930, the last of
four children.
Of love and my parents there is little
to be written: their relationship to
their
children was utilitarian. We were fed
and
housed and dressed and outfitted with
more cash than our associates and that
was all. We were also vaguely taught
certain vague absolutes: that we were
better than no one but infinitely
superior to
everyone; that we were the products of
the
proudest and most mistreated of the
races
of man; that there was nothing
enormously
difficult about life; that one
succeeded as a
matter of course.
Life was not a struggle--it was
something that one did. One won an
argument because, if facts gave out,
one
invented them -- with color! The only
sinful people in the world were dull
people.
And, above all, there were two things
which were never to be betrayed: the
family and the race. But of love,
there was
nothing ever said.
If we were sick, we were sternly,
impersonally, and carefully nursed and
doctored back to health. Fevers,
toothaches were attended to with
urgency
and importance; one always felt
important
in my family. Mother came with a tray
to
your room with the soup and Vick’s
salve
or gave the enemas in a steaming
bathroom. But we were not fondled, any
of us-- head held to breast, fingers
about
that head-- until we were grown, all
of us,
and my father died.
At his funeral I at last, in my
memory, saw my mother hold her sons
that way, and for the first time in
her life
my sister held me in her arms I think.
We
were not a loving people: we were
passionate in our hostilities and
affinities,
but the caress embarrassed us.
We have changed little. . . .
Chapter 4.
Seven years separated the nearest
of my brothers and sisters and myself;
I
wear, I am sure, the earmarks of that
familial station to this day. Little
has been
written or thought to my knowledge
about
children who occupy that place: the
last
born separated by an uncommon length
of
time from the next youngest. I suspect
we
are probably a race apart.
The last born is an object toy which
comes in years when brothers and
sisters
who are seven, ten, twelve years older
are
old enough to appreciate it rather
than
poke out its eyes. They do not mind
diapering you the first two years, but
by
the time you are five you are a pest
that
has to be attended to in the washroom,
taken to the movies and “sat with” at
night.
You are not a person--you are a
nuisance
who is not particular fun any more.
Consequently, you swiftly learn to
play
alone. . . .
Chapter 5.
My childhood South side summers
were the ordinary city kind, full of
the
street games which other rememberers
have turned into fine ballets these
days,
and rhymes that anticipated what some
people insist on calling modern
poetry:
Oh, Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
with the silver buttons, buttons,
buttons
All down her back, back, back
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For fifteen cents, cents, cents
To see the elephant, elephant,
elephant
Jump the fence, fence, fence
Well, he jumped so high, high, high
Til he touched the sky, sky, sky
And he didn’t come back, back, back
Til the Fourth of Ju-ly, ly, ly!
I remember skinny little South side
bodies by the fives and tens of us
panting
the delicious hours away:
“May I?”
And the voice of authority: “Yes,
you may --you may take one giant
step.”
One drew in all one’s breath and
tightened one’s fist and pulled the
small
body against the heavens, stretching,
straining all the muscles in the legs
to
make - one giant step.
It is a long time. One forgets the
reason for the game. (For children’s
games are always explicit in their
reasons
for being. To play is to win
something. Or
not to be “it.” Or to be high pointer,
or
outdoer or, sometimes--just the
winner.
But after a time one forgets.)
Why was it important to take a
small step, a teeny step, or the most
desired of all-- one GIANT step?
A giant step to where?
Chapter 6.
Evenings were spent mainly on the
back porches where screen doors
slammed in the darkness with those
really
very special summertime sounds and,
sometimes, when Chicago nights got too
steamy, the whole family got into the
car
and went to the park and slept out in
the
open on blankets. Those were, of
course,
the best times of all because the
grownups
were invariably reminded of having
been
children in the South and told the
best
stories then. And it was also cool and
sweet to be on the grass and there was
usually the scent of freshly cut
lemons or
melons in the air. Daddy would lie on
his
back, as fathers must, and explain
about
how men thought the stars above us
came
to be and how far away they were.
