zora neale hurston essay how it feels to be colored me

How It Feels to Be Colored Me, by Zora Neale Hurston

"I remember the very day that I became colored"

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Zora Neal Hurston was a widely-acclaimed Black author of the early 1900s.

"A genius of the South, novelist, folklorist, anthropologist"—those are the words that Alice Walker had inscribed on the tombstone of Zora Neale Hurston. In this personal essay (first published in The World Tomorrow , May 1928), the acclaimed author of Their Eyes Were Watching God explores her own sense of identity through a series of memorable examples and striking metaphors . As Sharon L. Jones has observed, "Hurston's essay challenges the reader to consider race and ethnicity as fluid, evolving, and dynamic rather than static and unchanging"

- Critical Companion to Zora Neale Hurston , 2009

How It Feels to Be Colored Me

by Zora Neale Hurston

1 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.

2 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.

3 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 gatepost. 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.

4 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-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. 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.

5 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 riverboat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County anymore, 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 brown—warranted not to rub nor run.

6 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.

7 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. 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.

8 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.

9 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.

10 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.

11 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 heathen—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.

12 "Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

13 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.

14 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.

15 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.

16 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.

17 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?

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• How It Feels To Be Colored Me

Background of the Essay

The essay ‘How It Feels To Be Colored Me’ was written in 1928 by an American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. It aims at highlighting the life of Afro-American black women in the 1920s. The skopos of the essay is not merely a black audience but also white men living in America. This way she shares her experience of being black and treated prejudice. 

Financially Hurston was quite wealthy and lived a prosperous life because of her father’s high rank in the society. Most of her years were spent with Black people where she was treated respectfully because of her socially elite status.

After her mother’s death, she was forced to live in the White community. Here she received some cultural, emotional and racial shocks. She was not welcomed here and this motivated her to write the essay ‘How it feels to be colored me’. She has expressed her experiences, emotions and viewpoints in the form of metaphoric or literary language. She has used anecdotes, imagery and other figurative devices. As an anthropologist, she has shown grip on societal trends, norms and discourse. As an active supporter of the Black community, she also participated in Harlem Renaissance. 

How It Feels To Be Colored Me Summary

The essay opens by explaining the word ‘colored’ or Afro-American. The author calls herself unique among others and makes no excuse to hide her racial identity. She is determined not to exchange her black identity with Native American whiteness just like other people of her race. She reminds the day of her life when she is made to feel colored. Before then she grew within a black community in a village of Eatonville, Florida.

Everyone around her was black like her and only white people she had encountered were those passersby to Orlando. Local townspeople usually rode horses and tourists from the Northern area used cars very often. And the residents of Eatonville did not bother white people who came from the Southern area and they kept on doing whatever they were i.e. chewing cane. But they were very much concerned with people coming from the North. They came out on the porch of their houses to watch them.  

It was Hurston who boldly went farther and sat outside the house near the gatepost to speak with passers-by. She usually used to say “Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin’?” If any of them stopped, she walked with him a bit farther in the street. Here Hurston writes, if any of her family members noticed what she was doing, she would surely be stopped from doing that. But she couldn’t stop greeting white tourists and being the first to welcome them. 

Hurston mentioned in the essay, at that time, she was aware of the only difference between white and black and that was white people do not live in their town and they paid her for singing, dancing and reciting. It was an amazing thing for her because she was not paid for these activities in her town. Only white people used to do it to her. Even her family disliked her performances yet they proclaimed her as “their Zora … everybody’s Zora.”

Life was plain until she reached the age of 13. Due to family issues, she was sent to a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. As she left the town, she was no more Zora but a little colored girl. 

From this point forward, Hurston describes the present view where she is being discriminated against because of her skin color. But she rejects this negativity that nature has made a dirty deal with negroes. Though she has to face hard times but her determination regardless of any race and color lets her not get upset. Instead, she spends her time sharpening knives for oyster.  

She protests why everyone reminds her of servitude which is a past event. Both white and black are trying to heal from that incident. It is like feeling a medical patient and recovering gradually from surgery. She wishes to run ahead instead of clinging to the past. Being enslaved was not her choice and she has a world open to gain. Bullying adventures of white people gain her a lot of attention. For her, it was not the black people but the white who are to sympathize. They are trying to get hold of things they already have. It is less fun and adventure than having them in the first place.  

Hurston often recalls her time in Eatonville. However, she sometimes finds herself in the backdrop due to her color especially when there is a white person.  When she attends college at Barnard, she notices that she is like a rock among the white sea foam covered with sea surge. She is there until the water retreats the surge and lets her visible again. 

Hurston also feels her social superiority when a white person leads her to a black people community. She gives an example of her social importance when she went to a music club in Harlem accompanied by her white friend. She describes when the jazz music was played, it affected her whole body and she started swaying and dancing like an animal. Music awakened wilderness in her and she felt like holding a spear and wearing tribal paints. She was joyfully crazy and terribly wished to kill someone.

But the song ended and bewildered feelings left slowly.   She then turns towards her white friend who only praises the music without being touched with the emotions that she was gripped in a moment earlier. She realizes a gap between them and “He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.”

Hurston does not find conflict between her Americanness and Darkness. She considers herself as part of the country. She sees discrimination with surprise and not with rancor.

Besides everything, Hurston compares herself with a sack filled with bits and bobs and that she is just a sack among sacks of various colors. Each sack contains both marvelous and ordinary things from diamond to broken glass pieces. If someone dumps her out in a big pile, there would be many priceless bags. They can be exchanged but stuffing will remain similar. She muses rhetorically that the Great Stuffer (God) might have stuffed them at first place just like that.

How It Feels To Be Colored Me Characters Analysis

Zora hurston.

The author paints herself in the essay as a character and gives an account of different shades of her life. Hurston is proud of her color and race. She feels free to acclaim her Negrotudness. She wears blackness as a badge and analyzes her views. She sets the tone for other Black people to feel proud of themselves. 

Enlightened Zora

Zora sprites in a new purified form when she realizes her identity is acceptable in her community and she is treated like a celebrity and worthy of praise. She feels all her pains are being rewarded now. She feels beautiful and ‘Colored’ among white pale people. 

Floridian white folks

These are the people of Jacksonville, Florida. When Hurston moved into this place, her neighborhood houses were inhabited with white folk. They did watch her as a scornful object. The environment was filled with tension and hatred. She felt being treated like an animal in a circus who is an object of amusement and to whom they treat down to earth.   

Black people

Two groups of the Black community are described in this essay. First one is a socially and financially powerful group that is proud of their tradition and race. She met them in Harlem where best African music sprites up representing Black people emotions. Then there is another sort of black person who wants to adjust himself in the wave of the White folk cultural stream. Hurston criticizes them for hiding their identity and ethnicity.  in with the mainstream culture that the White folks create. 

Themes in How It Feels To Be Colored Me

Pride in african-american heritage.

Hurston, the anthropologist, opens up her essay, “How It Feels To Be Colored me” with the clear acknowledgement that She is an African American by race. She admits and feels proud to be black and an African American. She says that it does not bother her all. She feels OK with it. 

