Don’t Let me Be Misunderstood:
The Relationship Between James Baldwin,
Lorraine Hansberry & Nina Simone
by Lynnée Denise Bonner
16
This excerpt focuses on the relationship
between Lorraine Hansberry and
James Baldwin.
dominant social movement narratives by privileged
southern, Christian, and heterosexual voices over the
social networks of cultural production, led by artists,
women and queer activists.
When Alice Walker coined the phrase “ancestors in my
line of work” she did so to describe the motivation behind
her quest to restore the legacy of writer and anthropologist
Zora Neale Hurston. In her 1975 essay, “Looking for
Zora,” Walker recalls posing as Ms. Hurston’s niece
in order to find traces of the writer’s existence in her
childhood town of, the all-Black Eatonville, Florida.
Most of what we know about the cultural work of Zora
Neale Hurston today is due in part to the efforts of Alice
Walker and her relentless search to reverse what she
pronounced to be “the symbolic fate of far too many
Black writers in America — to die alone, impoverished,
and in an unmarked grave.” Hurston’s absence from the
discussion of notable artists from the Harlem Renaissance
was impetus for Walker’s self-directed, investigative, and
archival practice.
This is an examination of the personal relationships
between Baldwin, Hansberry, and Simone who
created work that was often seen as oppositional to
popular movement strategies. By focusing on their
interconnectedness, I hope to move away from the black
exceptionalism trope that denies how the comradeship
between these artists and their communities are indeed
key elements in the creation of their most celebrated
works. From Jimmy’s queering of American literature
through Giovanni’s Room, to Lorraine’s second wave
Black feminist thread in A Raisin in the Sun, to Nina’s
unapologetic civil rights soul song “Mississippi Goddam,”
the elevation of the charismatic male leader turns our
attention away from political art works that were produced
or inspired by communal-spirited spaces that I hope will
garner more attention by academics and scholars.
Impressed by her literal and figurative excavation work,
I began to think about who I could name as the “ancestors
in my line of work.” I had questions about the silenced
histories of women and queer artists in the black radical
tradition whose legacies got lost in the male centered
recalling of most political and arts movements. Those
ancestors in my line of work are James Baldwin, Lorraine
Hansberry and Nina Simone. And similarly to Walker’s
restorative work with Hurston, my research for the
International James Baldwin Conference, A Language
to Dwell In, hosted by the American University of Paris,
was a historical recovery project that sought to interrupt
Prior to falling in love with James Baldwin’s bibliography,
I entered my relationship with him through the 1989
documentary The Price of the Ticket. It was from this
place that I began to critically engage his position on what
place an artist must occupy to ensure an honest reckoning
with the moral cost of American life. Baldwin describes
that this role is a witness to the truth. “[The artist],” he
says, “must rob us of our myths and give us our history,
which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our
personalities.” Throughout multiple essays, Notes of a
Native Son and The Creative Process being two of the
highly referenced, Baldwin designates the role of the
african Voices