Zora Neale Hurston
1891-1960

 Life

Family

 Homes

 Career

 Religion

Chronology

 

Quotations by Hurston

    "Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you" (213).

 
    "Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. That is natural. There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice box seasons his own food" (61).

 
    "I love myself when I am laughing, and then again when I am looking mean and impressive" - Hurston in a letter to Carl Van Vechten, Dec 10, 1934, referring to a series of photographs taken of her


Issues and Themes

Hurston's work was greatly influenced by her environment, self-confidence, patronage,
anthropology, folklore, hoodoo (voodoo), and the rise and fall of the Harlem Renaissance.  Zora Neale Hurston was raised in Eatonville, Florida.  It was the first all-black incorporated city that was self-governed.  When she was thirteen, she was sent to school in Jacksonville.  There she became aware of her color because she was no longer part of the all negro town.  In Jacksonville, she experienced the racial oppression and gender stereotyping that is evident in her works.   After leaving Jacksonville, she performed odd jobs for some years and met almost impossible odds to receive an outstanding education.  She began her writing career in 1925 and ended her career with seven novels and over one hundred plays, short stories, and articles under her belt.  Hurston's works deal with the social issues of racism, materialism, and the oppression of females, especially black females in that time.
 
Robert Hemenway wrote a biography on Zora Hurston and claims, "Zora Hurston was an extraordinary witty woman, and she acquired an instant reputation in New York for her high spirits and side-splitting tales of Eatonville life.  She could walk into a room of strangers . . . and almost immediately gather people, charm, amuse, and impress them."

In "How It Feels to be Colored Me" and other Hurston works, one of the major themes
is racial oppression of African-Americans, especially in the South. She claims that her race and her people should be happy, and they should not constantly think of the racial oppression their ancestors experienced.  In "How It Feels to be Colored Me," Hurston claims, "I am not tragically colored" (1984).  She is not sorry for who she is, and she does not feel it is necessary to hold onto slavery as an excuse for failure in life.  In "How It Feels to be Colored Me," she compares the institution of slavery to an operation by stating, "The operation was successful and the patient is doing well" (1984).  Like a patient recovering from an operation, she has recovered from the effects of slavery.  She is not ashamed of her race, but rather proud and excited because blacks have the chance to advance in society and "no one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory" (1985).  In her autobiography, Dust Tracks, Hurston maintained that blacks should focus on the positive aspects of black American life instead of staying with "the sobbing school of Negrohood" (Hurston 1942).
 
Hurston  is proud of her race. She also acknowledges that whites and blacks are both
different and alike. In "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Hurston  places herself  in a "white environment" in Jacksonville and then she reverses the situation and places a white man in a black jazz club.   The jazz scene with her and her white friend illuminates the differences in the races because both people have totally different reactions to the music.  While Hurston's pulse is throbbing and she feels like a jungle animal yelling "yeeeeowww!" because she is feeling the music, her white friend sits there "motionless" and drums "the table with his finger- tips" (1985).  We also see a bit of  Hurston's interest in anthropology when she places herself in an African tribe with a tribal spear as an illustration of her primal, emotional response to the jazz music. Hurston writes, "I dance wildly inside myself: I yell within, I whoop, I shake my assegai above my head..." (1985).  Though she feels most colored around whites, she "remains herself" because she is not going to change for anyone (1985).  Her attitude toward race is illuminated in the "brown bag" passage of the story, where Hurston explains that were are all the same on the inside.
 
She addresses racism in her  novels also. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the character named Nanny is a black slave who is forced into sexual relations with her white master through which she bears Janie, the protagonist of the novel.  To show how blacks discriminated against themselves, the character Mrs. Turner, who is a light skinned black woman, claims, "De black ones is holdin us back. Look at me! Ah, ain't got no flat nose and liver lips" (Howard 1980).

Another major focus in Hurston's works is the woman's discovery of self and search for happiness.  Se> 

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her works.  Through acceptance, the soul can be happy.  For example, in "How It Feels to be Colored Me," she states, "I am cosmic Zora. . .I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads" (1986).  She also claims that discrimination against her does not make her angry because "How can any one deny themselves the pleasure of my company? (1986).  In her eyes, if someone cannot accept her for who she is, then there is something wrong with that person.  Accepting the reality of a situation can lead to self-acceptance and therefore lead to happiness, according to Hurston (Howard 1980).
 
Many of the female characters in Hurston's works are oppressed and confined to their roles in society.  To show how they overcome these struggles, Hurston allows her characters (female) to express their sexual feelings even though it was not considered appropriate for a woman to openly show her feelings about sex.  In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the protagonist, Janie, is a mulatto woman who searches for happiness and love.  In the end of the novel, she is happy because she leaves her husband.  Hurston allows her to break the traditional role of women in the time period.

         In her writings, Hurston emphasizes that happiness can be found through freedom from    materialism.  Hurston never possessed the wealthy lifestyle, but she was happy because she did not believe material possessions were important.   She addresses  this notion in "How It  Feels To Be Colored Me" in the last paragraph. She figuratively sees herself as a bag full of little things priceless and worthless, such as an empty spool and lengths of string (1986). Yet she knows she is important and worth discovering or she is worth opening the bag to see what's inside. She also conveys how some blacks desired property and possessions. In Their Eyes  Were Watching God, Janie marries the wealthiest citizen of Eatonville, yet she discovers that she is not happy. She realizes she wants love and soon learns that love is not brought about through possessions.  Basically in Hurston's works, she conveys the general black female experience in America during the late 1800's through early 1900's.  She allows the reader to see how black females were oppressed by a male dominated society and how society views her experiences as valueless, insignificant, and inferior to masculine society  (Howard 1980).

Work

"How It Feels to be Colored Me"

Bibliography


Written and designed by Micah Messer, Cindy Parramore, Reena Patel, and Summer White, students, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, 1997
Edited by Mark Canada, Ph.D., professor of English, University of North Carolina at Pembroke

© Mark Canada, 1997

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