As the essay proceeds, she elaborates, those ways of racism that have informed her erroneously about her identity. In her surroundings, she is called a little Colored girl instead of being a little lass. In her teenage, she does not know that race is such a thing, people care about it. When she moves to Jacksonville, she encounters the harsh truth. As they began to grow in Jacksonville, she was made to feel abashed for her culture, race and heritage. Through her essay, she attempts to overthrow the feelings of guilt and shame that emerge because of blackness.

Judgement and Prejudice

Judgement and prejudice are one of the central thoughts in Hurston’s essay. The strange conflicting energy, present in the essay, defines it. She informs her readers that in her essay she is answering to the unuttered prejudice. She has not written this essay to express her feelings or what her life is like.

Though she, more or less, gives her thoughts to these two subjects, what she actually does, in the essay, is to drag back her readers into the belief system. She made her readers witness that the prejudice against black people emerges from their belief system. She grieves over the fact that white people do not celebrate the white culture. She speaks for the beauty of her culture and heritage. She argues that still white people still despise the black culture. Even today, white people scorn black culture and heritage.

Identity and Race

The author foretells that the white think that black people are preoccupied with the thought they are black and it makes them feel that they are inferior and they are ashamed of their culture and heritage. Being an African American writer, she says that case is not so. The white people have access to power relations and they set everything in society. Through religion, education, morality, economic system and laws, they oppress the black race. 

When the missionaries came to their land, they had religion and the native people had wealth. Missionaries taught them how to pray with closed eyes. When they opened their eyes, missionaries got hold of their wealth and the natives had religion. This is how the system of beliefs works. Religion is a tool to use to get targeted goals. The author does not even think about race in her daydreams. She dreams of getting famous. She makes it clear that race is not a significant thing about a person. Those who think it’s an important thing, they are requested to reevaluate their relationship to racism.

Abandonment of Racism

Abandonment of racism is another important theme of Zora’s essay. She emphatically writes in her essay that she does not have any negative feelings about racism. She feels perfectly fine with it. She clearly and simply writes that she doesn’t mind it at all. She rejects negativity with stress because she thinks people believe it exists. It can be her attempt to keep herself positive when the whole world is on the negative side. 

Nora’s idea of rejecting racism stretches out to her owl black people. In the very beginning of her essay, she makes fun of those African American who claim that they belong to Indian chiefs. She rather believes that we should feel proud of what we are in fact.

Later on, in her essay, she pokes fun on the sobbing schools of Negrohood who make them feel inferior. Such schools make them able to look down to themselves. In this regard, African Americans need to unlearn what they have been taught at schools. Such statements show that including her own black people, she condemns all those who believe that the African blood can make the people inferior and lowly. Nora Hurston rejects this idea of racism and she believes that Africans are as good as the people of other races.

Denial of Pain

Denial of pain is another significant theme of Hurston’s essay “How it Feels to be Colored me.” She writes down painful historical and personal events in her essay but her focus is on being positive and happy. She does not permit negativity to overcome her. She tells her childhood details in full three passages. In an only paragraph, she talks about her transformation into the little colored girl. She spends more time describing her childhood happiness. 

In the passage, where she gives her transformational details, she does not tell exactly what had happened to her. She says that she had found it out in certain ways. Her pains are unexpressed. She permits her readers to imagine the pain she had endured. She delicately passes through and does not pay any heed to those racists who have hurt her. She has had harsh experiences in her life, but she neither names nor describes those racists. Hurston loves to turn the spotlight on herself. She keeps herself in the story and refuses to accept negativity for her.

With great displeasure and annoyance, Hurston discusses slavery. She says, such people are in abundance around her, who continuously reminds her that she is the granddaughter of slaves. But this fails to get her depressed.

Perhaps, she willingly refuses to feel the pangs of slavery because she does not want history to do this to her. Her focus is on life that moves forward. She does not want to rub salt over injuries by peeping back into the harsh past. Again, she keeps her focus on herself. For the sake of civilization, she paid the price of slavery. In this adventure, she paid a huge price for her ancestors. Again the wrongdoers and those who enslaved others are completely absent from her essay.

Celebration of the (black) Self (Negritude)

Celebration of the self is another important theme in Hurston’s essay. Throughout her essay, she has been seen celebrating her black self. She accepts herself as she is in fact. While describing herself, she brings those qualities out, which are considered as flaws by other people.

For example, when she was talking about her childhood, she wanted other’s attention very much, she needed bribing to stop that performance.  Her depiction of her childhood age suggests that she was arrogant and attention seeker.  She embraces the aspects that other people criticize. She has learnt the art of celebrating herself. She used the word snooty for herself, which has negative associations. She accepts herself with all her flaws.

History and Opportunity

Nora Hurston wrote this essay in the 1920s. At that time, the United States of America was only sixty years away from the Civil War. The age of slavery was going to be ended. This account of experience is no doubt a legacy for African American culture. Hurston does this in her peculiar way.

In her essay, she acknowledges the racial discrimination against African-Americans. By this, she lessens the impact of slavery. Hurston is encouraged by the basic rights of the black race, which they sought by the 1920s. True equality was yet to be won. But whatever African-Americans have gained, was encouraging and strengthening. The way to attain equality is an opportunity for the African-Americans to end their unearned sufferings.

She considers her own time as an epoch of high adventure and celebrated endeavor. She, herself is the central character of all this.

Performance

In her essay, Hurston’s thoughts on race are tied up with creative performance. In her early age, she interacted with white people through singing and dancing. This was the time when she became the little colored girl. This interaction permits her to develop her creative performance. In this respect, her essay can be regarded as a story of an artist and it is also an essay about race.  She had many shows in different places, which let her polish her performance.

How It Feels To Be Colored Me Literary Analysis

Nora Neale Hurston’s essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored me” is about race. She remains positive throughout her essay when she talks about her African-American identity and heritage. Some of the assumptions about race are unstated as well.  These unstated assumptions complicate her claims about her experience as an African-American identity. 

Interpretation of Title

Hurston’s essay innately has an unclear title. It is very significant but can easily be overlooked. The use of ‘colored’ in the essay’s title can possibly be interpreted in two different ways. In a first way, if it means how a person feels to be colored, then the readers can take it as a straightforward discussion about the author’s life. In which she is trying to discuss her African-American background. In another way, if the readers take this ‘colored’ as a part of a passive verb phrase, then it is about the views of others about the colored one being. 

The second way of interpretation gives the authored image, which is dyed or painted by others. She herself does not have control over it because these are people’s perceptions and views about her. The title is ambiguous and throughout the essay, tension remains. On one side, the author presents herself strong, exuberant and an individual, who stays positive and happy and feels proud about her race, identity and heritage. She also faced racial discrimination and stereotypes but does not reveal. 

Acceptance of Racial Identity

In the very first sentence of her essay, she has been seen accepting her racial status. In plain and simple language, she writes that she is a colored girl. It gives a gesture about her race which was thought to be well- mannered about her time. Apart from this clause of three simple words, the remaining sentence is very much complicated. The author denies providing extenuating circumstances. She uses strange and odd diction, which suggest that she might be expecting to apologize for her race and heritage. This strange diction tells other people to think that Hurston takes the race as something bad.

