Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

by Imani Perry

we associate the liberation of women generally with the liberation of desire and human connection,

all those things mattered—but so had love.

stepping away from the limits imposed by a society bent on your destruction, was a revolutionary and liberatory move no matter what was bound to come.

Intellectual partners read together and write together. They also, and this is really my point, can swim in each other’s imaginations. Neither one imitating the other, but after bathing in the other’s words they return back to the shore, to the work, shaped by the beloved’s waters.

“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”

Celebration waned the more Nina and Jimmy knew and said about the world. They made people uncomfortable with their vulnerabilities and rage.

Inheritances haunt.

she was both mighty and vulnerable.

If people accepted the idea that racism was merely ignorance or misperception, white innocence could be preserved. If instead it was a system bent on the oppression of Black people, and the deliberate destruction of natural ties among members of the human community, then the whole damn nation was guilty.

Maybe her body in pain put her in communion with humanity.

She saw in it the ease with which people could accept destruction as long as it wasn’t too close to home.

this was part of the core of life: the plunging depths of death and the task of going on after the death of the beloved, not simply as endurance but as a baptism, a rebirth, a new beginning.