Staging Black Affects: Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”

My country needs me and if I were not here I would have to be invented.

–Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”

I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county, everybody’s Zora.

–Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”

“I remember the very day I became colored,” writes Zora Neale Hurston in her 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” ¹ To “become colored” conjures scenes of racial difference and geographic, socioeconomic mobility across the essay as Hurston narrates a series of physical and psychic transitions. Opposed to conventional narratives of racial belonging and exclusion, Hurston’s ribald play with “color” revises the conceptual limits of race as a stable category of identity formation. Instead, as she “remembers” color across the essay, “color comes” in different ways, alerting us to the elasticity of color in cross- and intra-racial encounters in spite of hierarchal supremacist regimes. Hurston’s turn to “color” thus stages the surplus meanings of the historically Black(ened) body for twentieth-century audiences.

One particular scene has become iconic for its invocation of the historically Black(ened) body: “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” (154). Here, color acts in excess of the embodied Black subject and, in turn, enacts the instability of racial categorization. Scenes like this illustrate Hurston’s negotiation of value and resilience across the essay. By invoking both publicity and performance repeatedly across the essay, I argue that Hurston’s staging of race invites, only to ultimately refuse, representational stability. In other words, instead of describing “race”, Hurston’s use of “colored” across the essay amplifies and obscures. In doing so she illustrates the performative and affective economies of race and language to her will. Read closely, these stagings centralize color and estrangement as tools for interrogating consciousness beyond “the color line.”

Hurston’s essay makes repeated and continued reference to various kinds of performances and stages. Early in the essay, she teases yet another depiction of the historically Black(ened) body with critical difference: “[White Northerners] 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 it” (153). The familiar dancing Black figure at the center of this scene dips in and out of view here. Singing and dancing for Northern audiences, we may have seen glimpses of her atop the ship deck, the coffle, or on the plantation before considering her fleeting resemblance to Black women’s cunning performances of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy. ² Such resemblances perhaps drew scenes of subjection far closer than twentieth century Black and white audiences expected by exposing competing public desires for Black containment, albeit in the seemingly alternating extremes of racial uplift or racist caricature. ³

Instead, Hurston revises this common trope. The voyeuristic gaze of white Northerners is somewhat curtailed by the performer’s awareness to her own “joyful tendencies,” which she leverages for silver. The dancing body of the scene is “Blackened” through a performance that reifies her own capacity for agency and pleasure. In Babylon Girls, Jayna Brown describes the distinctive ways Black women wield performances of Topsy as forms of corporeal capital and resilience. ⁴ By extension, in this essay I explore Hurston’s appropriation of corporeal and affective capital in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” I also examine her appropriation of “color” – an assertion of Blackened knowledge(s) and resilience gleaned from the Black theatre – to interrogate the Black imago in public spaces.

Furthermore, I examine Hurston’s invocation of the Black(ened) body for its generative and disruptive potential. As Daphne Brooks and others show, opacity was readily used by Black performers on nineteenth and early twentieth century stages to articulate the dissonant multivocality of Black identity in public and performance spaces. ⁵ By signifying upon the “the metaphorical utility of blackness,” Black performers enacted insurgent forms of contestation, self-invention, and mobility.

Despite racial uplift’s growing desire to police associations with racist minstrel acts and the Black stage, Black performers actively revised Black performance methods by improvising Black-authored minstrel gestures for an emergent Black stage. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a wellspring of Black stage pioneers and performers who wielded new corporeal vocabularies for interrogating Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement. Two pioneers of the Black stage, Bert Williams and George Walker, signified on white audiences’ expectations of “authenticity” in the 1890s by using burnt cork and billing themselves as “Two Real Coons.” Louis Chude-Sokei and W.T. Lhamon argue that their skillful corporeal performances and aesthetic innovations on stage and in song represented far more than just fame; they were forms of Black diasporic modernism that negotiated rituals of cross-cultural signification. ⁶

Building on this work of the emergent Black theater, it becomes clear that Hurston uses a performative and syntactical economy of “color” to stage the vibrancy and the opacity of Blackness in ways that depart from her contemporaries. Although a cursory glance at those contemporaries reveals that a lexicon around race, racial hue, passing, and colorism dominated their turn-of-the-century conversations around national identity, sexuality, and class, each deployed the illustration of race to different ends. For example, Nella Larsen in her novels Passing and Quicksand and James Weldon Johnson in Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man each deploy the trope of the tragic mulatto/a figure as a commentary and condemnation of racial hierarchy. Though Johnson’s novel signifies on “color” explicitly in the title, its eponymous character feigns a lack of awareness of “color” distinct from Hurston’s narrator in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Hurston distinguishes her essay from these modes in structure and form, too, driving her use of color toward a surreal experience of “red” “yellow” and “blue” alongside Black and brown.