In the very start of her essay, Hurston writes that African- Americans claim that they are the descendants of Native Americans. But the author does not think that way. Even she has been seen making fun of all those African- Americans who think Native Americans as their ancestors. In her view, they attempt to make their connection to America in contrast to those white Americans, who landed there as colonists. According to her, some of the African-Americans have the blood of Native Americans but this is not so for all. She made a bold and unconventional comment. It shows her sharp wit and she seems perfectly OK to criticize her own race.

Biblical Allusion and Cultural & Historical Associations

Hurston calls her Eatonville, Florida a biblical Eden, where an African American child is brought up without the burdens of racism. She uses the metaphor of an audience who is there to see theatrical performances. She describes herself that she is in a proscenium box, which means she is close to the stage in contrast to Eatonville’s simple and timid people who hardly dare to speak to the white people who pass by them.

She witnesses the people there, who were chewing sugarcanes. Chewing sugarcane was a common activity in those days. And those people were found chewing sugarcane, where sugarcane grows in abundance. Moreover, white Americans have an association with those who chew sugarcane. They thought them the uneducated ones. She runs down to such ways of portraying African-Americans in her writings. Her contemporaries were of the view that she is enforcing stereotypes rather to challenge them.

She is willing to displease her reader, in the passages where she writes about slavery. She writes down that she always finds someone who reminds her that she is the granddaughter of slaves. She writes this as this unease is prejudiced and full of annoyance. She does not get bothered by slavery and its history. History does not bother her. Scars of her ancestor do not hurt her. Terrifying past events do not bring sadness to her. She does not allow history to make her feel worried. 

Her focus is on herself. Her focus is on the present and future. Her focus is on staying positive. She shrugs off the sufferings and pains of other people and keeps herself focused on herself and her desires. When she writes about slavery, she cites reference to civilization. She allies this to the new American society. Then she compares this to the primitive culture. She also compares it to the imaginative African culture. 

Childhood as a True Color

In the days of her childhood, Nora Hurston could not realize that she belongs to the black community. After her childhood, she came to know this when she saw white people looking at them like they were glancing at a zoo. This revealed to her that she is black. Her identity changed when she moved to Jacksonville, where white people were in abundance. At Jacksonville, they called her a little ‘colored’ girl. For this, the little ‘colored’ girl was treated badly harshly.

Before leaving Eatonville, Hurston suggests that she was what she meant to be. In the paragraph about her childhood, she describes herself as a lively, impudent girl with tons of curiosity. She summons herself ‘the first welcome to our state, Floridian. It suggests that it was she who developed the custom of being friendly to all out of state visitors. This statement suggests that Hurston is still lively, witty, impudent, a woman of charming personality, as she used to be in her childhood.

She finds her true self in her childhood self. She finds the real Hurston is her childhood. She feels proud to cherish those childhood days when she stepped outside to meet other people when people were afraid to approach them. She was very friendly to them now she appreciates her boldness. She feels eager to perform before the audience. She was so eager that she needed bribing to stop. She accepts herself with all her ebb and flows. She loves herself. 

Hurston’s depiction of her childhood suggests that she was unperturbed by racism. The place, Eatonville, Florida, where she spent her childhood was not free from racial influences. Perhaps, she was too innocent to witness the racial signs before the age of 13. She was unable to recognize the signs. The town of Eatonville was founded by the formerly enslaved people who were suspicious of white visitors. Hurston was untouched by these harsh experiences. It shows that the people of Eatonville had protected their children from the mistreatment and racial abuse at the hands of white men. Hurston skillfully conveys her thoughts that her family members ‘of course’ stopped her from associating herself with the white people, if they ever caught her doing this.

Journey from Nora to a Colored Girl

The word ‘colored’ is central in the text. The title of the essay also carries the same word as it reminds that if Hurston is called the ‘colored’ girl then her own color is very important and is her identity in itself. That’s the reason, it is called, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” rather than “How It Feels to Be Colored. Hurston, again and again, gives her response to racism. She does not feel angered. She is confused about it. She is at sea to understand why people cannot highly think of racial and ethnic differences for the sake of beauty and heritage.

The author, Hurston, belongs to the African American race. In her essay, she asserts that she was not always “colored.” While discussing her childhood, she let us know that she remembers the day she became “colored.” This declaration suggests, being colored is not to have black skin. It is something different, which comes after social training. So that she was not “colored” when she was born. From the beginning of her essay, she confesses that she became “colored” eventually and she suggests that something bad is going to happen to the innocent, lively girls. This tension stays in the passage of her childhood.

It takes hardly a passage to become “a little colored girl” from Nora Hurston. Hurston was only thirteen when her mother left this world. She does not go into detail. She writes that she was sent away because of some changes in the family. She spells on the tale of her transformation into “a little colored girl.” She describes that she herself got into the riverboat. When she got off from that riverboat, she was someone else. It suggests that she become “colored” in the riverboat. She was someone who could understand that she belonged to the second class of citizens because of their race.

Racial Bullying during Childhood

Hurston does not give details about the happening in the riverboat when she was on her way to Jacksonville. One thing that she made clear was that change or transformation was heartfelt and intense. Now it’s up to her readers to imagine what had happened to her in the boat. She might have experienced something harsh in the riverboat. She might have had molestation, physical attack, sexual assault or racial slurs in the boat. She leaves it to the reader’s imagination to guess what had happened in the riverboat. Very skillfully she moves ahead by saying that, thousands of horrors an African American girl can face while travelling alone.

Nonetheless, her pains of transformation are very much obvious. The harsh experience of becoming “colored” was dehumanizing as well as unmooring. After her transformation, she says, she is no more the Zora of Orange County, now she is the little colored girl. In fact, racism has murdered her identity.

Vernacular Jazz Dance: A Key to Self Realization

Hurston performed dance for others. The people of Eatonville do not approve of her this performing tendency. They refused to pay for her dance performances. But the white men paid for her performances. The people of Eatonville regret her such tendencies. She does not say this at once. They perhaps disapproved of her performing tendencies for a reason. In the past, slaves were forced to perform for their masters.

When Hurston grows up, she dances for white people. She goes to a concert in Harlem. In that concert, she witnessed that African beats were used in rhythmic ways. Later on, these beats provided the foundations to the genres; rap, funk and hip-hop. She is fascinated by these rhythms. Hurston understands those beats wholeheartedly because they were the beats of her heritage. But Hurston’s white friends were unable to see this beauty. They could not appreciate it or were not willing to appreciate it. Her white friends merely get entertained by it as it was something manmade to get amused or pleased. But music and its rhythms symbolize human pains and pangs.

In this section, she uses the final metaphor, in which her skin of the body is equated with the dyed fabric. About her color she writes, in her own heart and mirror, she is fast brown, which means her color is fixed and stable. It cannot be changed. This dyed-fabric skin is so fixed that it cannot be rubbed off or run out of the wash. 

Transformation from Zora to Cosmic Zora

In her adulthood, she loves her colored self. She, again and again, expresses her thought that she does not see this blackness of the skin like a bad thing. She writes that she is not tragically colored which suggests her acceptance for herself. She neither minds it nor permits it, making her soul gloomy. From a different angle, she conveys this thought. Perhaps society wants her to take it as something negative but she does not.

