Introduction: How’d He Do That? MR. LINDNER? THAT MILQUETOAST? Right. Mr. Lindner the milquetoast. So what did you think the devil would look like? If he were red witha tail, horns, and cloven hooves, any fool could say no. The class and I are discussing Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), one of the great plays ofthe American theater. The incredulous questions have come, as they often do, in response to myinnocent suggestion that Mr. Lindner is the devil. The Youngers, an African American family in Chicago, have made a down payment on a house in an all-white neighborhood. Mr. Lindner, a meekly apologeticlittle man, has been dispatched from the neighborhood association, check in hand, to buy out thefamily’s claim on the house. At first, Walter Lee Younger, the protagonist, confidently turns down the offer, believing that the family’s money (in the form of a life insurance payment after his father’s recentdeath) is secure. Shortly afterward, however, he discovers that two-thirds of that money has beenstolen. All of a sudden the previously insulting offer comes to look like his financial salvation. Bargains with the devil go back a long way in Western culture. In all the versions of the Faust legend,which is the dominant form of this type of story, the hero is offered something he desperately wants –power or knowledge or a fastball that will beat the Yankees – and all he has to give up is his soul. Thispattern holds from the Elizabethan Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus through the nineteenth-century Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust to the twentieth century’s Stephen Vincent Benét’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster” and Damn Yankees. In Hansberry’s version, when Mr. Lindner makes his offer,he doesn’t demand Walter Lee’s soul; in fact, he doesn’t even know that he’s demanding it. He is,though. Walter Lee can be rescued from the monetary crisis he has brought upon the family; all he hasto do is admit that he’s not
