32 rue unrinisuni ‘There's lige to be confusion When a dream gets kicked around. ‘Raisin is striking confirmation of these leads from Hughes. Tt is, in many ways a deceptive play. It reminded me at first of Clifford ea Kind of Avake a Sing 0 Golden Boy in sepia, with a teaondeted mathe, an explo dream of a boy, the sy fps pects tx we of peyote a cee is enveloped. ‘But when T thought harder, I saw that Miss Hansberry had not copied from anyone, whether Odets or Langston. Hughes, but had futeceded in one of the hardest tasks a playwright could confront: ‘She has portrayed Negro life in America, with all its pressures, pulls and heartbreak, yet she has done it without hysteria, with a quiet yet ‘uncelenting strength; and she has made persons out of her characters, not categorie must confess that my own preference i for plays that re free fn method, less literal, les rooted in realism, more daring in the ex- ation of the wilder phases of the imagination. There was one scene ‘Raisin—in which Waltr and his college git sister, Beneatha, do an ‘African jungle dance—which hited me for & moment out of the circle ff description and reflection. But like a i itl who shows {for a moment the streak of Jezebel in he, the author quickly resumed Ihr proper poise, and the tembling ofthe veil was over. ‘ream deferred is Walters. Examine it—the dream of gett away from his despised job, of setting up a business with a liquor ‘ens, of building it up big, of having pens to hang around the neck Of his wife, of enabling his young son to drive to sehool in a taxi— and you will se that it isnt particularly Walter's dream as a Negro, nor yetan intensely private one. I is a dream that comes out of the larger culture of the whites in ‘which Walter has been caught up, just as George, one of Beneatha's suitors, has been caught up in it. (The other suitor, a young Ni inlets, captain porwayed, et the whole theme, of the ‘san bits ad pow ft a the Ngo is maria to he main theme of the play.) Walter's dream is a mi dream, rt Blak Bowgpodde: “Tie ack toupee sites from og 's Black Bourgeoisie: Sulers from nothin tess because when Negroes tain mills sats, thei ves ge erally os sh coment and gcc.” ns one goes back to the Langston Hughes ingle, “There's a cer= Rem esectmateat i| ter struggles through the “nothingness,” yes, and the impotence and the conte, too His dean ges ied round His eee | has a dream, to, of a house ina better neighborhood. The dreams — ON BEING 4 NEOKO IN AM ‘lash, and out of the confict and the resolution of the clashing dreams Walter finds himself. But just as the dream was never really his, but the dream of the ‘white culture, soit may be a weakness ofthe play that he finds himself ‘not through himself but through his mother. He is, in effect, shamed {nto maturing by his mother, when she dares him to humiliate himself in the presence of his own son. The theme Helen Lynd has stressed, ‘that in a moment of shame one may confront and discover one’s true self is illustrated in the magnificent eosing scene. ne almost orgets—s0, deceptively simple and human is Miss ‘Hansberry's writing—that the story i not only about the Younger family ut ina sense about the whole Negro people in America, about its heritage, and its trials and confusions, and its dream of equality de- ferred. 18 ss