On
Lorraine Hansberry’s realistic, flawed, and deeply moving young married couple.
Walter and Ruth Younger, the
young husband and wife at the center of Lorraine Hansberry’s seminal play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), are
perhaps the least sympathetic of the Youngers, the drama’s major characters. To
be sure, as in the case in any great dramatic work all the characters have
their flaws: but while the overly proud, widowed Mama (Lena) is also struggling
to keep her family together; self-centered elitist Beneatha is impressively going
to school to become a doctor; and naïve young Travis is just trying to grow up;
Travis’s parents Walter and Ruth are defined mostly by their hot-and-cold
marriage and Walter’s foolish and destructive get-rich-quick schemes. Some
combination of those factors, Walter’s individual pipe dreams and the
extremities to which their marital problems drive them both, could be said to
lead to most of the family’s worst arguments and problems throughout the play.
That could
be said, but it’d be wrong, as the play’s final scenes reveal a much more
systematic and significant culprit, putting the Youngers in the center of a broad
and crucial biographical and
historical context: the racial “covenants” that made
it so difficult for African American and other minority families to move out of
cities like Chicago and into suburban neighborhoods in the decades after World
War II. While not as regimented or all-encompassing as the South’s system of
Jim Crow segregation, the covenants did an equally thorough job of segregating
their respective urban and suburban worlds, and proved a powerfully difficult
impediment to the dreams of families like the Youngers. Systems like the
covenants don’t explain away all of Walter’s irresponsibilities or Ruth’s
enabling—again, no dramatic work as impressive as Hansberry’s treats its
characters as mere ciphers—but they certainly better reveal the world in which
these characters are trying to survive and succeed, and to an open-minded
audience render Walter and Ruth significantly more sympathetic as a result.
But in the
final scene Hansberry takes the couple, and her play, one step further still. The
Youngers have been approached by a representative from the neighborhood
association of the suburban community into which they hope to move, a man who
is offering them money in exchange for their withdrawing their purchase of that
suburban home. In one of the play’s most traditional moments, not only in terms
of gender roles but also because it embodies the spirit of Walter Sr., the family’s
departed father, both Mama and Ruth allow Walter to make the decision; and
Walter rises to the occasion, saying no to the lure of easy money and rejecting
the offer. He gains a great deal of respect from Mama in the process, but
perhaps even more significant is Ruth’s response: she seems to see in her
husband for the first time in years the man she married, a man who can model
for Travis a strong, proud, resilient African American identity and manhood in
the face of some of the worst their society can throw at them. The moment and
scene are tremendously moving for many reasons, but certainly at the top of the
list is seeing the reconnection between this flawed and troubled but likewise
resilient and impressive couple.
Next
lovers tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Nominations for the series?
6/5 Memory Day nominee: Bill Moyers, the pioneering
television host and journalist whose investigative
reporting, philosophical
and spiritual conversations, and American Studies efforts have fundamentally impacted
and changed American journalism, politics, and culture.
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