Catchin’ Strays: On Pet Negroes, the Black Domestic, and the Politics of Loyalty

Catchin’ Strays: On Pet Negroes, the Black Domestic, and the Politics of Loyalty

“We should not presume a desire for freedom” 

 — Jared Sexton 

“Comfort has come to be its own corruption”

— Lorraine Hansberry

"Revolution begins with the self, in the self.”

 — Toni Cade Bambara

In her 1943 essay for The American Mercury entitled “The ‘Pet Negro’ System,” writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston transforms the literary genre of the article into a political pulpit. Sharing her Southern prophecy of interracial relation, the essay sets out to describe what Hurston designates as “the ‘Pet Negro’ System”—a network of allegiances and betrayals which shape the lives of Black Southerners. Opening with a pastor’s charm, Hurston commands the attention of her readership-ministry with her first two lines: “Brothers and Sisters, I take my text this morning from the Book of Dixie. I take my text and I take my time,” she declares. Laying the groundwork for her greater decree, she establishes which passages from “the Book of Dixie”—the unwritten text of Southern racial decorum drafted under slavery—will serve as the foundation of her sermon. As she states, the promises of “the Book of Dixie” read as follows: “every white man shall be allowed to pet himself a Negro.”  

 With “The ‘Pet Negro’ System,” Hurston effectively recounts a social history of race relations as if they were the makings of a Biblical passage. Focusing on “an aspect of the race problem ignored by zealous reformers,” Hurston articulates a racial doctrine that caters to white Southerner’s desires for a more elastic kind of domination—the right “to pet and to cherish.” As she expertly notes, this system of racial domination and divine entitlement hinges on the possibility of the “pet Negro.” In Hurston’s words, “the pet Negro, beloved, is someone whom a particular white person or persons wants to have and to do all the things forbidden to other Negroes.” With this definition in mind, Hurston’s essay opens up a crucial discourse on access, community, Black exceptionalism, and the politics of betrayal as they concern these so-called “cosy” Negroes. As her work illustrates, the “pet Negro” is but an invention of oppression—a victim-turned-beneficiary of an intricate system committed to the regulation and management of Black comfort. For those “chosen ones” who’ve been granted access to the exclusive white world and its offerings, Hurston is resistant to the temptations of denying Black complicity. Rather than describe the “pet Negro” as an unknowing participant in this system of allowances, Hurston suggests a complex exchange takes place between white patrons and their “pets”—a dynamic which, she argues, “a lot of black folk, I’m afraid, find mighty cosy.” 

Here, Hurston’s use of the word ‘cosy’ lingers as, perhaps, the essay’s most subtle yet trenchant critique. Whilst giving voice to the systemic structures that shape Black-white relations in the post-Emancipation South, Hurston is careful in her consideration of the morally and politically complicated ways that Black people negotiate their own wellbeing within hostile territory. In taking seriously the political implications of  ‘coziness,’ “The ‘Pet Negro’ System” serves as a critical intervention in the politics of comfort. With this work, Hurston asks that we contemplate what it means to be comfortable and cautions us against its seductions. In doing so, she articulates what theorist Frank Wilderson III would remark upon decades later in his work Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms: “where there are slaves, it is unethical to be free.” In the 1940s, Hurston posed Wilderson’s statement as a question. She asked, what is the cost of attaining individual comfort, knowing well the distress you’ve escaped? How can one be both colored and cozy? 

Writing of the paradox of personal comfort amidst mass Black discomfort, Black American playwright Lorraine Hansberry reflected upon this very set of questions decades after Hurston’s essay. In a private journal entry, published shortly after her untimely death in 1965, the late Hansberry remarked, “Do I remain a revolutionary? Intellectually—without a doubt. But am I prepared to give my body to the struggle or even my comforts? This is what I puzzle about. [...] Comfort has come to be its own corruption.” Critiquing the very corruption Hansberry would later recognize in herself, Hurston set out in 1943 to take cozy Negroes to task. Knowing well that “these comfortable, contented Negroes are as real as the sharecroppers,” Hurston refused to ignore the role of agency and self-interest in her analysis of these “pets.” For, it is within the bourgeois allowances of white proximities where the “pet Negro” finds solace in their distance from other Negroes. As Hurtson’s essay asserts, theirs is a comfort that corrodes community in both the social and the political sense—eating away at its very potential as a site for liberatory struggle. 

