When I Get Home
“I grew up a little girl with dreams.” That’s how the song “Dreams” begins, from the 2019 Solange album entitled When I Get Home. The album debuted before the pandemic began, but Black Lives Matter was already airborne and spreading in the Black community, well before our grief had a moniker. Trayvon Martin and Laquan McDonald and Michael Brown and more, they had already been slain. Soon the world would awaken to the reality that Martin Luther King may have been right about the burning house he feared we all lived in, which he disclosed with deep despair to his close friend Harry Belafonte, mere months before his assassination, as he reconsidered if integration were enough to reconcile our past.
I think about this as I listen to the chorus of Solange’s song: “Dreams, they come a long way, not today. Dreams, they come undone.” Langston Hughes wrote the poem “Harlem” in 1951; and Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun, perhaps in response to his inquiry, in 1957. Solange released this song in 2019, nearly 70 years after Hughes first posed the question, What happens to a dream deferred? As I listen to the chorus, I wonder if this is her answer. The path to equality does not appear to be linear. Human rights are fragile. Vulnerable to the elements, they can be dismantled. Dreams deferred come undone, as Solange put it.
As I turned my attention to what ideas would ground our programs for this production, the tenuous nature of progress weighed heavy on my mind. I thought about the Younger family and tried to imagine what they might have felt as they tested the American experiment and endeavored to move from the South Side of Chicago into a brave new world. I tried to comprehend the fortitude it takes to continue to insist on a more just world and the fundamental role that an indestructible kind of hope must play to keep resisting the status quo.
When I consider the improbable history of my people, I can only come to the conclusion that they believed a better world was coming, but only if they dreamed it first. Like the Youngers, they too remained steadfast, holding tight to the promise that I might one day exist. With this in mind, I hope our public programs for A Raisin in the Sun act as an invitation to reconsider the American Dream. Through critical exploration of the themes within this play, I hope you are inspired to have new visions of what America can become.
More information and event registration can be found here. I sincerely hope you will join us.