Published during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance, it is no surprise that an awareness to race informs Hurston’s iconic essay. The visual primacy of skin color and its psychosocial hierarchies are reflected across some of the most canonical texts of the period. Even as Wallace Thurman in The Blacker the Berry and Hurston in Color Struck further extend the apparent ways in which color appears in Black modern literature as an index of racialization, no other writer explores its “metaphorical utility” so richly as does Hurston in her essay. Even in the midst of such an intense flurry of material on “color,” Hurston stands apart. In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston outlines “color” as a shifting category of performance rooted in genealogies of violence, appropriation, and affirmation. As we read, we begin to see how Hurston makes visible a range of Black performance affects.

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After a spectacular debut on the Harlem literary scene barely three years prior, Hurston’s 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” dramatized an unexpected portrait of the racial artist for the unwitting readers of the World Tomorrow, an American political magazine that catered to a white readership composed mostly of women. The essay positioned Hurston as a new kind of public intellectual and an artist keen on articulating the intersecting stakes of publicity and spectacle, on the one hand, and quotidian performances of interiority, race, and racialization, on the other hand.

Despite the tendency to read the essay in the autobiographical tone its title suggests, Hurston’s mastery wields interiority as a tool that becomes central to her critical deconstruction of race. Predating “Characteristics of Negro Expression” – her now-canonical treatise on Black drama – by six years, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is Hurston’s earliest theoretical statement on Black performance. In it, she leverages “color” to narrate, agitate, and refract contemporary sensibilities of race and culture and expertly engages and revises genealogies of performance history. Like early pioneers of the twentieth-century stage who claimed authenticity as a staging device, Hurston signifies upon the autobiographical mode in her essay.

Hurston’s seemingly simple aims in her essay promise the veneer of a compressed personal prose: short but honest glimpses into the lived experience of a Black woman writer. It is perhaps this seeming authenticity and the charged depictions of the Black(ened) body that prompted Alain Locke to write Hurston and dub her essay “a mistake.” In a letter to Hurston just days after the publication of “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Locke explains his concern for the way in which the essay oversteps the boundaries of propriety and conjures the very images of antiquated minstrel performance that his New Negro anthology was meant to combat. ⁷ Locke’s palpable concern for Hurston’s essay highlights his and other racial uplift intellectuals’ desire for a stricter New Negro image to effectively police forms of Black representation to white audiences. His letter highlights his fear that Hurston had committed an irreparable act of revelation of Black interior life to outsiders, while also anticipating a range of perplexed, if not displeased, responses from Black audiences. Taking Locke’s remarks against Hurston as a critical point of departure, I would like to sit with this notion of Hurston’s “mistake” as one that is a productive and deliberate staging of opacity. Hurston’s deployment of the singing and dancing Black figure cites the divergent desires of early twentieth century Black artists, activists, and audiences by harnessing an economy of affective and corporeal strategies gleaned from the Black stage.

In his letter, Locke’s chastising of what he deems as Hurston’s professional misstep is later tempered with caution and concern: “I realize that you had opened up too soon. I had that feeling because I had myself several times made the same mistake. The only hope is in the absolute blindness of the Caucasian mind. To the things that are really revolutionary in Negro thought and feeling they are blind.” ⁸ Here Locke identifies what he perceives as the inability of white audiences to fully interpret the nuances of Black thought and feeling. His statement “to things that are really revolutionary … they are blind” implores Hurston to consider the ramifications of publishing an essay that perhaps was too radical for its white audiences. While Locke does not elaborate on this point further, the immediate attention to Hurston’s perceived trespass indicates a much more complex set of motives and pathways aimed towards Black creative and political liberation.

