Doubly Dynamic: Diana Sands in A Raisin in the Sun

It’s easy to imagine that a white director assigned to this project by a Hollywood studio, as Petrie was, might have misinterpreted Hansberry’s intent and overemphasized or ridiculed Beneatha’s capricious tendencies. Indeed, the moment in which Sands pops out of her bedroom in a Nigerian dress and head wrap, a gift from Joseph, and performs an impromptu folk dance comes dangerously close to dismissing Beneatha’s efforts at anti-assimilationist Africanism as a lark. (“You know, even the NAACP takes a holiday sometime,” Walter tells her at one point.) But Petrie, taking an unobtrusive approach with his ensemble, cedes space to Sands that allows her to assert co-ownership of the role; her brash, deep-seated defiance protects Beneatha from becoming the butt of anyone’s joke. The viewer tempted to laugh at Beneatha’s herky-jerky choreography and Nigerian garb might be surprised by the absolute and ardent seriousness of Sands in that same scene once Walter takes up his sister’s battle cry of “Ocomogosiay!” Chided incessantly by her devout mother, money-minded brother, and self-effacing sister-in-law, Beneatha is a modern woman stuck in a chamber of tradition, looking for an outlet that can communicate all she thinks and feels; in the world of A Raisin in the Sun, she is undoubtedly the character closest to Hansberry herself.

Sands had appeared, mostly uncredited, as a glorified extra in a few films prior to this performance, but she embodies Beneatha’s defiance and zest with an expressivity that bucks restraint, its hallmark a sandpapery New Yorker’s voice that rings out like a pealing bell. Reciting Hansberry’s dialogue on film, Sands revivifies words she had by that point recited hundreds of times, creating her character in the light squeaks and rusted rasps of her utterances. You can make out all that Beneatha feels about Gossett’s stuffed-shirt beau by the nasal drip Sands puts in her pronunciation of “George,” the way she mockingly elongates her statement that he is “ashamed of his heritage.”

It is a testament to Sands’s commitment to honesty that she does not shy away from the character’s abrasive streak. Beneatha visibly recoils from Walter’s wailing display after he loses the lion’s share of the insurance money, and she’s later chastised by her mother yet again for bitterly disowning her brother for this blunder. (Poignantly, Sands endows Beneatha with the same beckoning, bladelike arms and springiness of step as Poitier, whose effusive physicality was similarly born of the stage, tangibly bonding her character to a brother who is more of an annoyance than an ally.) Many of Beneatha’s scenes find the character being scoffed at for her peculiar independence or compelled to reconsider her own harsh judgments, but Sands accentuates her empathy in other ways. One of Beneatha’s final gestures finds her standing in solidarity with Walter after he refuses to take a bribery check from the chief segregationist of Clybourne Park, the all-white suburb where Lena plans to move the family. Sands conveys a generosity of spirit as she wraps a strong arm around Poitier and pecks him on the cheek with pride and affection.

For all her surface toughness and fierce intellect, Sands is often credibly coltish and callow, unafraid to let Beneatha be seen not knowing. Her performance embraces the humility that Beneatha learns over the course of the film, a result of the youthful struggle to admit one’s ignorance without invalidating one’s beliefs. It is this struggle that earns Beneatha the Yoruba name “Alaiyo,” or “One for Whom Bread Is Not Enough,” from Joseph, causing her to collapse rapturously at the door upon his exit, overwhelmed by the feeling of being truly seen and appreciated. Sands holds the character’s conflicting impulses all at once, bolstering and advocating for Beneatha by insisting on her right to complex personhood.

“She was beautiful people,” Melvin Van Peebles told Ebony on the occasion of Sands’s tragic passing in 1973, at the tender age of thirty-nine; she was survived by her own mother. “She was supportive of all Black people trying to work in this business.” Pancreatic cancer, the same illness that took Hansberry from this world far too soon, forced Sands to relinquish the highly coveted title role of a Harlem mother in John Berry’s Claudine (1974); the part, written expressly for Sands, was poised to elevate her career. At death’s door, Sands insisted to the film’s reluctant director and producers that the glamorous Diahann Carroll have a crack at Claudine, paying it forward some years after Carroll had fought for Sands to get her four-episode gig on the groundbreaking NBC sitcom Julia (1968–1971). By adamantly, selflessly defending the right of her friend, colleague, fellow Bronx native, and former LaGuardia High School classmate to be taken seriously as an actor, Sands cleared the path for Carroll’s first and only Academy Award nomination, for Best Actress. Sands never saw such success, but her artistry and generosity of spirit remain an inspiration to similarly underestimated descendants like Khandi Alexander and Jackée Harry, veterans who have both cited Sands as a role model, a reminder that though life may end, greatness is eternal.

Sands’s connection to her most famous character was pure and total: “Beneatha was a completely new type of human being to put on the stage, although I’d seen her walking down the street every day,” Sands told the Village Voice. “I played her for two and a half years and I was never bored. There was no end to the character. And I had a tremendous sense of doing something new and important.” In A Raisin in the Sun, Sands luxuriates in a rare spotlight and breathes life into Beneatha’s mercurial moods. This is felt most palpably in Beneatha’s scenes with Joseph, in which she tries her best not to surrender to passion’s pull, swinging between arousal, offense, and gratification with this amused and besotted suitor. Late in the film, Joseph invites the marriage-averse Beneatha to return to Nigeria with him and build a life there as husband and wife. In reaction to this proposal, Sands’s eyes turn gently ruminative and her fingers reflexively reach her lips, as if trying to hold back the breath that romance and the promise of partnership have pulled from her lungs. It’s a gorgeous gesture, emblematic of how, in a matter of mere seconds, love can put a mile between you and the person you knew yourself to be. And it’s a moment to make one wonder, with no small amount of wistfulness, what other women of heart and mind Sands might have brought into being.