Hurston disdains the members of the sobbing schools of Negrohood who believed that nature has given this lowdown and they are meant to be inferiors. It is not without interest, many African Americans blame nature instead of society. She is not prepared to blame nature in that way. Even, she makes association with primitive culture, she does not disdain it. She accepts it and writes, primitive culture is desirable. 

Hurston writes those who succeed in this world, they do regardless of their race and the color of their skins. They are made to succeed. She makes it clear that she considers herself as a strong one. She does not cry at the world but keeps herself busy at sharpening her oyster knife. This vigorous image of the author suggests that she is dangerous as well as ready for action. By using this knife metaphor, she shows herself ready to do good for the world.

Hurston comes to know that race affects her life. She concludes her essay on the point that there exists Zora but without race. Now she has become a cosmic Zora who is eager to see what the world has stored for her. She does not have separate feelings for being an American and colored girl. She considers herself a petty part of the Great Soul.

In the end, she described herself as a brown bag of miscellany. She is brown and there are many other color bags. The color cannot be ignored in this special metaphor. The content remains the same in all these bags of different color. She concludes that God randomly stuffed people in this world from the very start. This suggests that everyone in this is essentially the same and the differences among people are nor important at all.

More From Zora Neale Hurston

How It Feels To Be Colored Me

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Summary: “how it feels to be colored me”.

This guide is based on the electronic version of Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” available at the University of Virginia’s Mules and Men website. The original essay was published in the May 1928 edition of The World Tomorrow. Hurston’s essay is her explanation of how she experiences being African-American.

Hurston opens the essay with the comment that she is “a Negro” and unlike many African-Americans claims no Native American ancestry. Prior to the age of thirteen, Hurston lived in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, where her only contacts with nonblacks were with the Southern and Northern tourists who drove through the town. No one was curious about the familiar Southerners, but most people were so fascinated by the Northerners that they watched them from their porches.

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Hurston, not content with the porch, would sit on a gatepost at the entrance of town to greet the tourists, ask them questions, ask for rides out of town, or even perform for them, only to be surprised when they gave her money for doing what she loved. At this point in her life, Hurston’s only perception of differences between whites and blacks was that whites did not live in her town and paid her for performing.

This attitude changed when Hurston was sent to Jacksonville by riverboat to attend school at thirteen. Hurston notes that for the first time, she was a “little colored girl” instead of simply being herself (par. 5, line 5). Despite this change, Hurston says she is not “tragically colored” and has no feeling that being black is a curse (par. 6, line 1).Hurston’s perspective on her place in the world is that she is instead “too busy sharpening her oyster knife,” eager to take in what the world has to offer (par. 6, line 6).

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When people insist on reminding Hurston that she is descended from slaves, she feels no sadness about it because slavery is “sixty years in the past” and simply the price of belonging to Western civilization (par. 7, line 3). Being the descendent of slaves means for Hurston that she has even more opportunities for achievement and glory because she is starting from nothing and the nation, fixated on race, is focused on people like her. By contrast , Hurston pities whites, who are weighed down by their ancestors and stuck with maintaining their privilege.

In her present life, Hurston has moments when she only feels black if she is in an all-white setting , such as when she attends classes at Barnard College, an institution attended by few people of color. In other moments, the presence of a white person in an all-black setting also makes Hurston feel conscious of her racial identity. She describes sitting in a Harlem cabaret and being swept away by the rhythms of the music, which connect her to her African ancestry, only to be surprised by a white friend’s more casual enjoyment of the music.

Sometimes, Hurston feels no sense of racial identity. When she promenades down a main thoroughfare in Harlem, she is the “cosmic Zora”and feels more potently feminine that Peggy Hopkins Joyce, the 1920s equivalent of a Kardashian (par. 14, line 4). Hurston experiences her American identity as being indistinguishable from her racial identity. When someone discriminates against her, she is surprised, rather than angry, because it puzzles her that anyone would deprive him- or herself of the pleasure of knowing her.

Hurston closes the essay with the image of each human being asa “bag of miscellany” (par. 17, line 1),filled with a mix of worthless and precious things, distinguishable only by the color of the bags. Shespeculates that switching the contents of bags would reveal how similar they are inside and that perhaps this is exactly as God intended.

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Issue 16.2 | 2020 —  Undiminished Blackness: Zora Neale Hurston as Theory and Practice

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

By mariel rodney.

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.

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. 8 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. 13 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. 14 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). 15 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.

• 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. [ ↩ ]
• 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. [ ↩ ]
• Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). [ ↩ ]
• Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women and the Making of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 56–91. [ ↩ ]
• Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom 1850–1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). [ ↩ ]
• 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). [ ↩ ]
• 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). [ ↩ ]
• Ibid. [ ↩ ] [ ↩ ]
• Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” Survey Graphic, March1925. [ ↩ ]
• Locke, The New Negro, 3. [ ↩ ]
• Soyica Diggs Colbert, The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 97. [ ↩ ]
• Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1940), 235. [ ↩ ]
• 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. [ ↩ ]
• 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). [ ↩ ]
• 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). [ ↩ ]

Read More from This Issue

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By john l. jackson, jr.

“The Brown Bag of Miscellany”: Zora Neale Hurston and the Practice of Overexposure (Reprint)

By autumnn womack.

Hurston as Anthropology

Featuring adriana garriga-lópez ,  tami navarro ,  sarah e. vaughn,  and  bianca williams, read more from s&f online.

The Power and Joy of Being “Difficult”

By ann douglas.

Poop Worlds: Material Culture and Copropower (or, Toward a Shitty Turn)

By shaka mcglotten and scott webel.

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Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me,” 1928

Guiding Question: To what extent did Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice become a reality for African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century?

• I can interpret primary sources related to Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice in the first half of the twentieth century.
• I can explain how laws and policy, courts, and individuals and groups contributed to or pushed back against the quest for liberty, equality, and justice for African Americans.
• I can create an argument using evidence from primary sources.
• I can analyze issues in history to help find solutions to present-day challenges.

Building Context

Zora Neale Hurston was a celebrated author and anthropologist who grew up in the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida. After her mother’s death, Hurston moved to Jacksonville, a segregated Florida town. It was then, she writes, that “I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was a little colored girl.” In 1925, Hurston received a scholarship to Barnard College in New York City. While in the city, she befriended other writers such as Langston Hughes and became an artist of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston’s work focused on Black culture and Black Americans in the South. In this essay, she explores her discovery of her identity as a Black American and celebrates her self-pride.

Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me,” 1928

Source link: https://www.casa-arts.org/cms/lib/PA01925203/Centricity/Domain/50/Hurston%20How%20it%20Feels%20to%20Be%20Colored%20Me.pdf

. . . 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 or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. . . .   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. . . . 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.

Comprehension and Analysis Questions

• What does Hurston mean by saying she is not “tragically colored”?
• What is Hurston’s attitude toward race, based on her writing in this excerpt?
• How does Hurston build on Hughes’ views in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”?

