Zora was the first African American student to graduate Barnard College (the women's college at Columbia University). She was an anthropologist, a fellow student with Margaret Mead, and was a graduate student at Columbia University as well. In addition to her formal studies, she was one of the leading writers of the "Harlem Renaissance."
Many of her collected songs are available on iTunes.
Below is her essay about being Black in a White world. It is both serious and tongue in cheek humor. It is a fine example of how one very creative and intelligent woman was able to make an enjoyable life in the midst of complex and often difficult circumstances. Below it are some quotes that are favorites of mine.
I hope you enjoy Zora Neale Hurston's
How It Feels to Be Colored Me
I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.
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. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I'd wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: "Howdy do?well I thank you? where you goin'?" Usually automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably "go a piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first "welcome to our state" Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.
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 mela, 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 it. 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 county, everybody's Zora.
But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, a Zora. When I disembarked from the river boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. 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 brownwarranted not to rub nor run.
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 hurt about it. Even in the helter skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world. I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the grand daughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. 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 1 have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. 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.
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.
I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
For instance at Barnard. "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.
Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathens, follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue, My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something, give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.
"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall In company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small, things priceless and worthless. A first water diamond, an empty spool bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held, so much like the jumble in the bags could they be emptied that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place, who knows?
"I do not weep at the world -- I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."
"I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes."
"Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at de sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground."
"Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much."
"Those that don't got it, can't show it. Those that got it, can't hide it."
"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."
"I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death."
Zora Neale Hurston
I found this by Zola. It feels a lot like my life. I want it read at my funeral.
Zora Neale Hurston – I have lived in many ways
I’m not bloodthirsty and have no yearning for strife. If what they say is true that there must be this upset, why not make it cosmic? A lot of people would join in for the drama of it who would not be moved by guile.
I do not say that my conclusions about anything are true for the universe. But I have lived in many ways – sweet and bitter. And they feel right for me.
I have seen and heard.
I have sat in judgment upon the ways of others. In the voiceless quiet of the night, I’ve also called myself to judgment. I cannot have the joy of knowing that I always found a shining reflection of honor and wisdom in the mirror of my soul on those occasions.
I’ve given myself more harrowing pain than anyone else has ever been capable of giving me. No one else can inflict the hurt of faith unkempt. I’ve had the corroding inside at times of recognizing that I am a bundle of sham and tinsel, honest metal and sincerity, that cannot be untangled.
My dross has given my other parts great sorrow. But on the other hand, I’ve given myself the pleasure of sunrises blooming out of oceans and sunsets drenching, heaped up clouds.
I have walked in storms with a crown of clouds above my head and then zigzag lightning playing through my fingers.
The gods of the upper air have uncovered their faces to my eyes. I’ve made friends with trees and veils.
I found out that my real home is in the water, that the Earth is only my stepmother. My old man, the sun, sired me out of the sea.
Like all mortals, I’ve been shaped by the chisel in the hand of chance, bulged out here by a sense of victory, shrunken there by a press of failure and the knowledge of unworthiness.
But it has given me – it has been given to me – to strive with life and to conquer the fear of death. I have been correlated to the worlds so that I know the indifference of the sun to human emotions.
I know that destruction and construction are but the faces of dame nature and that it is nothing to her if I choose to make personal tragedy out of her unbreakable laws.
So I ask of her few things. May I never do good consciously nor evil unconsciously. Let my evil be known to me in advance of my accent, my good when nature wills.
May I be granted a just mind and a timely death.
While I’m still far below the allotted span of time and notwithstanding, I feel that I have lived. I have the joy and the pain of strong friendships. I have served and been served.
I made enemies of which I am not ashamed. I have been faithless. And then I have been faithful and steadfast until the blood ran down into my shoes. I have loved unselfishly with all the ardor of a strong heart. And I have hated with all the power of my soul.
What waits for me in the future? I do not know. I can not even imagine and I’m glad for that.
But already, I have touched the four corners of the horizon. For from heart searching, it seems to me that tears and laughter, love and hate make up the sum of life.
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