You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays

"I know Zora Neale Hurston best for her fiction, and particularly Their Eyes Were Watching God , which is probably her best-known work. I have read a couple other of her novels and some short stories. This is the first collection of nonfiction I’ve come across, and it was put together from writings that she did, mostly from Manhattan, in Harlem, during the 1930s, 40s and up into the 50s and they reflect that period of history. She has a very strong, opinionated voice and she’s using it in these various essays. Some essays are longer than others, some are quite short. The latest is from the 1950s, when she attended a famous trial of a Black woman who was accused of murdering a white doctor after years of his abuse of her. Her voice and her opinions really resonate today. What’s interesting in listening to these essays is that Robin Miles—who we may have talked about before as an audiobook narrator, she’s one of our ‘Golden Voices’—is brilliant at capturing the subtleties of accents, tonal changes, certain regionalisms and the speech patterns. These essays weren’t written in the last decade, so the style of the writing is a little different. Robin picks up on all the cadences. The whole stylistic presentation of the essays is fabulous, and also the spirit of the writer, of Zora, comes through so well. Very much so. We believe in what she is saying now, but no one was listening then. That makes you even madder—or at least it makes me madder. With the injustices that we see now, at least there are some people listening, but I can imagine back then they were not being heard in any way. But she was still writing. It makes you wonder where these essays have been all this time, but I’m glad that they’ve been collected now."