Wearing it, Lorraine thought she looked exactly like someone wearing one of those dreadful rabbit suits meant to entertain children. In one of the most poignant recollections of her youth she recalled the terrible error her parents made in sending her to school in a lavish white fur coat in the middle of the Great Depression. They discomfited her, and even made her suffer. Some steps Lorraine was expected to take as a child of the Black middle class, in particular, isolated her. Why was it important to take a small step, a teeny step, or-one giant step? A giant step to where? 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. I remember skinny little South Side bodies by the fives and tens of us, panting the delicious hours away.Ī favorite game was the childhood classic Mother, May I, the choreography of which Lorraine described tenderly: My childhood South Side summers were the ordinary city kind, full of the street games and rhymes that anticipated what some people insist on calling modern poetry. Her recollections of childhood were often sweetest when she remembered summertime: Lorraine, though a bookish and interior child, was part of the throng of children playing on those wooden back porches of Chicago apartment buildings and on the burning concrete of Chicago blocks. The Black migrants from Southern farms traded terror and cotton fields for crowded units with hallway toilets and a slightly greater taste of freedom. Chicago was known for business, from gangsters to gilded captains of industry, and the hard-scrabble lives of its laboring residents. Many of the adults worked in the stockyards of the smoky industrial city that was at once a center of global exchange and a site of intense segregation. They occupied the same building as their tenants. Living on South Parkway and Forty-Fifth, the Hansberry family was knitted within a fabric of migrants. And always a line of white and pink clothes scrubbed so well, waving in the dirty wind of the city. The honesty of their living is there in the shabbiness: scrubbed porches that sag and look their danger. Lorraine would remember her early years in this way: The waves of migrants from the South slowed, and the people relied on each other even more intensely. The Great Depression had cast an already poor community into desperation. As a result, the Hansberrys were, at least in the eyes of the community in which they lived, wildly successful.Īnd yet, like the vast majority of their skinfolk, they were shuttered into the ghetto. Quite simply: the South Side was bursting at the seams, and Carl found a lucrative solution to the problem. The kitchenettes allowed Carl, and the other investors who followed suit, to provide housing for Black residents who, due to widespread housing discrimination, were squished into far too small a terrain. He earned this designation by routinely purchasing three-unit apartment buildings and chopping the units into ten smaller sections, each of them with a partial kitchen attached to the living room. Carl was a successful real estate entrepreneur, a man known as the “kitchenette king” in the Chicago Defender. Nannie was a teacher and a ward leader for the Republican Party. Carl had graduated from Alcorn State in his native Mississippi and Nannie, from Tennessee State University in her home state. But Carl and Nannie were distinguished in their community: They were college educated. Their life, like that of most Black Chicagoans, was on the South Side. And Lorraine was the last of their four children. Chicago was a destination of Black hope and aspiration. Carl and Nannie, like thousands of others, had departed from the Deep South decades prior and built their lives in the Windy City. Her mother, Nannie Perry Hansberry, gave birth in Provident, the first Black owned and operated hospital in the nation. THE WEATHER WAS COOL, blue sky and bluster.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |