It's a Privilege to Expect More

A Black Eyed Confession

Zora Neale Hurston

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Find an audio reading of this Black Eyed Confession above.

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I’ve started this essay four times. Each time I begin again, it gets more depressing. 

I’d like to be like Zora Neale Hurston and tell you, “No, I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife,” but that’s a lie. I weep, a weeping willow tree—branches, leaves, roots—shading my soul. I weep dry tears. Like a dry alcoholic, I don’t indulge but I’m still very much unhealed and very much affected by the underlying issues. 

More suffering, more inequality, more hatred, more spitfire backlash at any twinge of movement towards equitable change. More worry, more despair, more caution, more disbelief at just how bad bad can get.  

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James Baldwin

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I’d like to be like Zora, but I’m more like James Baldwin asking himself, “What can we do?,” before he answers,“Well, I am tired … I don’t know how it will come about, but I know that no matter how it comes about, it will be bloody; it will be hard.” 

And I close my sore red eyes. I am so very very tired. I google:

did+James+baldwin+get+tired+of+talking+about+race

Google answers: 

• Time Magazine - How James Baldwin Told the Truth About Racism In America

• Discourse Magazine - What James Baldwin Can Teach Us About Race and Identity

• The Center for Community Solutions - Why We Must Keep Talking About Racism

• University of Central Florida - Honest Conversations About Race Will Help Move Us Forward

• Harvard Gazette - James Baldwin As Seen Against The Backdrop of Racial Upheaval 

• NPR - I Am Not Your Negro: Did I Get James Baldwin Wrong?

• American Archive of Public Broadcasting - A Conversation With James Baldwin 

I click on: NPR - “To Be In a Rage, Almost All the Time.” It begins: 

In 1961, author James Baldwin was asked by a radio host about being Black in America. He said:

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time — and in one's work. And part of the rage is this: It isn't only what is happening to you. But it's what's happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country, and their ignorance. Now, since this is so, it's a great temptation to simplify the issues under the illusion that if you simplify them enough, people will recognize them. I think this illusion is very dangerous because, in fact, it isn't the way it works. A complex thing can't be made simple. You simply have to try to deal with it in all its complexity and hope to get that complexity across.

The answer is yes, James Baldwin did get tired of talking about race. But James Baldwin loved Black people so much, as much as the weight of the hundreds and hundreds of conversations he willingly had with the most colorblind and indifferent dismissers of his Black beauty, Black love, Black wisdom, Black blackness with it’s gapped teeth and crinkled forehead. I dry-weep, wanting to giving him a heaping helping of rest. 

I want to be like Hurston and not feel a need to talk about race— or even feel it. I want to be like her and say, “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.” 

In some ways I do feel exactly as she did. Like her, I am not tragically Black. Like Maya Angelou said, if I weren’t Black I’d be jealous. I don’t have hurt feelings about it. I don’t hold that nature gave me some “lowdown dirty deal.” No, not nature. But heavens, I do believe humankind, with all its systems and institutions, did me and mine dirty. I don’t want to die as Zora did, not understanding this. I don’t want my kind to have to come and find me dead and buried and forgotten. I don’t want my contributions resurrected by a few. When the time comes, I hope my work will be like Angelou’s and Baldwin’s, exalted by the masses, steadily remaining, and never “remembered” because it was never buried and forgotten beneath a headless grave, dry as dust, poorer than ashes. I hope my words will forever be vibrant. 

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Maya Angelou Gardening

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In a menagerie of vases scattered throughout my home, there are deep ruby peonies and white hydrangea and sprigs of bright red geranium in bloom. Sweet Potato Vine, Spearmint and Thai Basil are strewn like twinkle lights across the back patio. There are mourning doves and starlings and sparrows and cardinals and chickadees who visit. There’s a cut glass hummingbird feeder beckoning ruby throats to drink and flutter and dazzle us with wonder. There’s a squirrel who holds court like a jester full of antics. There is so much love right here ,right now and by god, when I look on it, I know despite her worldly woes, Hurston had her fill of such muchness in those narrow days.

