I’ve been waiting for this book for over a dozen years. I couldn’t 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. Hurston was a great essayist for many years, and then she started writing truly terrible work. Collecting her essays would expose readers to the terrible ones along with the great ones. And that is precisely what has happened.
Up until the mid-1940s, Hurston turned out one good essay after another. As far as I know, her best are in this volume. “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 like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes, and after she’d 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 fight for justice for African Americans. “The Lost Keys of Glory” (1947), an argument that women should accept their subservience, is one of the most sexist things I’ve ever read. Her satire in these essays has changed from sharp to shopworn. There’s a good reason only one of these (“Mourner’s Bench”) was published during Zora’s lifetime.
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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 instead are organized by subject. As you read each one, you have no clue when it was written or for what publication—for that you have to turn to the back of the book. Essays are usually occasional—why obscure the occasion?
Nowhere is the selection process explained. What was excluded? The book doesn’t 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 begin to tell you.
And then there are the endnotes, which are difficult to use (there are no page references) and mostly useless. I’ll 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 refers to his mention in an essay about Fannie Hurst; not mentioned is that he was also Hurst’s lover.) I won’t bother quoting the one identifying Abraham Lincoln.
The introduction provides valuable critical apparatus, and is essential reading in order to understand much of the book’s content. But if you’ve forgotten what you’ve read there, by the time you get to the book’s last section, devoted to Hurston’s extensive coverage of a murder trial, you’ll be lost. The context is vital, and it just isn’t there.
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But these are relatively unimportant faults compared with the great boon of having 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 who 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 wrote 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 wrote 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.” “Art and Such” portrays a black poet who wants to write “a song to the morning” but can’t because “the one subject for a Negro” is “the Race and its sufferings.” Instead, he writes about a lynching. Zora wasn’t 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 US imperialism and Jim Crow laws; and “What White Publishers Won’t Print”). But she didn’t complain: she brought out her oyster knife.
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