You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Editors’ Note

  Introduction

  Part One: On the Folk

  Bits of Our Harlem

  High John de Conquer

  The Last Slave Ship

  Characteristics of Negro Expression

  Conversions and Visions

  Shouting

  Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals

  Ritualistic Expression from the Lips of the Communicants of the Seventh Day Church of God

  Part Two: On Art and Such

  You Don’t Know Us Negroes

  Fannie Hurst

  Art and Such

  Stories of Conflict

  The Chick with One Hen

  Jazz Regarded as Social Achievement

  Review of Voodoo in New Orleans by Robert Tallant

  What White Publishers Won’t Print

  Part Three: On Race and Gender

  The Hue and Cry About Howard University

  The Emperor Effaces Himself

  The Ten Commandments of Charm

  Noses

  How It Feels to Be Colored Me

  Race Cannot Become Great Until It Recognizes Its Talent

  Now Take Noses

  Lawrence of the River

  My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience

  The Lost Keys of Glory

  The South Was Had

  Take for Instance Spessard Holland

  Part Four: On Politics

  The “Pet Negro” System

  Negroes Without Self-Pity

  The Rise of the Begging Joints

  Crazy for This Democracy

  I Saw Negro Votes Peddled

  Mourner’s Bench

  A Negro Voter Sizes Up Taft

  Court Order Can’t Make Races Mix

  Which Way the NAACP?

  Part Five: On the Trial of Ruby McCollum

  Zora’s Revealing Story of Ruby’s 1st Day in Court!

  Victim of Fate!

  Ruby Sane!

  Ruby McCollum Fights for Life

  Bare Plot Against Ruby

  Trial Highlights

  Justice and Fair Play Aim of Judge Adams as Ruby Goes on Trial

  McCollum-Adams Trial Highlights

  Ruby Bares Her Love Life

  Ruby’s Story: Doctor’s Threats, Tussle over Gun Led to Slaying!

  Ruby’s Troubles Mount: Named in $100,000 Lawsuit!

  The Life Story of Mrs. Ruby J. McCollum!

  My Impressions of the Trial

  Acknowledgments

  Chronological List of Essays

  Credits

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Zora Neale Hurston

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Editors’ Note

  Most of the essays collected here appeared in Hurston’s lifetime, over the course of almost forty years. Some appeared in print in the years following Hurston’s death. Still others appear here for the very first time. “Ritualistic Expression,” “The Chick with One Hen,” “Which Way the NAACP?,” “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” “The Lost Keys of Glory,” “Take for In­stance Spessard Holland,” and “The South Was Had” have never before been published. “The Hue and Cry About Howard University,” “Race Cannot Become Great Until It Recognizes Its Talent,” “Noses,” “Now Take Noses,” and the Ruby McCollum series are all reprinted here for the first time since their initial publications. The essays are often grounded in the political and social context of Hurston’s own time, so to make the vol­ume more accessible to today’s readers, the essays are annotated to supply information that her initial readers would have likely had, such as names and details about events that would have been in the media.

  To establish the copy-texts for this volume (that is, the versions upon which the essays printed here are based), we took a two-pronged approach. First, if an essay appeared in print during Hurston’s lifetime, we returned to the earliest known publication of that essay. In the case of the other essays, we used either the earliest extant typescript or manuscript, whichever exists.