After her novel The Golden Bench of God was rejected, she wrote to her editor:

“Digging in my garden, painting my house, planting seeds, and things like that, makes me lazy about getting to the Post Office, and so I did not get your letter until Friday P.M. So belatedly I thank you for your editorial comments, and the time you spent reading the book…”

It was as if she’d never written a manuscript. It was all behind her. She continued on with more about her garden: 

“There is a flowing artesian well about fifty feet of the house, and already I have arranged a bit of ornamental water. I am planting butterfly ginger around it.” 

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Audre Lorde

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I never googled did+zora+neale+hurston+get+tired+of+talking+about+race. She’d already thoroughly and unequivocally given me her answer. She never did make the revisions her editor asked for, too busy eating her oysters, brine juice, grit and all. I’d like to be like that. I’d like to count the petals on these dragon-ish, double-headed peonies bewitching the corner of my eye, sitting poised and demure on my desk. I’d rather take tea with my geraniums. 

But a rapist, racist, fraudster insurrectionist lurks ready to gobble up such joy and I have to be like Audre Lorde and “learn to use/the difference between poetry and rhetoric,” and I need to continue to remind myself that “I am treacherous with old magic,” while knowing what Toni Morrison knew: “None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing,” and even still I can’t lie down when there are still contributions to be made to The Black Book so many of us are currently writing. 

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In the novel If Beale Street Could Talk, a love story written from the very heart of Baldwin, the protagonist Tish who is in love with Fonny thinks, “Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.” 

Whenever I read her words my heart catches because I have seen up close how neither love nor terror can warm the blood of an indifferent human being. We all found “love" for Black folks when George Floyd lay dead in the street and we all shrieked in “terror“ when the MAGA mob stormed the Capitol. And yet today whenever I say “a rapist, racist, fraudster insurrectionist” is running for president, I am flummoxed at just how little we care. Where did the love go? Where did terror run to? Did the swell of them drain us bloodless leaving us concussed and nonplussed? Or maybe the power of them knocked us unconscious. 

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Octavia Butler

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Whichever it is, I don’t want to talk about race any more because whenever I do it feels like I’m talking to ghosts. It feels like I’m speaking in riddles. It feels like I’m inside a nightmare, voiceless and trying to scream. It feels like I’m talking to the wind inside a sauna. It feels pointless but then I remember these words from Octavia Butler’s Earthseed planted inside her book Parable of the Talents: 

To survive,
Let the past
Teach you—
Past customs,
Struggles,
Leaders and thinkers.
Let
These
Help you.
Let them inspire you,
Warn you,
Give you strength.
But beware:
God is Change.
Past is past.
What was
Cannot
Come again.

To survive, 
Know the past.
Let it touch you.
Then let
The past
Go.

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Jars of soil from lynching sites in the EJI Legacy Museum

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So today, I will tell you the past I know. I will let it touch you and then I will let the past go…

Between 1865 and 1876, in the early years just after Black enslaved people were set free in this country and states began to repel the property requirement for voting, and just after the 15^th Amendment was ratified, there were 34 documented lynchings of approximately 1,299 Black bodies. 

There is a rapist, racist, fraudster insurrectionist running for president and doing well in the polls who doesn’t want you to know any of this and who has hinted at “a unified Reich,” and who has vowed to fight “anti-white feeling,” whatever that is, and to strip funding from schools teaching his definition of CRT, and to refuse federal funding to schools or charities or businesses with DEI initiatives. He and his Klan plan on using Section VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to do this because it uses the word “race” indiscriminately and he and his mobsters on the Supreme Court have everything they need to smite us all with a colorblind America that will not see or acknowledge White supremacy because they do not see color and once upon a time we had a Black president which terrified them. 

You have no idea how badly I want to delete these words and try again. But I know to expect more is a privilege, and what it is, is what it is. 

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