“I remember the very day that I became colored,” writes Zora Neale Hurston in her essay, How It Feels to Be Colored Me. This statement at the beginning of her essay immediately demonstrates the perspective Hurston adapts throughout her essay, that race is a matter of external more than internal perspective.
Before that day, however, Hurston exhibits a social curiosity and extroversion not typical for the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida where she grew up. For other members of Eatonville, white Northerners traveling through town were avoided. While they stayed in their homes peeking out behind curtains, Hurston would sit on top of the gatepost, greet them, and strike up conversations with them when she could. This attitude would continue to serve her after leaving her hometown.
“I left Eatonville . . . as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more . . . I was a little colored girl,” she describes as her discovery when she goes away to school at age thirteen. Although the rest of the world may choose to see her as “colored,” Hurston retains a personal sense of self and a perspective on America that is larger than issues of color. For instance, she believes that strong people will succeed in the world, no matter the color of skin pigment. As to slavery in America’s past, she views it as a price ex-slaves “paid for civilization,” and that it was not her choice or that of anyone else she has to deal with. This is not to say that she never feels the effects of race; she does, most notably when at Barnard College, where most of her classmates are white, or at the New World Cabaret with a white friend, where most of the club goers are black.
Hurston’s well-developed sense of self serves her well in achieving success and defeating the demeaning effects of discrimination. As she walks down Seventh Avenue in Harlem, she feels good and that she has no race, belongs to no particular time, and that she is merely herself, a part of the universe. When she does feel discriminated against, she feels astonishment instead of anger, wondering, “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?”
Finally, as an American in the late 20s, she says she has she possesses no feeling that there is a separation between being an American citizen and colored. Her view is very modern in seeing America as necessarily made up of many different parts that add up to a greater whole, or Great Soul, as she refers to it. This view mirrors her “brown bag of miscellany” example in her final paragraph, because just as America is constructed of many different peoples, so are individuals themselves, and “a bit of colored glass more or less would not matter.”
Works Cited
Hurston, Zora Neale. How It Feels to Be Colored Me. 1933.
