Blog Post 5

              I really enjoyed reading “How It Feels to be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston, an essay in which she dives into her identity as a Black woman and the role that her childhood and upbringing played in shaping that identity. I knew for this blog post that I wanted to focus on that piece and Hurston as a person, and in doing research on her I came across an article that surprised me and changed my perspective on her and evoked another Black woman (albeit a fictional character) that we have been focusing on in class: Clare Kendry from the Netflix film Passing (and the eponymous novel). While Hurston lived her life openly as a Black woman and Clare Kendry in the film was “passing” as a white woman, they seemed to have some similar opinions on their racial identity, mainly that it was seemingly not the most important thing to either of them.

The article, written in The New Yorker by Lauren Michele Jackson, dives into a book compiling many of Hurston’s nonfiction essays and highlights instances where she expresses opinions that are counterintuitive to ones that we might expect from a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston has been described as “America’s favorite Black conservative” and was even rumored in her later years to be an outspoken fan of a white, pro-segregation politician. Her writings were sometimes deemed critical of contemporary Black society, with editors even making a footnote about it in one essay that she wrote:  “In a footnote to an essay titled “I Saw Negro Votes Peddled,” an eyewitness account of single-shot voting in Dade County, the editors warn that “Hurston was unwittingly repeating” racist ideology out of Columbia’s Dunning School regarding Reconstruction and “clearly had not read W. E. B. Du Bois’s seminal rebuttal.” (Jackson)

It is important to note that none of Hurston’s writings expressed any disapproval of her own racial identity. She differs from Clare Kendry in that she lived as a Black woman, and I think it’s fair to say that she did not see that as any kind of a weakness. In “How It Feels to be Colored Me”, she makes this point abundantly clear: “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 but 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.” (Hurston)

Where I see the parallels between Hurston and Clare Kendry is in how they think about their Blackness and how that understanding plays into their broader self-identity; both Hurston in real life and Kendry in the film acknowledge that they are Black women (in Clare’s case not to everyone, including her husband, but to those that she grew up with and know that she is Black), but that acknowledgement is not the main characteristic in which they derive their identity. Both women are motivated in their lives by factors unrelated to (or at least not inseparable from) their race, and both seem to have a sense of self-determination that supersedes the racial constraints (literally, in Clare’s case) of the times that they lived in. While Clare chose to pass as a white woman because that is what was convenient to her or that is how she was raised, Hurston chose to view life from her own prism, shaped by her upbringing in conservative Central Florida, that was not always aligned with the progressive black movement that the Harlem Renaissance was.

The Harlem Renaissance, like any other cultural movement, was not a homogenous group of completely likeminded people who all had the same ideas about Black identity, society, and contemporary issues. As we saw with eventual split between Du Bois and the NAACP, there were ideological differences amongst some of the key figures of the Renaissance, which spanned the spectrum from conservative to liberal attitudes, all connected by a shared Blackness. Even though her conservative leanings may be surprising when we think of her place in such a progressive movement, there is no denying the importance of Zora Neal Hurston and her prolific writings when we think of the Harlem Renaissance.

Works Cited

• Jackson, L. M. (2022, February 15). The Zora Neale Hurston we don’t talk about. The New Yorker. Retrieved April 14, 2022, from https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-zora-neale-hurston-we-dont-talk-about
• “How it Feels to be Colored Me.” World Tomorrow, 11 (May, 1928) 215-216. Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: Lippincott Publishers, 1935.
• McWhorter, J. (2011, January 5). The root: Zora Neale Hurston was a conservative. NPR. Retrieved April 26, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/2011/01/05/132674087/the-root-zora-neale-hurston-was-a-conservative
• Norwood, A. R. (n.d.). Zora Neale Hurston. National Women’s History Museum. Retrieved April 26, 2022, from https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/zora-hurston