Ever the anthropologist, Hurston is keen on the idiosyncrasies of Black cultural dynamics, values, social types, and subtexts. Of the “pet Negro’s” opposite—the negro without white ‘friends’—Hurston extrapolates the following: “They belong in the ‘stray nigger’ class and nobody gives a damn about them.” With this anti-Black apathy in mind, Hurston argues that it is the “pet Negro” who leaves “stray niggers” behind to fend for themselves in the midst of structural and pervasive neglect. Nonetheless, the Black community’s regard for the “pet Negro” is neither unilaterally hostile nor entirely reverent. Serving as a figure of both community uplift and betrayal, the “pet Negro” finds individual prosperity and does not give back to their own, signifying a singular and selfish politic of success. “There are dangers in the system. Too much depends on the integrity of the Negro so trusted,” Hurston writes. “What was meant for the whole community has been turned to personal profit by the pet.” 

Though the “pet Negro” enjoys much leniency within a culture that has been compelled not to report on our own, Hurston assures us that the treasonous can be and are still rebuked for their crimes against community. “We curse him for a yellow-bellied sea-buzzard, a ground-mole and a woods-pussy, call him a white-folkses nigger, an Uncle Tom, and handkerchief-head and let it go at that,” she writes. In drawing on this rebuke of the “pet Negro,” we can begin to name this matter of communal betrayal, which festers throughout Hurston’s essay, as a primary function of the ‘petting system.’ After all, the system is largely dependent on Black elites, and their prosperity gospel of exceptionalism, for making up its “pet” class. And no one who relishes in the fruits of inequality—luxuries that are “forbidden to other Negroes”—should go unchecked for their indulgence. Still, in thinking of those with proximities to white power structures, one would be remiss not to engage with the hegemonic forces which make such dynamics possible. After all, there can be no “pets” without owners. No masters, no slaves. 

In her theorization of “the ‘Pet Negro’ System,” Hurston is less harsh and meticulous in her critique of the white “pet owner.” Of the “pet Negro” class, specifically, Hurston explains that, “if they are worth the powder and lead it would take to kill them, they have white friends.” Here, rather than identifying these white benefactors as the effective “owners” of these “pet Negroes,” Hurston instead refers to them as ‘friends.’ In doing so, she implicates interracial friendship—a highly precarious social and emotional exchange between the unequally yoked—as a feature rather than a bug of the ‘pet Negro system” 

This ‘petting system,’ as Hurston refers to it, constitutes a network of “underground hook-up[s]” that create possibilities for individual Black people that may or may not be subsequently shared with their communities. Though the “pet Negro” could threaten this very social order, given their proximity to these sources of power, she notes that the figure too often relinquishes this potential to secure limited personal freedoms or comforts. Yet, as Hurston lays out, this underground integration of Black and white social lives largely safeguards white power. The incorporation or embrace of select Black people is, thus, important though unessential to the system’s greater scheme—racial domination. In this enduring war, the likes of which Hurston describes, the “pet Negro” serves as a crucial informant who is, by design, prone to casualty. By providing white communities with valuable insight into the affective and political state of Black communities, the “pet Negro” delays their own liberation—helping to prevent the very “hasty explosions” of retribution or resentment that could unmake the Southern social landscape. 

In keeping this bubbling tension at bay, these “friendships,” or pet-owner relations, are integral to the vision of the South which Hurston cites in her “Book of Dixie.” This informal though auspicious text is grounded by one fundamental doctrine: “no man shall seek to deprive a man of his pet Negro.” As Hurston articulates, by affording their special “pet Negro” with privileges denied to other Black people, the white Southerner cashes in on an economy of desires that undergirds the intimacy of race relations, thereby fulfilling their needs for both dominance and affection.