More from this Category

Zora Neale Hurston with Patricia Brown | Black Intellectuals Series #4

How did Zora Neale Hurston, noted African-American writer during the Harlem Renaissance, contribute to understanding the Black experience in America? In this episode of our Scholar Talk series "Black Intellectuals and the African American Experience," BRI Senior Teaching Fellow Tony Williams is joined by Patricia Brown, professor of English at Azusa Pacific University, to discuss Hurston's unique examination and celebration of Black expression, creativity, and resiliency. How did Hurston's book "Their Eyes Were Watching God" convey a message of Black women's freedom and self-discovery?

How it Feels to be Colored Me

Zora neale hurston, everything you need for every book you read..

Zora Neale Hurston opens the essay by explicitly stating that she is “colored,” or African-American, and that she has no desire to minimize that identity by claiming Native-American ancestry, as other African-Americans of her time might.

She remembers the first day she felt colored. Before then, Hurston grew up in the black town of Eatonville, Florida. The only white people she saw were passing through on their way to Orlando. Although the locals paid no special attention to southern whites, who rode through on horses, they made a commotion over northern tourists who drove through in their cars, often coming out to the porch to observe them.

Growing up, Hurston relished the visits of these traveling white people and didn’t bother with subtlety when watching them from her porch. She would even greet them and walk alongside them as they traveled, and she jokes that the Chamber of Commerce should have taken notice of her efforts.

Hurston recalls that, in her childhood, she didn’t draw a distinction between white and colored people, only observing that the former rode through her town but never stopped. She would recite, sing, and dance for the travelers as she accompanied them, and was surprised when the travelers would sometimes give her a coin. The colored people in her town never paid her for her performances, but she nevertheless felt a sense of belonging there.

Her awakening as a “little colored girl” begins upon moving to Jacksonville at the age of thirteen. She describes a loss of identity: she’s no longer Zora of Orange County, but an impulsive colored girl to be scolded and watched. However, in her present life, Hurston doesn’t view her colored status as a tragedy. She contrasts herself with other African-Americans, who she says feel victimized by their oppression. Instead, she claims that life is dominated by the powerful, whether that power is applied on the basis of skin color or any other criteria.

Hurston complains about the tendency to overemphasize the legacy of slavery, which she dismisses by placing it “sixty years in the past.” She describes the struggles of previous generations as a sacrifice for her current freedom, which she plans to use in pursuit of glory and adventure. In contrast, white people are haunted by the historical guilt of African-American slavery.

Hurston notes that she doesn’t always “feel [her] race,” but she feels it most often around white people, as she does at Barnard College in New York. But she describes the feeling in positive terms, as it brings her sense of self into greater relief.

She tells an anecdote about bringing a white friend to a jazz club in her black neighborhood. As the band strikes up, Hurston enters a trance where she makes contact with a more primitive, animal nature. She describes herself with painted skin brandishing an African spear. But when she returns to reality, her white friend merely compliments the music. Hurston pities him because what was an ecstatic experience to her is just “music” to him.

At times, Hurston feels she has no race but “Zora.” She belongs to no specific place or time. She walks the streets of Manhattan as a mythic, cosmic figure. Although she experiences discrimination, she can’t imagine why someone would deny themselves her company based on something so insubstantial as race.

To explain her point, Hurston poses a metaphor of colored bags that correspond to racial identity and skin color. What draws her interest is not the appearance of the bags, but the contents, which she describes in deep and poignant detail. She claims that all the objects in these bags could be mixed up and replaced, with the contents of a white bag placed in a brown bag, without needing to tailor the contents to the color of the bag. And that might even be the original intent of the “Great Stuffer of Bags,” the deity who filled the “bags” in the first place.

Perspectives Black History

Harlem is everywhere : episode 3, art & literature.

How did the literature of the Harlem Renaissance play a central role in conversations around Black identity?

Jessica Lynne , Monica L. Miller and John Keene

How did the literature of the Harlem Renaissance play a central role in conversations around Black identity? In this episode we’ll learn about publications like Opportunity , The Crisis , and Fire!! which each promoted a unique political and aesthetic perspective on Black life at the time. We’ll learn about Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston before they became household names and explore how collaboration and conversation between artists, writers, and scholars came to define the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance.

View the objects discussed in the episode and read the complete transcript below .

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VOICE 1 : Night wears a garment, VOICE 2 : All velvet soft, all violet blue . . . VOICE 3 : And over her face she draws a veil VOICE 1 : As shimmering fine as floating dew . . . VOICE 4 : And here and there In the black of her hair,

JESSICA LYNNE : The subtle hands of Night Move slowly in their gem-starred light.

That was “Street Lamps in Early Spring ” written by Gwendolyn Bennett in 1926.

Welcome to Harlem Is Everywhere brought to you by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m your host Jessica Lynne. I’m a writer and art critic. This is episode three: Art and Literature.

Today writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston seem fully present in our minds as staples in the canon of American literature. But there was a time when they were young and eager, stretching their wings and finding a voice, hoping to place their work in publications like The Crisis , Opportunity ,and Fire!! .

All three of these publications shared a goal of amplifying the voices and images emerging from the Harlem Renaissance. But they didn’t always agree on what stories to tell or who they wanted to tell them to. It was beautiful and it was complicated.

There are just too many talented people from this era to cover in one episode. We’ll speak about members of the younger generation like Hughes and Hurston and we’ll point out foundational figures like Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Spurgeon Johnson and Jessie Redmon Fauset.

We’ll hear from researcher and educator Monica L. Miller:

MONICA L. MILLER:   When Hurston walked in the door, she famously had a red feather boa on, threw that feather boa over her shoulder, and said the words, “Color struck!”

LYNNE: We’ll also speak with writer and professor John Keene:

JOHN KEENE : The writers of Fire!! were not concerned with presenting neat bourgeois representations of Black people.

LYNNE: In the fall of my junior year of high school, all the adults around me wanted a real answer to that existential question: “So, what do you want to do with your life?”

Everyone needed an answer to this question and I was drawing a blank.

Around this time my English teacher assigned Zora Neale Hurston’s novel  Their Eyes Were Watching God . I still have my high-school copy with the black-and-white portrait of Hurston taken by the photographer Carl Van Vechten. In it, Hurston wears a wide-brimmed hat tilted slightly to the right side of her face and a chunky, beaded necklace. I still need this necklace. Her smile is alluring, almost mischievous.

I felt so alive after reading Hurston’s words. I wanted to know everything about this Black Southern woman who depicted on the page so much of what was familiar to me as a Black Southern girl—even if I was living almost sixty years in the future.

Her characters were speaking a Black American English that I’d heard all my life and Hurston took special care to write dialogue in that vernacular throughout the novel.

Zora Neale Hurston (American, 1891–1960). Their Eyes Were Watching God , 1937. Walter O. and Savannah Evans Collection

You know that opening scene when Pheoby meets Janie on the back porch with a plate of food, ready to sit and visit a while? I had seen all the women in my life problem solve and caretake or gather together in much the same way.

So, what did I want to do with my life? I wanted to do whatever Hurston had done. And that included living in New York.