I turn to Hurston’s use of the essay’s short form and autobiographical mode of address to instigate the production of an alternative form of literary modernism that extends – even while it disrupts – the models of the New Negro movement that shaped the Harlem Renaissance. What becomes Locke’s harshest critique of this moment, its “opening up too soon” and the unyielding dizzying divulgence of an “authentic” persona, is indeed one of Hurston’s earliest and most deliberate stagings of a subversive modernism that responds to color as a formative site of political and aesthetic maneuvering and negotiation.

If we are to fully comprehend Hurston’s iconoclastic performance of color, it is useful to understand how its larger context contributed to an act of transgression within a New Negro sensibility. By the time Hurston published her essay in 1928, Locke’s The New Negro anthology had already codified the image of the New Negro that would frame the politics of respectability and cultural aspiration of the Harlem Renaissance. The battle for legitimized forms of racial uplift was one that would be fought over decidedly “new” representations of the Black cultural life – a stylized vision that mobilized collective aspirations and group fashioning towards a modern Black aesthetic. Even as Hurston contributed to Locke’s anthology and studied for a time under his mentorship and tutelage, she enacted a mode of trespass in her later essay that threatened the clean-cut separations between public/private, spectator/spectacle, and old/new modes of Blackness.

By 1925, the year Hurston first submitted her first performance piece, “Color Struck,” to Opportunity magazine, the vogue of the New Negro was in full swing. As early as March of that year, Alain Locke’s “New Negro” essay in Survey Graphic re-established the currency of a New Negro lexicon that sought to give name and purpose to the “metamorphosis” he dubbed as currently seizing hold of Black life. ⁹ As an expansion of that essay, Locke’s now-canonical The New Negro anthology would codify the phrase into a popular model of Black “reconstructive” thought that in many ways would provide a vocabulary for understanding the creation of a modern Black sensibility represented through artistic creation and bourgeois values.

Locke’s The New Negro collectively showcases a willful representation of Black life creatively reimagined across fiction, poetry, drama, and prose essays organized around the nature of Black art and a progressive American identity. Locke’s project effectively situated itself alongside a growing number of works that were tailored for various strands of racial uplift and that sought to reposition the sociopolitical landscape of Blackness in the twentieth century. As such, Locke’s project functions within this larger scope of racial uplift and New Negro ideology, one which gained broader currency once Locke’s anthology was published.

With respect to the anthology, Locke’s essay “The New Negro” remains one of the most important contributions to the concept of a creative Harlem Renaissance. Heralding the very transformation he describes, Locke frames a “new dynamic phase” of Black life by consistently referencing a vocabulary of newness, buoyancy, and urbanity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Locke uses this language of newness and vibrant feeling to lay claim to the “new psychology” and “new spirit” “suddenly” seizing hold of the Black “masses.” ¹⁰

It seems just as crucial to note, however, that while Locke’s The New Negro depends upon conceptually reidentifying Blackness as a newly unified racial spirit endeared to progress and self-determination. The language of newness necessitates its stark distinction from an “old” Negro characterized by “mammy” figures and caricature. As scholars note, Locke’s language of vitality and willed revision continuously stages the key tropes of a Black reconstruction heavily laden with antinomies. ¹¹ For Locke, “a new spirit” had been conjured, one stirred to life by the desire to break from a distorted, sentimentalized figure of Black types. Locke’s careful scripting of a new New Negro sensibility in this way is crucial for our considerations of Hurston’s project as one that carefully imagines itself within this larger conversation of racial uplift and Black social reconstruction. Even as Hurston contributed to Locke’s anthology and studied for a time under his mentorship and tutelage, she would inevitably and figuratively break with his literal attempt to contain and organize what a “new” Negro could and should look like.

Hurston’s role within the New Negro movement is an interesting one. Realizing her participation as the youthful arm of a burgeoning movement, she fostered close collaborations with a group of artists who would eventually transform the scene of the Harlem Renaissance. Dubbed the Niggerati and intended as a subversive swipe at the propriety and class tension amidst the aesthetic arbiters of the period, they gathered over the summer of 1926 to bring to life what would become Fire!!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. Along with Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglass, Gwendolyn Bennet, Richard Nugent, and Countee Cullen, Hurston published “Color Struck” in Fire!!! with the intention of supporting its happily defiant theme. As Hughes describes, the journal was meant “to burn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of the past … into a realization of the existence of the younger Negro writers and artists, and provide us with an outlet for publication not available in the limited pages of the small Negro magazines then existing.” ¹² From its inception, Fire!!! was meant to offend and shock, subverting the stiff values of an “old[er]” generation. ¹³ It seems useful, then, to consider this moment as formative within Hurston’s crafting of a subversive aesthetic that actively theorizes the aesthetic possibilities of race alongside the performance of color.