  We have made only minor editorial changes to Hurston’s writings. Rather than imposing a universal standard on the volume, each essay has been edited as a discrete text. Thus, readers will find the variations of folklore, folk-lore, and folk lore. Apostrophes in contractions (aint versus ain’t) also follow the pattern in the original text. Among the few “silent” emendations, we corrected misspelled proper nouns and obvious typographical errors. The punctuation is largely Hurston’s own. The exceptions include adding an occasional comma to introduce quotations or in a few instances moving end punctuation to inside the quotation marks in keeping with today’s standard practices; adjusting capitalization within quotations to reflect current practices; adding a comma when one comma (either opening or closing) around an appositive phrase is missing; and adding periods where end punctuation is entirely missing. In general, capitalization here follows the original, so readers will find heaven and Heaven, hell and Hell, as well as southern and Southern. Alternate spellings have been retained within essays rather than regularized across the volume. The rare significant change appears in brackets, or those brackets indicate the insertion of a letter or word where the manuscript or typescript is illegible. Hurston’s last writings, “The South Was Had” and “Take for Instance Spessard Holland,” exist only in Hurston’s handwriting, and parts of the manuscripts were lost when staff at the nursing home in which she died began burning her belongings. The brackets there indicate text that has been lost.

  The essays published in Hurston’s lifetime, including her reportage on the Ruby McCollum case, were often accompanied by artwork, blurbs, and biographical descriptions of Hurston that publishers created to situate the author and her texts in their particular moment. However, including them here was beyond our scope. Likewise, we are unable to reproduce all of the textual features of the essays. For instance, some paragraphs in the Ruby McCollum series appear entirely in bold to attract readers to more salacious or surprising aspects of Ruby’s life story. Those features of the text have been standardized. We have, however, maintained the asterisk marks between paragraphs in the series.

  The essays are grouped loosely by a dominant theme or topic to support readers interested in exploring a single area, but often those distinctions are admittedly artificial, as any one essay might have appeared in two sections. For readers who want to approach the essays from a more historical perspective, there is a chronological list of essays at the end of the volume.

  Introduction

  I’m going to sit right here on this porch chair and prophesy that these are the last days of the know-nothing writers on Negro subjects. Both editors and readers are clamoring for something that makes their side meat taste like ham, for to tell the truth, Negro reality is a hundred times more imaginative and entertaining than anything that has ever been hatched up over a typewriter. From now on, the writers must back their rubbish with something more substantial than the lay-figure of the past decade. Go hard or go home. Instead of coloring up coconut grease in the kitchen, go buy a cow and treat the public to some butter.

  Zora Neale Hurston, from “You Don’t Know Us Negroes”

  The witty rhyme with which Zora Neale Hurston ends the title essay of this collection—“Biddy, biddy, bend, my story is end,/ Turn loose the rooster and hold the hen”—can be taken as a sort of epitaph for her, certainly, but also as the naming of a key theme to which she returns again and again throughout the essays she wrote over almost four decades—monumental decades that saw the birth of the H
arlem Renaissance and the launch of the classic period of the civil rights movement with the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the desegregation of the US military and the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Through these essays, collected in one volume for the first time, Hurston takes her place as a major essayist of the twentieth century.

  Hurston’s words in the epigraph above would prove prophetic. The renowned Black psychiatrist from Martinique, Frantz Fanon, brilliantly observed that the West could never “understand the being of the black man, since it ignores [Black people’s] lived experience.”1 Hurston dedicated her writings, especially her novels, to addressing this very shortcoming, which braids its way through so many of her political and aesthetic essays. Essentially, Hurston argues that “the Negro in fiction,” as she said, was too often an artificial, two-dimensional construct. Both white and Black authors were guilty of creating a fictional Negro, the former to demean or exoticize, the latter as one more propaganda weapon in the war against white supremacy. What she wanted instead was a revelation of the richness and complexity of Black life behind “the Veil,” as W. E. B. Du Bois famously put it in 1903 in The Souls of Black Folk.2 “And so,” she argues, “the writings that made out they were holding a looking-glass to the Negro had everything in them except Negroness. Some of the authors meant well. The favor was in them. They had a willing mind, but too light behind.” Slavery, Jim Crow, white supremacy, and anti-Black racism, she explains, “intensified our inner life instead of destroying it.” And rather than using literature to deflect the white gaze, Hurston maintained that the purpose of the Black writer was both to lift the Veil and to allow the Black experience to speak in its own voice, in all of its sublime resonance—good and bad, positive and negative.

