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IT WOULD BE 
GOOD, SELFISHLY,
TO HAVE HER
AROUND NOW,
THAT SMALL,
DARK GIRL,
WITH HER WIT,
HER WONDER,
AND HER
ELOQUENT COMPASSION.

1969, 1985 by James Baldwin.
Reprinted by arrangement with the James Baldwin Estate.

Middle Page

the disagreeable necessity of becoming "an insurgent again." For Lorraine made no bones about asserting that art has a purpose, and that its purpose was action: that it contained the "energy which could change things."

It would be good, selfishly, to have her around now, that small, dark girl, with her wit, her wonder, and her eloquent compassion. I've only met one person Lorraine couldn't get through to, and that was the late Bobby Kennedy. And, as the years have passed since that stormy meeting- Lorraine talks about it in these pages, so I won't go into it here- I've very often pondered what she then tried to convey- that a holocaust is no respecter of persons; that what, today, seems merely humiliation and injustice for a few, can, unchecked, become Terror for the many, snuffing out white lives just as though they were black lives; that if the American state could not protect the lives of black citizens, then, presently, the entire state would find itself engulfed. ANd the horses and tanks are indeed upon us, and the end is not in sight. Perhaps it is just as well, after all. that she did not live to see with the outward eye what she saw so clearly with the inward one. And it is not all farfetched to suspect that what she saw contributed to the strain which killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine was dedicated is more than enough to kill a man.

I saw Lorraine in her hospital bed, as she was dying. She tried to speak, she couldn't. She did not seem frightened or sad, only exasperated that her body no longer obeyed her; she smiled and waved. But I prefer to remember her as she was the last time I saw her on her feet. We were at, of all places, the PEN Clun, she was seated, talking dressed in all black, wearing a very handsome wide, black hat, this, and radiant. I knew she had been ill, but I didn't know then, how seriously. I said, "Lorraine, baby, you look beautiful, how in the world do you do it?" She was leaving. I have the impression she was on a staircase, and she turned and smiled that smile and said, "It helps to develop a serious illness, Jimmy!" and waved and disappeared.

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SWEET 
LORRAINE
BY JAMES BALDWIN
THAT'S THE WAY I ALWAYS FELT ABOUT HER, AND SO I WON'T APOLOGIZE FOR CALLING HER THAT NOW.
She understood it: in that far too brief time when we walked and talked and laughed and drank together, sometimes in the streets and bars and restaurants of the Village, sometimes at her house, gracelessly fleeing the houses of others; and sometimes seeming, for anyone who didn't know us, to be having a knock-down-drag-out battle. We spent a lot of time arguing about history and tremendously related subjects in her Bleecker Street and, later, Waverly Place flats. And often, just when I was certain that she was about to throw me out as being altogether too rowdy a type, she would stand up, her hands on her hips (for these down-home sessions she always wore slacks), and pick up my empty glass as though she intended to throw it at me. Then she would walk into the kitchen, saying, with that haughty toss of her head, "Really, Jimmy. You ain't right, child!" With which stern put-down she would hand me another drink and launch into a brilliant analysis of just why I wasn't "right." I would often stagger down her stairs as the sun came up, usually in the middle of a paragraph and always in the middle of a laugh. That marvelous laugh. That Marvelous face. I loved her, she was my sister and my comrade. Her going did not so much make me lonely as make me realize how lonely we were. We had that respect for each other which perhaps is only felt by people on the same side of the barricades, listening to the accumulating thunder of the hooves of horses and the heads of tanks.
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Transcription Notes:
2 photos of Lorraine Hansberry Photo courtesy Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust/lhlt.org