Thus, Hurston’s early portraits of Black life teetered on the edge of a hardly won fight over representation and collective posturing. My attention to the slippage afforded by Hurston’s “mistake” turns to the ways in which she stages the production of new meaning through the refracted lens of color. Simply put, I am most interested in Hurston’s transformative subversion of a voyeuristic white gaze for a larger performance of agency and pleasure. How might we read Hurston’s essay as its own “speak piece”? What is a “speak piece” in Hurston’s hands, if not a series of performative re-enactments of Blackness that deconstruct and re-negotiate the artist’s “place” as a racialized public figure? Hurston’s turn to the autobiographical representational “I” affirms this strategy and the nature of its constructedness.

Into the Gallery

Returning to Hurston’s pivotal line “I remember the very day that I became colored” is instructive. Capturing her audience with the promise of divulging how it feels to be colored, Hurston’s essay is staged from its very opening. The title creates the expectation that the author will provide some racially authentic personal insight on race relations. We should consider, however, how Hurston’s title ruptures the very expectations into which it seeks to play. Its awkward syntax highlights this interpretive break and calls attention to how we read the emphasis on Hurston’s “colored.” Is it “how it feels to be colored me” or “how it feels to be a colored me”? Is “colored” the stable description of the author’s condition or are there other possibilities for reading color within the text? Anticipating her later claim that drama is elemental to Black life, Hurston in her essay revises the implicit fixit of colored as a noun and recasts its potential to act and enact through performance. Through this frame we can understand color as a verb that describes the author as an actor, an agent of action and motion, who demands that we continue to hold the following questions in tow: who is color acting upon, and who is enacting/exacting it?

Across the essay, Hurston plays with the slippage that these questions of meaning and positionality afford. The succinct and irrefutable fact of Blackness that launches the essay: “I am colored” is thrown into tension with the “day that [she] becomes colored.” These “shifts,” which persist across the essay in alternately playful and discomforting ways, construct a narrative around the speaker’s unmoored positionality of color as the site of performance and racial meaning. Revealing, for example, her dizzying kaleidoscopic play with color, Hurston’s descriptions fluctuate dependent upon the context of each racial encounter. As we read, we are reminded that Hurston’s speaker does not always feel colored. Affectively, Hurston works to create distinction and distance in the text between a “self” that physically and psychically negotiates public spaces. That she feels “most colored when … thrown against a sharp white background” produces disorienting results. Indeed, Hurston’s rhetorical gallery reveals itself to be a site of contradiction and paradox.

It is in these moments that Hurston’s reaffirms her rhetorical mastery: “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” (154). Hurston’s metaphor re-casts darkness as resilience, rooting the speaker in an interstitial space of kinship and individualism. Though “surged upon” by “a thousand white persons,” Hurston writes, “I am.” Such epistemic defiance and certitude in the face of obliteration signifies upon histories of enslavement and minstrelsy. Paradoxically, Hurston affirms selfhood at precisely the moment of obscurity and erasure.

Color Capital

My attention to Hurston’s subtle turn of tricks here calls for a reading of her colorful (or coloring) practice as one that takes on further layers of meaning when read as an interrogation of how we read Black performance and its legacies of appropriation and celebration. When Hurston marks color as an active site of epistemic production across the essay, she invokes the specter of minstrelsy and actively relishes in her own appropriation of its calcified layers. It is here that her construction of the gallery – a living archive for quotidian and spectacular experiences of color – becomes realized. It is in this light that Hurston enables additional readings of her text, taunting misapprehension and daring her audience to challenge what they presume to know about racial difference. Hurston coyly describes the following scene: “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” (152). Claiming the best seats in the house for herself, Hurston transforms the space of the Southern front porch into a space of interregional performance exchange. She marks out the domestic space of the porch as a site of great potential. It is here that she will practice negotiating a gendered, racial gaze, while leveraging that space as one of pleasure and power. In choosing to speak and enjoy her own “joyful tendencies” for herself, Hurston seizes the proscenium box for self-pleasure and so appropriates the gaze traditionally marked by legacies of minstrel caricature for herself.