  Reading Hurston’s reflections on the inner logic of Black cultural forms, social institutions, and behavior is a bit like overhearing an internal monologue in the same way that soliloquies function in Shakespeare. This is one of the innovations she makes in the history of the African American essay form. And throughout these essays, she argues that the full richness of the African American experience could only be realized in print if writers allowed the tradition to speak for itself, thus revealing “a genuine bit of Negroness” in the same way blues and jazz artists had done in the secular tradition; Black preachers and the “unknown bards” had done in their compositions of sermons, spirituals, and gospel music; and as she herself had done, much to the annoyance of Black male contemporaries such as Richard Wright and Alain Locke, in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Her lesser-known essays “Race Cannot Become Great Until It Recognizes Its Talent,” “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” and “The Chick with One Hen” capture these lifelong aesthetic commitments to lift the Veil.

  One of the delightful aspects of Hurston’s nonfiction is the subtle way in which it serves as commentary on her practice of fiction writing in a relationship of theory to practice. Her foundational essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” for example, is an attempt to define systematically, like a linguist would, the unique ways in which African Americans speak, the ways in which “the American Negro has done wonders to the English language.” This essay is one of the first attempts to arrive at a typology of Black English, helping us to understand the principles behind her representation of Black speech in her novels. Hurston identifies “the Negro’s greatest contribution to the language” as these three original usages: metaphor and simile (“You sho is propaganda”); the double-descriptive (“chop-axe”); and verbal nouns (“I wouldn’t scorn my name all up on you”). These she groups under the larger Black aesthetic principle of “the will to adorn.” Then she traces examples of this originality in traditional Black artistic forms, such as folklore, prayers, and sermons. These religious forms, she says, “are tooled and polished until they are true works of art,” forged “in the frenzy of creation,” a theme to which she returns several times in these essays. “The beauty of the Old Testament does not exceed that of a Negro prayer,” she asserts. As rendered in print, “dialect,” which Hurston distinguishes from “idiom,” was the often racist representation of Black spoken English, widely dismissed as a sign of Black people’s lack of intelligence, in minstrelsy, dialect poetry, and vaudeville. But when flowing from Hurston’s pen to page, her use of idiom underscores the beauty and range of what is actually a poetic diction, a language within a language. She highlights the manner in which African Americans have fashioned, and continue to refashion, the English language in their own resplendent voices, investing in English new power, poetry, neologisms (colorful coinings of words and expressions), and originality of expression, a thing at which to marvel and not to mock.

  For Hurston, Black Vernacular English and folk cultural forms are two of the African American people’s most original contributions to American culture. Most importantly, she argues, the cultural artifacts produced by the enslaved community and their heirs are proof that the “will to adorn,” in spoken English and storytelling, in the composition of sacred forms such as sermons, prayers, and the spirituals, in the blues and jazz, was one of the most salient signs of cultural vitality and survival and adaptation in the face of the horrors of enslavement and Jim Crow. These forms are parts or manifestations of what we might think of as a larger, organic “culture of themselves,” one that Black people formulated behind the Veil. And in these essays, Hurston is determined, detail by detail, to lift that Veil for the world to see, and just as importantly, to hear the sounds of African American cultural formations. She mounts a defense of what we might think of as traditional Black culture against those who would disparage it, be they white or members of the Black middle class.

  Hurston can be quite bold in her taxonomies of what she terms “Negro Folklore.” For instance, she characterizes Jack or John and Brer Rabbit, Black culture’s ultimate heroes, both with the wit and power to defeat the Master and, in John’s case, even the Devil, as he is “often smarter than God.” She also, in several asides, characterizes the Black Church as something of its own, a sui generis belief system: in the essay’s “Culture Heroes” section, she daringly writes, “The Negro is not a Christian really,” because of the vestiges of African religions still very much alive and patently manifest in traditional forms of worship, especially in the South. “We are not Christians really, but pagans,” she repeats in “Full of Mud, Sweat and Blood,” her review of David Cohn’s novel God Shakes Creation. “It is true that we employ all of the outward symbols of Christianity, but it is a beating of drums before new altars and calling old gods by new names.”3