I had known what the Harlem Renaissance was, but immersing myself in Hurston’s life gave me a better sense of the Harlem that she’d encountered in the 1920s, and how it impacted her as an artist.

This was a Harlem that was opening its arms to Black folks from everywhere, including the South, and in doing so was fundamentally changing the cultural landscape of a nation.

If Harlem, if New York, was a place that was special enough for my newfound literary hero, it was special enough for me, too. What was it about these streets and avenues that made Hurston feel at home? How did this uptown neighborhood become the epicenter of the world’s first Black-led modern art movement? In a way, if I wanted to understand Hurston, I needed to understand Harlem.

LYNNE: Monica L. Miller is a professor of English and Africana studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.

MILLER: I teach and research African American literature and cultural studies, as well as Afro-diasporic literature and cultural studies. So, my work spans Black identity and culture from the United States into Europe.

LYNNE: In the early 1900s two major civil rights organizations created and distributed literary publications—the National Urban League promoted Opportunity m agazine while the NAACP released The Crisis . These publications had two main goals: to promote the values of the organizations and to offer a platform for established as well as younger Black artists to shine.

MILLER: What was really important about those magazines is that they were as part of the sort of early Black press movement magazines that included news, that included history, artwork, and often literature. So they were really important in terms of being a place where African American community was actually sort of talking to itself, right? And then ultimately you could sort of get the pulse of what was happening.

LYNNE: Not only what was happening in Harlem, but also in other major urban centers in the Northeast. These cities were becoming the home of so many people as a result of the Great Migration. These magazines were knitting together a community of people, similar to how Black-owned newspapers had done in the late 1800s.

MILLER: What was different about these journals, though, is precisely the way that they included the arts and literature.

LYNNE: These publications, like the people they represented and spoke to, weren’t a monolith. They were a mosaic of different styles and themes, ideals, and voices.

Opportunity was almost an extension of The New Negro anthology. This was a publication that looked to shape Black modernity in a powerful way. Charles S. Johnson acted as the editor while Alain Locke helped develop the magazine and was a frequent contributor.

The Crisis was created by W. E. B. Du Bois with Jessie Redmond Fauset acting as the editor.

MILLER: The Crisis is ultimately a relatively—I mean, I think we think about it now, but not at the time—a relatively conservative publication in the way that it balanced both, sort of, internal and external politics.

Du Bois was a proponent of respectability politics, which meant that he was really interested in putting, sort of, the best foot forward. He was very concerned about remaking the image of African Americans, both for themselves, but particularly for a sort of outside audience. So, The Crisis was a magazine that reflected those ideals and ideologies.

Left: Laura Wheeler Waring (American, 1887–1948). Egypt and Spring, Cover of The Crisis , April 1923. Collection of Walter O. and Linda Evans; Right: Laura Wheeler Waring (American, 1887–1948). The Strength of Africa, Cover of The Crisis , September 1924. Collection of Walter O. and Linda Evans

MILLER : When I look at the cover of The Crisis what I’m seeing there is this idea about Africa being the sort of classical base for African American art and culture. If Europe has the Greek and Roman past, African America has the African past. So, we see Egypt and a kind of Africanized version of Greece, which is really fascinating.

LYNNE: The cover of the February 1925 issue of Opportunity by artist Winold Reiss represented a new approach to thinking about West African aesthetics.

The cover features an illustration of a traditional mask framed by geometric patterns in yellow and black.

Winold Reiss (American, born Germany 1886–1953). Cover of Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life , February 1925. Collection of Walter O. and Linda Evans

MILLER: We’re being asked to think about African America as modern, but almost as modern sort of being borrowed and in conversation with the way that Modernist—capital M Modernist—artists had been thinking about and using African aesthetic forms.

LYNNE: Fire!! was something altogether different. The November 1926 cover by Aaron Douglas is of a sphinx and other abstract symbols on a completely black background. This cover demands attention.

MILLER: Here we’re sort of thinking about Africa in an avant-garde way, Like it’s really we’re supposed to be thinking like, oh, you know, this is exciting, this is maybe a little kind of outré. Like, it’s exotifying in some ways, but for the purpose of attraction.

LYNNE: While Opportunity and The Crisis represented more “respectable” values on their covers and in their pages, Fire!! was not at all remotely interested in respectability. It was a place for younger artists to discuss controversial topics like sexuality that the older guard might deem taboo. Here’s John Keene.

KEENE: The writers of Fire!! were not concerned with presenting neat bourgeois representations of Black people. They were interested in—you know, and of course it’s to our benefit—presenting a richer and fuller portrait of Black life at that moment.

So you get representations of working-class and poor Black people. You get representations of the struggles of the Black bourgeoisie. You get overt critiques of racism and White supremacy. You get, for example, with Richard Bruce Nugent, one of the very first works that deals with Black queer sexuality.

MILLER: The legend around Fire!! is that Wallace Thurman, who was a young writer who had come to Harlem from Los Angeles, and Bruce Nugent—who was perhaps the youngest person who was active in the Harlem Renaissance at that time, who had just come to New York from Washington, D.C.—both of them queer men, that they flipped a coin. And whoever got heads was going to write the story about prostitution and whoever got tails was going to write a story about homosexuality. And those were the two stories that they wanted to sort of anchor Fire!! magazine around, which was going to be which was going to be and ultimately turned out to be incredibly controversial at the time.

LYNNE: The artists and writers of Fire!! weren’t simply trying to find an audience amongst their peers. They represented the interests and ideas of an entire generation. A generation less concerned with signaling middle-class values and more concerned with honest expression.

Keene: The Harlem Renaissance writers and artists represented really, you know, Black America at that moment in the urban North in New York. So, you had writers, you know, who were from the West Indies, you had the Caribbean, you had writers who were born in the South. You had writers from New York itself, right, and other northern urban centers. So, you get this incredible mixture of people. And so respectability kind of went out the window!

MILLER: So Fire!! is for the younger Negro artists who want to, as Langston Hughes said in his essay, “The Negro Artists in the Racial Mountain,” who want to express themselves freely. And they don’t care if Black people like it, they don’t care if White people like it. That they’re doing it, right, to be what he said, “free within themselves.”

So, Fire!! is this magazine that includes just like The Crisis and Opportunity essays, poetry, artwork, history. But it does it from a decidedly radical point of view. Ironically, there was only one issue of Fire!! because the issues that were being stored to be sold all over the East Coast or as far as they could get the magazine burned up in a fire.

LYNNE: Yes… Fire!! magazine’s life was cut short due to a fire. But the bond and creative energy that existed amongst the younger generation stayed intact.

MILLER: The younger group of Negro artists who were part of Fire!! magazine were all kind of located in an apartment that was rented out by a sort of older woman in Harlem who was really interested in fostering the arts. Her name was Iolanthe Sydney. She rented apartments at a discount to artists. Aaron Douglas lived in this apartment. I think Bruce Nugent lived there on and off. Hurston was there occasionally. Wallace Thurman was there, Langston Hughes was there.

