How It Feels To Be Colored Me

“The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gate-post. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter.” 

By contrasting her daring with the reticence of the other townspeople of Eatonville, Hurston characterizes herself as a person who early on exhibited intellectual curiosity. This quote is also an example of the many metaphors Hurston uses throughout the essay.

“During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me speak pieces and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they didn't know […] The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the count—everybody’s Zora.” 

Hurston again demonstrates her lack of childhood awareness of any intrinsic differences between blacks and whites. In addition, this passage makes it clear that the caring attitude of the adults around her during her childhood gave her a sense of confidence and self-worth.

“I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown warranted not to rub nor run.” 

The rite of passage that ushered Hurston into awareness of the significance of race for others occurred when she moved to Jacksonville. Her description of this awareness of race as permanent dye shows that Hurston saw race as a superficial identity grafted on top of her authentic identity.

“But 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 but about it.” 

Hurston rejects the idea of African-American identity as one rooted in victimhood. Her description of African-Americans whose identities do emphasize their subordination is laced with contempt. This attitude is in keeping with her notion that African-Americans are resilient people with great potential because of all they have overcome.

“No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.” 

Hurston uses the metaphor of sharpening the oyster knife to represent her eagerness to achieve acclaim in the world and claim the portion she believes due to her because of her efforts.

“Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said ‘On the line!’ The Reconstruction said ‘Get set!’ and the generation before said ‘Go!’ I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.”

Hurston references what even then would have been a controversial perspective on slavery, one that imagines it as a kind of “fortunate Fall.”African-Americans’ African ancestors lost their freedom when they were enslaved, but the loss of that freedom was a fall from grace that paid off by transforming them into Westerners, imagined as a blessing in a world in which the West is a civilizing force only, not a destructive force for colonialism and oppression.

“It is thrilling to think to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.”

Hurston writes against the grain of representing African-Americans as marginal and oppressed people in this quote. Instead, she places them and their progress at the center of this cultural moment. This inversion of the usual way African-Americans are represented is an intervention Hurston repeats throughout the essay.

“The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.” 

This passage uses contrast between blacks and whites to invert the representation of whites as privileged. The dark figures in this interaction are constantly moving intospaces that in the past had only been reserved for whites. Hurston’s portrait here is of a competition between the races, one blacks are more likely to win in the end because they have more to gain.

“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” 

Hurston’s sense of racial identity sharpens when she is in the presence of whiteness, as illustrated in this description of what it felt like when she attended Barnard College, a predominantly-white institution. 

“Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.” 

In this quote, Hurston distinguishes between her reaction to listening to jazz in a cabaret and the reaction of a white friend there with her. Their different reactions to the music serve as a marker for Hurston of the different relationship they have with black cultural forms, and to African heritage. Hurston uses the visual contrast to reflect the racial contrast in their reactions.

“AT CERTAIN TIMES I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.”

Hurston describes another perspective on her identity. This perspective is grounded in gender,rather than race, and it again hinges on striking a contrast between the authentic Hurston, who is plugged into deep-rooted experiences that she believes are universal in nature and the less authentic Joyce, a celebrity whose image is manufactured. 

“I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.” 

Hurston’s refusal to sort out national identity from racial identity counters the idea that African-Americans were not part of American society as a whole, and the idea that—because of racial injustice—African-Americans should reject patriotism. 

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.” 

The tone taken here—indignation and surprise—as a response to discrimination contrasts with “the sobbing school of Negrohood” Hurston points out earlier in the essay (par. 6, line 4). That attitude arises out of Hurston’s assumption that she is the equal of any white person and confident in herself as an individual.