Lorraine Hansberry was born on
May 19, 1930, to lawyer Carl A. Hansberry and Nannie Perry Hansberry in
Chicago, Illinois. Her parents were dedicated to the battle against racism, so
when they saw that the doctors had written "negro" on her birth
certificate, they scratched it out and wrote "black." (To Be Young, Gifted, and Black ad. Nemiroff, 16) Despite growing
up during the Great Depression, the Hansberry family was wealthy due to her
father's steady job and the history of education in the family- Carl's parents
were teachers and Nannie's father was a preacher. However, their life of
relative comfort caused problems for Lorraine when she was little. On her first
day of Kindergarten, she was sent to school in a fur coat when many children
were going hungry. As a result, she was beat up by her classmates, many of
which ended up becoming her closest friends in high school. After that
incident, she became violently opposed to symbols of wealth to the point of
trying to emulate the lifestyle of her poor friends. “They, understandably,
never understood (or believed) my envy- and they never will” (Nemiroff, 39)
I'm fascinated with her relationship with poverty. I wonder what changed in her actions to cause the same children who beat her up to eventually become her best friends. I also wonder in what other ways this relationship with poverty shaped her identity and writing - was it something she could shake off or was it something that continued to haunt her?
ReplyDeleteI'm not familiar with her work as a whole, but I have read A Raisin in the Sun, and a large focus of that play is the financial trouble the family goes through. I know in class we talked about how when there are female playwrights, or POC playwrights, we assume that they write about what they are "familiar with" i.e., what hardships their ingroup has faced. I think I would have assumed, based on this model, that Hansberry would have written A Raisin in the Sun from personal experience, so it's interesting to me that she actually grew up quite wealthy. I wonder what inspired her to write about a family going through poverty, as opposed to keeping in line with her own personal experiences -- was it that same envy?
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