So, this apartment was was a place where… that was a salon of the younger Negro artists. Important, though, in that apartment was, because of Aaron Douglas and also Bruce Nugent, who were visual artists. The walls were painted by Douglas. There were drawings all over the place that were made by Bruce Nugent. He was the only, sort of, out gay man in the Harlem Renaissance, so his drawings and artwork were very provocative at the time. A lot of naked bodies and sensual depictions of the African American body.

So, they lived in a space that was filled with art, the writers. And the artists lived in a space that was filled with words.

LYNNE: The collaborative spirit of these visual and literary artists allowed their mediums to collide. A chance to explore subjects considered scandalous, and to simply let go.

John Keene has seen this in his own projects.

KEENE: I’ve done two books with visual artists, one of whom is also an amazing poet and one of them is an amazing photographer. I just did a poster with another wonderful photographer. And I feel like one of the things that I gain is a sense of depth, a deeper appreciation for the other mediums and for the medium I’m working in, right?

So, working with a visual artist you come to understand how they see the world, how they see the process of making art. And it informs my own work as a writer, and I believe the reverse is true, as well. The other thing too, I think, that I love about collaboration is it involves a certain amount of surrendering of the ego. You have to step back from the “I” and think in terms of “we”—how can we create—which I think is a great spur for creativity.

LYNNE: Ultimately, these publications were more similar than they were different. Each was dedicated to promoting the arts and literature of the Harlem Renaissance and the artists central to this movement and each had important figures behind their success.

One of them is Jessie Redmond Fauset, a novelist, poet, critic, and editor of The Crisis who is sometimes overshadowed by her male counterparts.

MILLER: Fauset is an incredibly important person in the Renaissance because of the way that she edited that magazine and also solicited work from writers and also encouraged them—like Charles Johnson and Alain Locke did for the Opportunity contest—really fostered a kind of literary environment. And ultimately, she and other people were part of many different kinds of salons that were taking place both in New York and also in Washington, D.C.

LYNNE: The Crisis and Opportunity not only provided a platform through commissioning artists for cover illustrations, they also sponsored contests for writers.

MILLER: And these contests were important because they not only supported artistic work and recognized it, but they were often the vehicle through which many of the writers that we associate with the Renaissance came to New York.

LYNNE: James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Missouri and grew up in various midwestern towns. Raised mainly by his maternal grandmother he developed a love of words early.

While in high school he began to compose the first of a lifetime of short stories, poetry and plays. In his early twenties Hughes moved to New York City to attend Columbia University. Around this time he submitted a poem to The Crisis . It was called “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”

He’d written it as a teenager on a train crossing the Mississippi River. Writing the poem down on the back of an envelope, it seemed to flow out of him like the waters below. You can almost picture him reading the poem softly under his breath as the train headed south.

Here’s Hughes in his own voice reading the “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”:

LANGSTON HUGHES:

I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers.

LYNNE: Did he realize that what he’d just written would catapult his career and become one of the defining poems of the era? Hughes ended up submitting this poem to The Crisis after arriving in New York as a twenty year old.

MILLER: There are these moments, famous moments, when we think about the Renaissance.

LYNNE: One of those is when, after reading the poem, Du Bois turns to Fauset and says, “What colored person is there, do you suppose, in the United States who writes like that and is yet unknown to us?”

Langston Hughes has been close to John Keene’s heart throughout his own career. Here’s Keene reflecting on a portrait of a then twenty-four-year-old Hughes by German-born artist Winold Reiss.

This portrait features a young Hughes in a sharp suit seated at a desk with a notebook open… as if the viewer is watching the writer at work. Hughes looks into the distance, in contemplation.

Winold Reiss (American, born Germany, 1886–1953). Langston Hughes , 1925. Pastel on illustration board. National Portrait Gallery, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, Washington D.C.; Gift of W. Tjark Reiss, in memory of his father, Winold Reiss

KEENE: One of the things that it sort of signifies is his centrality, right? He was someone who was a kind of connecting figure for so many different members in what became the Harlem Renaissance, right? But even at his very young age, he was, I think, sort of establishing himself as one of the premier poets of his generation. So it’s sort of fascinating to see, you know, someone capture him at that young age, but also to kind of show the range of who he was through the juxtaposition of the images in the painting. The Cubism in the background and, of course, the pensive young poet in the foreground.

LYNNE: John Keene loves Hughes’s poems, for their approachability, humor, and lyricism.

KEENE: I think it was a combination of the poems’ musicality, their artistry. He’s very gifted in concision, their humor. And also the poems have a political bite. And you don’t have to be, you know, super sophisticated, you can be a child and pick up what he’s saying. So you get all of those elements together, and they make for very powerful and compelling poetry.

I probably encountered Langston Hughes’s poetry first as a small child from my parents and godparents and had been a fan of and loved Hughes’s work ever since.

LYNNE: John Keene didn’t need any prompting recalling Langton Hughes’s poem “Harlem.”

KEENE: So, the opening line, of course, is:

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? — Which, of course, provided Lorraine Hansberry with the title for her great play… Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

And then that final line:

Or does it explode?

LYNNE: Hughes had caught the attention of Du Bois and Fauset at The Crisis . Meanwhile, Hurston made a splash with the editors of Opportunity .

Hurston had previously been published in Opportunity . But in 1925 she entered a short story called “Spunk” and a play called Color Struck to one of the magazine’s literary contests. She won second place in both categories.

Another one of those famous moments in the history of the Harlem Renaissance was at the party celebrating this contest, when Hurston made her debut.

MILLER: When Hurston walked in the door, she famously had a red feather boa on, threw that feather boa over her shoulder, and said the words, “Color struck!” Which was actually the name of the play that she had won second prize for. The whole room turned to look at her. She announced her presence in Harlem with that gesture.

LYNNE: Zora Neale Hurston would become a force of the Harlem Renaissance and American literature more broadly. That night she met Langston Hughes, who would become a great friend. And she made another connection with Barnard College founder and trustee Annie Nathan Meyer.

Monica: And Annie Nathan Meyer, after seeing Hurston circulating in the party, said, you know what? I think that woman is the woman I want to see if I can integrate Barnard College with.

Hurston became Barnard’s first Black student after meeting Annie Nathan Meyer that evening. And for Hurston, securing an education was actually sort of everything. So moving into that room, making that impression, meeting her sort of, you know, soulmate in Langston Hughes, and this vehicle towards education and her ultimate career as both a writer and an anthropologist… Opportunity magazine gave her that opportunity.

LYNNE: She would go on to study anthropology and become the first Black graduate of Barnard College. After getting her degree Hurston wanted to return to the South, where she’d grown up, to document Southern Black life: its folk tales, songs, and stories.

After receiving funding, Hurston drove down South in a little coup nicknamed “Sassy Susie.”

MILLER: There’s a great photograph of her in front of her car with a gun in a holster because she was traveling through the South primarily alone and occasionally needed to to feel protected. Also the car, because sometimes there were not places where a Black person or Black woman in particular could stay—she would stay in the car.

This photograph is a beautiful contrast to a painting found in the exhibition titled Miss Zora Neale Hurston . The portrait, by Aaron Douglas, not only captures another side of Hurston but also a different style than the modern, geometric approach typically associated with Douglas.

