From the first essay she published, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” it was apparent that Hurston would leave her stamp on the genre. The humor, the colloquial tone, and the insistence on the personal, announced in the title and evident throughout, distinguish it from earlier essays in the African American tradition. DuBois, in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” the first essay in Souls, responded autobiographically to the question “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?” 1 Hurston, rather than answer the question, rejects its premise. She “feels” like herself. In the most often cited line from the essay, she insists: “But I am not tragically colored.” 2 Instead, she proclaims herself too busy “sharpening [her] oyster knife” to weep. Other black essayists of the 1920s were adept at humor. George Schuyler’s “The Negro-Art Hokum” and Rudolph Fisher’s “The Causasian Storms Harlem” took up serious issues with a wit that suggested the influence of H. L. Mencken. But neither of them was able to leaven political and social satire with self revelation. Hurston did. The tone of “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” also differentiates it sharply from the pieces Alain Locke had included in The New Negro three years earlier. Hurston’s meditation on racial identity was much less direct in its appeal to an audience of liberal-leaning white Americans, such as the readers of The World Tomorrow, the journal in which it was published.
Deflating the artifice that then attended most discourse on race, Hurston begins her essay with a joke: “I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.” 3 The joke is aimed both at those whites who would assume that blackness is a problem requiring a solution, or at least an explanation, and at those blacks, almost certainly including race-conscious New Negroes, who want it understood that they are not merely black. Hurston claims her color gladly. At the same time, she understands that racial identity is not grounded in biology; it is socially constructed. Consequently, she avers, “I remember the very day that I became colored.” She states that in her all-black hometown of Eatonville she could be herself rather than the “colored girl” she became in the more hostile and racially mixed environment of Jacksonville, Florida. By its conclusion, the essay asserts that any incongruity between the “colored” and “me” of its title has been resolved.
Significantly, two sites of tension that the essay marks involve Hurston’s participation in interracial cultural exchange, the project that was at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. Writ small, this exchange involves the “small silver” whites give the child Zora for “speaking pieces” at the gatepost in Eatonville. The offer of money is a gesture that strikes the child Zora as strange as well as generous, because performing made her so happy she needed “bribing to stop.” But she is conscious that her black neighbors do not share her joy in performances that, in fact, partake of a communal cultural heritage. Writ large, the exchange transpires in Harlem City, in the allegorical space of the New World cabaret. Hurston’s persona is now a spectator rather than a performer. African American music and dance have become commodities in the cultural marketplace of New York, where both the financial and psychic stakes are much higher. Hurston suggests that the identity she has forged in the free space of Eatonville allows her to negotiate these exchanges without being exploited. The historical Eatonville was not, of course, a free space; and Hurston’s biography is replete with instances in which her work or her person was exploited. The self she claims here is her identity as an artist, the “cosmic Zora,” who is at once individual and transcendent, both the singular talent and the conduit for the collective memory.
