“A Secondhand Kind of Terror”

Abstract

When Grace Halsell cited Lorraine Hansberry’s affirmation of a talented generation of black youth, she had only recently “become” a black woman. Armed with the curiosity and mobility of a freelance journalist, the economic security of a former White House staff writer for the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, and the reckless courage of the daughter of an infamous cowboy and westward expansionist, Halsell attempted to abandon the presumed comforts of Southern white womanhood by undergoing a course of medication to darken her skin. For Halsell, experimental blackness had little to do with challenging structural racial inequalities or solving W. E. B. Du Bois’s stubbornly and dangerously persistent “problem of the color line.”¹ Instead, she chose blackness “to open my mind, my eyes, my pores, to the dilemma of race in America, and to share those experiences.”² Privately citing Hansberry’s motto, the title of both a posthumously produced play and a literary mosaic of unfinished works, interviews, and journal entries, Halsell appropriated the powerful rhetoric of a burgeoning Black Power movement by imagining herself among the intended audience of the playwright’s loving and urgent charge to a new generation of black writers. With the hubris of privilege, Halsell timed the “specialness” of her new “young” and “gifted” blackness just as black separatists began to question and reject the place of white liberals in a movement starting to address issues such as white supremacy, capitalism, and the US imperialism evidencedby the Vietnam War.

Though it be a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic—to be young, gifted and black … Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention… This nation needs your gifts.

—Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words

As Lorraine Hansberry had observed, it’s a special time to be young, gifted, and black.

—Grace Halsell, September 16, 1969, journal entry