Hurston marks these transgressions across the essay with sheer delight. She dissembles and disassembles, marking the interstitial space for radical critique, departure, and pleasure between literary form and performative production. In this lack of resolution, she performs a pleasure that carries across the breadth of the essay, at once feigning ignorance at the limits of a provocative persona and welcoming the refractions that come with holding up a mirror to an American subjectivity.

If we return to Hurston’s description of singing and dancing for Northern audiences, we see the ways in which this performative exchange is full of shifts and masked negotiations: “The [white people] liked to hear me ‘speak pieces’ and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their 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” (152). Hurston envisions herself as an actor, performing speak pieces and pas ma las. ¹⁴ Unabashedly, Hurston’s description signifies upon performance histories of minstrelsy, vaudeville, and caricatured dance – the very forms of representation against which Locke and others so carefully constructed their New Negro respectability. Hurston’s willingness and delight in performing the pas ma la immediately references the popular caricatured dance of the nineteenth century, along with the racial tensions that accompanied such performances. That Hurston figures her own performance within a performance here, is crucial for how she manipulates the personal essay as both a site of disclosure and stylized display. The pas ma la symbolizes Hurston’s desire to break antinomies of new/old, serious/comic, past/present.

Created by Ernest Hogan, the pas ma las was a comic dance often performed in blackface that consisted of a walk forward with three steps backward. The dance gained increasing popularity when Hogan published his 1895 hit “La Pas Ma Las.” The chorus is as follows:

            Hand upon yp’ head, let your mind roll back,

            Back, back back and look at the stars

            Stand up rightly, dance it brightly

            That’s the Pas Ma La.

Aware of her complicity in invoking the minstrel type of the “happy darky” who dances brightly for white amusement, Hurston invokes multiple layers of performative subversion here. On one level we should read Hurston as deploying a form of ironic reversal; one where voyeuristic desire shifts in the service of the performer herself. Here Hurston seems to recast caricatured performance with an assumed agency fueled by her own desire for pleasure. Head back, and eyes looking upward “at the stars,” Hurston’s layered performance codes ambition and upward mobility by co-opting the pleasure politics of the scene.

Audiences are often struck both by Hurston’s invocation of the minstrel show and by her willful revision of its affectations. These affectations – referenced by her turn to affect, scripted language, gesture, and stage positionality – lie simultaneously within and beyond the scope of a capital economy of minstrel gesture. Hurston performs a particular kind of Southern vernacular utterance here, one that professes her familiarity with both the area and the expectations of Northern white travelers. She thus stages a theatre of her own making, deploying familiar scripts of Black and white exchange to achieve unfamiliar ends. By staging a series of roles with white Northerners, Hurston emphasizes her ability to glean profit and pleasure from “negotiations” with white Northerners and readers. In Hurston’s essay, pleasure and reversal (or the pleasure of reversal) may be reward enough.

Yet this depiction of pleasure is short-lived. Hurston’s essay brilliantly anticipates that her valuation of these subversive scenes will be misinterpreted. Across the essay, we see these moments frequently. They appear most tellingly as Hurston describes “rudely ending negotiations” if her family sees her with white Northerners, and in the New World Cabaret scene, where she realizes that her white friend cannot participate in her indulgence of a “primal” color performance. Notably, Hurston stages these moments as interpretive gaps of knowledge and experience. Put differently, white and Black actors perceive color and value across an immutable line of difference.

While Black minstrelsy offers Hurston a vehicle through which self-possession and pleasure might be discernable, it also lets her mimic the forms that dispossession and estrangement can take. Hurston uses possession to narrate her whimsical and often-striking performance acts in the essay, turning later to dispossession as an analog that plots a Black historical trajectory. When she decides to claim the “gate-post” as a pivotal site of pleasure, performance, and youthful exchange, it is her dancing for outsiders that places her beyond the space of permissible Black social interaction and outside one circle of kinship. Despite this displacement, Hurston insists on claiming those who would reject her and declares, “I was their Zora nevertheless.” In another scene that narrates (dis)possession and “color,” Hurston describes:

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter 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 I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory.