I never did learn to believe that
anything could be as far away as that.
Especially the stars. . . .
Chapter 7.
The man that I remember was an
educated soul, though I think now,
looking
back, that it was as much a matter of
the
physical bearing of my father as his
command of information and of thought
that left that impression upon me. I
know
nothing of the “assurance of kings”
and
will not use that metaphor on account
of it.
Suffice it to say that my father’s
enduring
image in my mind is that of a man whom
kings might have imitated and properly
created their own flattering
descriptions of.
A man who always seemed to be doing
something brilliant and/or unusual to
such
an extent that to be doing something
brilliant and/or unusual was the way I
assumed fathers behaved.
He digested the laws of the State of
Illinois and put them into little
booklets. He
invented complicated pumps and
railroad
devices. He could talk at length on
American history and private
enterprise (to
which he utterly subscribed). And he
carried his head in such a way that I
was
quite certain that there was nothing
he
was afraid of. Even writing this, how
profoundly it shocks my inner senses
to
realize suddenly that my father,
like all
men, must have known fear. . .
.
Chapter 8.
April 23,1964
To the Editor,
The New York Times:
With reference to
civil disobedience
and the Congress of
Racial Equality stallin:
. . . My father was typical of a
generation of Negroes who believed
that
the “American way” could successfully
be
made to work to democratize the United
States. Thus, twenty-five years ago,
he
spent a small personal fortune, his
considerable talents, and many years
of
his life fighting, in association with
NAACP1 attorneys, Chicago’s “restrictive
covenants” in one of this nation’s
ugliest
ghettos.
That fight also required that our
family occupy the disputed property in
a
hellishly hostile “white neighborhood”
in
which, literally, howling mobs
surrounded
our house. One of their missiles
almost
took the life of the then eight
year-old
signer of this letter. My memories of
this
“correct” way of fighting white
supremacy
in America included being spat at,
cursed
and pummeled in the daily trek to and
from
school. And I also remember my
desperate and courageous mother,
patrolling our house all night with a
loaded
German Luger, doggedly guarding her
four
children, while my father fought the
respectable part of the battle in the
Washington court.
The fact that my father and the
NAACP “won” a Supreme Court decision,
in a now famous case which bears his
name in the law books, is --
ironically -- the
sort of “progress” our satisfied
friends
allude to when they presume to deride
the
more radical means of struggle. The
cost,
in emotional turmoil, time and money,
which led to my fathers early death as
a
permanently embittered exile in a
foreign
country when he saw that after such
sacrificial efforts the Negroes of
Chicago
were as ghetto-locked as ever, does
not
seem to figure in their calculations
That is the reality that I am faced
with when I now read that some Negroes
my own age and younger say that we
must now lie down in the streets, tie
up
traffic, do whatever we can -- take to
the
hills with guns if necessary--and
fight
back. Fatuous people remark these days
on our “bitterness.” Why, of course we
are
bitter. The entire situation suggests
that
the nation be reminded of the too
little
noted final lines of Langston Hughes’
mighty poem:
What
happens to a dream deferred?
Does it
dry up
Like 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 sags
Like a
heavy load.
Or
does it explode?
Sincerely,
Lorraine Hansberry
Write your own essay:
You will write an eight part paper in which you will
write about the same elements of your life as Lorraine Hansberry wrote about
hers. For the eighth section, you should write about something for which you
feel great passion, as Hansberry felt about her ethnicity.
Each part should be 150-200 words. We will be typing
these out and also adding an image/design/personal picture to it.
You will write the sections in this
order: 5, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 1.
1. Why is it important to write about me.
2. The place where I grew up and how it influenced me.
3. How members of my family relate to each other
emotionally.
4. How birth order affected me.
5. Games I played as a child.
6. Things we did as a family.
7. My _____________.
8. To be young, gifted, and what?
You will be sharing this
writing with a parent/loved one.
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