  The church, to Hurston’s mind, is also the ultimate source of the most sublime Black poetry:

  The finest poetry that has come out of the Negro race so far has come out of the church, out of the mouths of preachers. If a man announces that he is called to preach and cannot get up in the pulpit and call God by all His praise-giving names; cannot gild the sunrise; heighten the glory of the rainbow, he will soon find himself back at his plowing and digging. Like others we have that consciousness of the inexpressible and a hunger for beauty, and the preacher must fill that want.

  Precisely when her contemporaries either wanted to render Black vernacular forms in standard English infused with the African American idiom (for example, James Weldon Johnson) or see them as reflections of economic exploitation and desperate cries for salvation (for example, Richard Wright), Hurston not only defends their sublimity, but subtly makes the case for an aesthetics based on these traditional forms themselves, a true “Black Aesthetic.” This was a most radical act, a spirited declaration of the need to recover the essence of Black creativity in the sublime artifacts of the Southern, unreconstructed slave past.

  Hurston returns to this idea repeatedly, particularly in “Mother Catherine” and “Ritualistic Expression,” her perceptive analysis of the sacred cultural forms that define the Black Church, far too many to enumerate here.4 But her keen observation is that Black religious practice really was what we might
think of as a “cultural laboratory,” because, as Hurston puts it, “the religious service is a conscious art expression,” reflecting both strikingly original musical forms and neologisms. In “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals,” she explains that “[i]n the mouth of the Negro the English language loses its stiffness, yet conveys its meaning accurately.” She offers marvelous examples: “‘The booming bounderries of this whirling wind,’ conveys just as accurate a picture as mere ‘boundaries,’ and a little music is gained besides. ‘The rim bones of nothing’ is just as truthful as ‘limitless space.’” Here she summarizes the relation between art and the religious service in action:

  [A]ll religious expression among Negroes is regarded as art, an ability recognised as definitely as in any other art. The beautiful prayer receives the accolade as well as the beautiful song. It is merely a form of expression which people generally are not accustomed to think of as art. Nothing outside of the Old Testament is as rich in figure as a Negro prayer. Some instances are unsurpassed anywhere in literature.

  This practice by Black people of reshaping Christian forms of worship in their own image is just one example of a cultural characteristic shared throughout African American culture. Hurston argues:

  So if we look at it squarely, the Negro is a very original being. While he lives and moves in the midst of a white civilisation, everything that he touches is re-interpreted for his own use. He has modified the language, mode of food preparation, practice of medicine, and most certainly the religion of his new country, just as he adapted to suit himself the Sheik hair-cut made famous by Rudolph Valentino.

  Creativity and originality, Hurston argues, infuse every aspect of Black life.

  Hurston valorizes traditional Black culture as a defense against the social insecurities of a rising Black middle class, whom she chastises for their “self-despisement,” refusing “to do or be anything Negro. ‘That’s just like a Nigger’ is the most terrible rebuke one can lay upon this kind.” Her list of what psychologists would call cultural “self-loathing” among the Black middle class includes their mocking of traditional Black preaching, the blues, the spirituals, and essentially any of the other cultural forms created by enslaved people. Hurston’s critique of this social class predated by decades E. Franklin Frazier’s classic work, Black Bourgeoisie (1957), in which he would severely chastise the emergent middle class for these same cultural practices.5 A special target for critique in “Spirituals and Neo-Spirituals” is anyone who tries to rearrange the traditional forms of Black sacred music, “some daughter or son [who] has been off to college and returns with one of the old songs with its face lifted, so to speak.” “But I say again,” she continues, “that not one concert singer in the world is singing the songs as the Negro song-makers sing them. If anyone wishes to prove the truth of this let him step into some unfashionable Negro church and hear for himself.”