In this puzzling scene, Hurston employs a retelling of enslavement cast as the “price … paid for civilization.” By toggling between possession and dispossession, Hurston marks the critical ways in which the legacies of slavery rehearse and give rise to new and violent regimes of power and progress in the modern era. Her parody of neocolonialist forms of thought draws on the color line and reifies the imagery of the line in the form of two compelling images: a race and the national stage. This repeated invocation of the stage punctures the fourth wall of the parodic farce. She again places herself at the proscenium (another formative line of sorts) and, this time, reveals her winking eye as she explains, “It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep” (153). By embedding such scripted moments of dance, gesture, and mimicry into the essay, Hurston reimagines the chilling and capacious strategies of the Blackened body in performance.

Everybody’s Zora

Nearly one hundred years since its first publication, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” has staying power. It is Hurston’s most quoted essay. Generations of everyday readers, scholars, poets, and conceptual artists have drawn from her meditations on race and American society. In her vignettes, we see glimpses of a Zora who appears equal parts charming, endearing, challenging, and provocative. Everybody’s Zora indeed.

Yet Hurston’s kaleidoscopic treatise on and of color refuses static interpretation. She may be everyone’s Zora, but she is possessed by no one. To “feel” colored is to activate the simultaneity of being fixed and mutable across racial encounters. Becoming colored, uncolored, recolored, and “so colored,” Hurston’s performance sweeps between moments when the “color comes” and those when the color is fixed, “warranted not to rub or run.” She appears to fit simultaneously into various versions of her that we have encountered over time. ¹⁵ We know her as a bold Harlem Renaissance icon, passionate literary maestra, fearless researcher, and committed anthropologist-archivist. Her literary and popular range and influence is both materially real and of mythic proportions (Spillers). ¹⁶ I expect that we will continue to see more versions of Hurston emerge over time, as many versions of her as there are of ourselves. Unsurprisingly, Hurston’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” insists that we push against the still-life portrait of the artist by attending to her strategies of performance.

Of the many titles we might attribute to Hurston’s accolades we might add performance artist to the list. The artist’s body is center stage in her 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” As a writer, scholar, and performance artist extraordinaire, Hurston turns to the elasticity of color and its conceptual range in her essay. Hurston’s understanding of color is performative; it enlivens the essay while displaying the gendered, epistemic, sociopolitical work that color enacts. Here, color vis-a-vie the body takes center stage and backstage. Elsewhere in the essay, color is context and background; color is mutable, irremovable. Everywhere, color is live.

It is precisely Hurston’s publicity then and now that contribute to a multitiered reading of her text as performance. Hurston’s production of intimacy and belonging across the essay is inherently tied to her ability to deliver a persona that delights in simultaneity. Hers is a persona idealized: desiring and desirable, specific and yet unfixed. In the essay, she is both local – the Zora of Eatonville – and the cosmic Zora.

1. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (Feminist Press, 1979), 152–5.[↑]
2. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women and the Making of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 57–8.[↑]
3. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).[↑]
4. Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women and the Making of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 56–91.[↑]
5. Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom 1850–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).[↑]
6. Louis Chude-Sokei, The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); and W.T. Lhamon, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).[↑]
7. Alain Locke letter to Zora Neale Hurston, 2 June 1928, quoted in Eric Watts, Hearing the Hurt: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and the Politics of the New Negro Movement (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 2012). See also Alain Locke, The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1968).[↑]
8. Ibid.[↑]
9. Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” Survey Graphic, March1925.[↑]
10. Locke, The New Negro, 3.[↑]
11. Soyica Diggs Colbert, The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 97.[↑]
12. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1940), 235.[↑]
13. Ibid.[↑]
14. Though Hurston misspells the dance in her essay, the correct spelling has been documented as pas ma las. I rely on the latter spelling in this essay.[↑]
15. Mary Helen Washington, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman Half in Shadow,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (Feminist Press, 1979).[↑]
16. Hortense J. Spillers, “A Tale of Three Zoras: Barbara Johnson and Black Women Writers,” Diacritics 34, no. 1 (2004): 94–7; and Hortense J. Spillers, “Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987).[↑]