How It Feels To Be Colored Me

Hurston published “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” at the height of the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance, a flowering of African-American culture during the 1920s that brought national attention to black artists, writers, and musicians. Hurston’s essay engages with one of the central questions of the age: what does it mean to be African-American in America? Hurston uses her autobiography, metaphor, and contrast to counter prevailing narratives of African-American identity.

Hurston uses her autobiography as a touchstone for articulating her experience of racial identity. The initial sentence of the essay previews her approach to the task of racial definition. She opens the essay with a joke. The joke hinges on the reader’s familiarity with the spurious claims to Native American heritage by African-Americans. These claims emerge from a sense of shame because African-American heritage is one rooted in slavery, while Native American heritage is seen as one that connects to a popular image of Native Americans as noble and worthy of celebration.

By refusing this claim, Hurston is signaling that she will take a light-hearted approach to the issue of racial identity. That light touch contrasts sharply with the sometimes-serious tone taken by African-American intellectuals intent on intervening in racist representations of black identity and culture. Hurston’s use of humor is subversive because it refuses to plead for acceptance of African-Americans as worthy of celebration; she simply assumes that the average, fully African-American heritage is good enough, without the embellishment of noble, nonblack forbearers.

Hurston’s assumption of African-American cultural sufficiency is borne out with the other details of her autobiography that she includes or leaves out. Her representation of her early, naïve perspective on whites is one that emphasizes curiosity but not awe. Their presence is incidental in her all-black town and merely serves as the background for demonstrating her boldness, her early talent for entertaining, and her yearning to explore. The implicit confidence that young Zora, “everybody’s Zora” (par. 4, line 5), had in her value is rooted in her identity as a member of a community,rather than the coins or attention given to her by white tourists.

Thirteen—an age when young people experience the rites that introduce them to adulthood—marked the first major instance in which Hurston internalized the idea of race as an important part of her identity. The language in the paragraph underscores the idea that her recognition of race was one that emerged from external, social pressures, not something intrinsic to her psychology. Hurston is sparing of intimate details of her autobiography in this section—there is no disclosure of the family changes that occasioned the move, the riverboat trip itself, or the “certain ways” (par. 5, line 6) that made her realize the importance others attached to racial identity.

Dating back to the age of the slave narratives, the wrenching moment when a black child realizes the import of racial discrimination is usually included in black autobiographies. Further, it is usually taken as an opportunity to condemn the injustice of a society that denigrates even children. Hurston chooses to make a different move in that moment. She instead uses the metaphor of dyeing to talk about it: her description of her skin as a “fast brown warranted not to run” (par. 5, line 6) emphasizes the superficiality of racial identity but also the apparent inescapabilty of it,as race is like a permanent dye that colors over what is underneath. Her refusal to disclose personal details and her use of a metaphor that emphasizes surface and appearance over interiority communicate to the reader that race as most people know it is socially constructed—a person is black because society labels ands treats the person as such.

While the imposition of such externally-imposed definitions could be represented as traumatic, Hurston, in the next paragraph, immediately rejects any such reading of her recognition of herself as black.While contemporaneous writers frequently focused on black identity as the tragedy of racism, Hurston imagines an African-American identity that aligns more closely with the idea of the “New Negro,” Harlem Renaissance writer Alain Locke’s idea that African-American identity had emerged from the old days of slavery and subjection into a modern age of self-definition and possibility.

Hurston’s descriptions of what it means to be black at the start of the twentieth century brim with possibility. The world is an oyster that she will eat attack and eat with an oyster knife, life as a twentieth-century African-American is a race made possible by slavery in the Western world, and running the race by refusing to look back is a “bully [exciting] adventure” and “thrilling” (par. 7, lines 7-10). The positive connotation of these words reinforces Hurston’s insistence on the sufficiency of African-American people and culture. There is no shame attached to being the descendent of slaves. Hurston also makes a parallel move when describing whites. She represents them as objects of pity because they are forced to expend energy in maintaining white privilege. To be black is to be filled with possibility, while to be white is to be weighed down by the past.

In the remaining sections of the essay, Hurston continues to use personal experience to show how race is a socially-created construct. Her description of feeling black in the predominately-white setting of Barnard College uses visual, black-white imagery (she is a black rock overwhelmed by a white ocean), emphasizing that the sense of racial differences emerges only because of the social setting.

She refines the idea of black identity in her examples of listening to music in the New World Cabaret and walking through Harlem. The extended, impressionistic description of her emotional response to listening to jazz is marked by imagery drawn from primitive representations of Africa: jungles, drums, an assegai (spear), and jazz as a beast that connects her to Africa. The impact of listening to music shaped by African culture in the New World is that it is rooted inacknowledgment of the cultural connections between Africa and African America, not slavery or racist, white perceptions of African-American inferiority.

Hurston again contrasts this more positive representation of blackness with whiteness that is defined by a lack, in this case a lack of connection to the powerful, primitive urges that a connection to Africa gives the black listener. Whiteness and Western culture are portrayed as lacking in substance and detached from primitive drives that give life a greater authenticity.

Hurston’s description of walking down Harlem streets is one that emphasizes identity that taps into deep, ancient connections to the feminine. She uses contrast in this vignette as well, this time by favorably comparing herself to Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a celebrity actress who was mostly famous just for being famous, in addition to the rich men she married and left. Joyce is a female figure who is all surface and whose image is one created in the service of her celebrity, while Hurston’s gender identity, when she walks in Harlem, is presented as “cosmic” and “the eternal feminine” (par. 14, lines 4-6). In this comparison, Hurston’s identity transcends race and is represented as more authentic than that of the white figure’s identity.

Hurston’s last image completes her vision of race. The images of differently-colored bags return to the idea of race as coincidental and superficial, while the idea of people’s interiority as interchangeable jumbles of junk and jewels shows that Hurston believes that, in terms of experience, people are not so different from each other.

Through the use of her autobiography, metaphors, and contrast, Hurston ultimately gestures toward a universal humanity that exceeds our attempts to define people by essential racial characteristics.