You Don't Know Us Negroes, and Other Essays

I have been waiting for this book for over a dozen years. I could not figure out why such a prominent writer's collected essays had never been published when her stories, letters, plays, and folklore had all been assembled in book form. Well, now I know. Until the mid-1940s, Hurston turned out one good essay after another. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is perhaps the most brilliant, published in 1928. “Characteristics of Negro Expression” lays out Hurston's ideas on what makes Black communication unique. “Art and Such” is a sharp exploration of the history of African American art and writing. But most of the later essays are shockingly repulsive—and poorly written. After Hurston's greatest work had been pilloried by Black male writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes—and after she had been falsely accused of child abuse by her Harlem neighbors—she essentially became a Southern conservative. “Mourner's Bench: Why the Negro Won't Buy Communism” (1951) is full-blooded McCarthyism. “Court Order Can't Make Races Mix” (1955) and “Which Way the NAACP” (1957) object vehemently to desegregation and the African American fight for justice. “The Lost Keys of Glory” (1947), an argument that women should accept their subservience, is one of the most sexist things I have ever read. Her satire in these essays has changed from sharp to shopworn. There is a good reason only one of these (“Mourner's Bench”) was published during Zora's lifetime.In compiling and publishing You Don't Know Us Negroes, the editors made some rather odd decisions. First, the essays are not in chronological order but organized by subject. As you read each, you have no clue when it was written or for what publication—for that you must turn to the back of the book. Essays are usually occasional: Why obscure the occasion? Second, nowhere is the selection process explained. What was excluded? The book does not tell us, so I did my own research. Excluded are most but not all of the following: her book reviews, contributions to Nancy Cunard's Negro: An Anthology, contributions to the Florida Writer's Project, and pieces she wrote about Cudjo Lewis. Also excluded are “Mr. Schomburg's Library” (1922), “The Eatonville Anthology” (1926), and “Self-Association as Negro Policy” (1955); the encyclopedia entries she wrote; four late 1950s essays published in the Fort Pierce Chronicle; and more than a dozen unpublished essays. Why were they excluded? Some of them are available in other books, but as for the others, I cannot tell you. Third, there are the endnotes, which are difficult to use (there are no page references) and mostly useless. I should quote a few here in their entirety. “Louis XIV (1638–1715) was king of France from 1643–1715.” (If you're going to use from, you have to use to, not a dash.) “John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) and Henry Ford (1863–1947) were very wealthy business magnates and industrialists.” “Venus is the Roman goddess of love, beauty, and sex.” “Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879–1962) was a Canadian explorer and archaeologist.” (This entry refers to his mention in an essay about Fannie Hurst; not mentioned is that Stefansson was also Hurst's lover.) I will not bother quoting the one identifying Abraham Lincoln. Finally, while the introduction provides a valuable critical apparatus and is essential for understanding much of the book's content, the book's last section, devoted to Hurston's extensive coverage of a murder trial, is practically incomprehensible without referring back to it. The context is vital but locally absent.Still, despite these faults, we do have the boon of Hurston's greatest essays collected in a book. Some of the wisdom that has meant the most to me is here: “The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.” “I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” Victimhood as a pattern of thought and even a way of life may be more popular now than ever before. No matter your color, sex, or creed, you can easily find a group that will support your claims to being a victim of another color, sex, or creed. The entire Western world seems to have succumbed to the culture of grievance. White men complain of being stripped of power by Black women, and vice versa. Even white male billionaires feel persecuted. Hurston's essays are the ultimate antidote to this way of thought. “Sometimes,” she writes in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” “I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It's beyond me.” “We do not hate white people,” she writes in “Mourner's Bench.” “We certainly have no wish and desire to kill off the pink-toed rascals. Even if they were not useful as they are, we'd keep ’em for pets.” Self-pity, for Zora, was an unforgivable sin. She roundly condemned Black writers who concentrated on their people's suffering. In the book's title essay, which is previously unpublished, she writes: “Negro writers have set out to prove that we can pout. With slight exception the novels have been sociological. At the lowest, a prolonged wail on the tragedy of being a Negro. . . . A forlorn pacing of a cage barred by racial hatred.” The essay “Art and Such” portrays a Black poet who wants to write “a song to the morning” but cannot because “the one subject for a Negro” is “the Race and its sufferings.” Instead, he writes about a lynching. Zora was not shy about treating racial injustice herself, as her three essays for Negro Digest make plain (“My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience”; “Crazy for This Democracy,” a sarcastic attack on American imperialism and Jim Crow laws; and “What White Publishers Won't Print”). But she did not complain: she brought out her oyster knife.