Aaron Douglas (American, 1899–1979). Miss Zora Neale Hurston , 1926. Pastel on canvas. Fisk University Galleries, Nashville

MILLER: We have Hurston sitting in a chair and there’s a certain kind of dark brownness to the wood. So I’m really interested in the many many tones of brown that are in the painting. She’s wearing a brown kind of cloche hat, she’s got a little fur, and her coat is brown. So, it’s a sort of study in brown, which I think is really beautiful because it’s bringing out her skin tone.

What I also really like about this painting is the expression on Hurston’s face. She seems like she is relaxed and thinking and in the company of a friend. We think of Hurston as a person who has a lot of energy. Like, she just had tremendous energy. And this portrait is one of her where she’s calm, relaxed, and at ease.

LYNNE: It’s a refined, quiet portrait—a far cry from Hurston the pistol-totin’, Sassy Susie–driving, anthropological researcher….

During this time Langston Hughes was also down South.

MILLER: So Hurston was down in the South doing field work, collecting stories and folk songs. Trying to sort of study African American culture in a way that it hadn’t really ever been studied before and preserve it. And Langston Hughes was visiting Tuskegee Institute and giving a reading of his poetry. And they kind of got on the road together.

And the way that Hurston was traveling is that she was not traveling to universities. She was traveling to, you know, work camps, work sites, small Black communities where she could listen to stories and talk to ordinary Black people about their lives, you know, record their speech, their metaphors. I mean, all of the things that she called the characteristics of Negro expression. So they were really sort of out in smaller communities and rural communities driving around in Hurston’s car.

LYNNE: These two writers and their lives embody how the writings of the Renaissance traveled. It wasn’t work that only found an audience in the cosmopolitan North. It spoke to and resonated with these rural communities in a way that’s not surprising.

MILLER: Hurston’s collecting stories. Hughes is reading his work and interacting with people. So, in terms of how some of the Harlem Renaissance poetry and literature was received in other places, it was embraced.

LYNNE: The writings of the Harlem Renaissance traveled far and wide and covered many themes. The essays, novels, short stories, poems, and plays created during this time spoke to audiences in Europe, the Caribbean, and beyond about life in the rural South as well as the industrialized cities of the North.

The writer Nella Larsen tackled topics like colorism in her classic novel Passing . Other writers, like Claude McKay or Countee Cullen, found inspiration in themes of sexuality, alienation, and racial pride. There are so many incredible writers from the Harlem Renaissance to research and enjoy. Their contributions radically changed and inspired the written word and we can see, feel, and read their influence in so many writers today.

KEENE: We get a deeper sense of Black experience, Black interiority, Black subjectivity in a way that we had not seen before. So, I think that the Harlem Renaissance writers really opened up a lot of doors, a lot of windows for their peers and for all the writers who follow. Because we’re still, in a sense, walking through the doors that they opened up for us.

[Zora Neale Hurston singing “Halimufack”]

LYNNE: You may have had the chance to read Zora Neale Hurston’s work as a writer and an author. But I wanted to share something that feels really special to me as a self-identified Hurston fangirl. Here’s her singing.

[Zora Neale Hurston continues singing]

LYNNE: There’s something about hearing her voice that makes me realize—oh wow. She was a human being, with her own emotions and lived experience and singing voice.

LYNNE: “Halimufack” performed by Zora Neale Hurston is available in the Library of Congress .

LYNNE: A big thank you to Monica L. Miller and John Keene for spending time with us today. Our next episode will focus on the music and nightlife of the Harlem Renaissance. We’ll talk about the musicians, the brilliant ballrooms, and smokey bars, and the freedom that people found in challenging conventional understandings of sexuality.

Harlem Is Everywhere  is produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios.

Our senior producer is Stephen Key. Our producer is Maria Robins-Somerville. Our editor is Josh Gwynn. Mixing by our senior engineer, Marina Paiz. Additional engineering by senior audio engineer Pedro Alvira. Our assistant engineers are Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks.

I’m your host, Jessica Lynne. Fact checking by Maggie Duffy. Legal services by Kristel Tupja. Original music by Austin Fisher and Epidemic Sound

The Met’s production staff includes producer Rachel Smith; managing producer Christopher Alessandrini; and executive producer Sarah Wambold.

This show would not be possible without Denise Murrell, the Merryl H. & James S. Tisch Curator at Large and curator for the Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism exhibition; research associate is Tiarra Brown.

Special thanks to Inka Drögemüller, Douglas Hegley, Skyla Choi, Isabella Garces, David Raymond, Ashley Sabb, Tess Solot-Kehl, Gretchen Scott, and Frank Mondragon.

Asha Saluja and Je-Anne Berry are the executive producers at Pineapple Street.

More from Harlem Is Everywhere

Harlem Is Everywhere : Episode 5, Art as Activism

Harlem Is Everywhere : Episode 4, Music & Nightlife

Harlem Is Everywhere : Episode 2, Portraiture & Fashion

About the contributors, jessica lynne.

Host, Harlem Is Everywhere

Monica L. Miller

Professor of English and Africana Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University

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A century ago, a dinner party in New York set in motion one of the most influential cultural movements of the 20th century.

It was an interracial soirée that included intellectual and artistic luminaries.

It was barely covered at the time. But we explored archival material and have reconstructed much of it.

In the years after the dinner party, Black writers published more than 40 volumes of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

But most importantly, it organized a creative movement that reverberates to this day.

If the Harlem Renaissance had a birthplace, this party was it.

Supported by

The Dinner Party That Started the Harlem Renaissance

By Veronica Chambers and Michelle May-Curry

On March 21, 1924, Jessie Fauset sat inside the Civic Club in downtown Manhattan, wondering how the party for her debut novel had been commandeered.

The celebration around her was originally intended to honor that book, “There Is Confusion.” But Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke thought the dinner could serve a larger purpose. What if the two Black academic titans invited the best and brightest of the Harlem creative and political scene? What if, over a spread of fine food and drink, they brought together African American talent and white purveyors of culture? If they could marry the talent all around them with the opportunity that was so elusive, what would it mean to Black culture, both present and future?

What the resulting dinner led to, nurtured over the years in the pristine sitting rooms of brownstones and the buzzing corner booths of jazz clubs, was the Harlem Renaissance: a flowering of intellectual and artistic activity that would give the neighborhood and its residents global renown.

While there are plenty of galas and gatherings today, the goal of the 1924 dinner was far broader: It was intended to bring together that talent and those opportunities.

“Benefits are celebrations. They’re not operational meetings,” said Lisa Lucas, the senior vice president and publisher at Pantheon and Schocken Books who was the first woman and African American to head the National Book Foundation. “It’s unusual to really have an honest space for people to meet and hammer out what’s working and what’s not.”

Johnson and Locke chose the Civic Club because, as the historian David Levering Lewis would later write, “It was the only upper crust New York club without a color bar where Afro-American intellectuals and distinguished white liberals foregathered, more often than not around a table haloed by Benson and Hedges cigarette smoke exhaled by Du Bois” — W.E.B. Du Bois, arguably the center of the coalescing Harlem galaxy.

Among the party organizers: Locke was a dapper, Harvard-educated professor who was the first Black Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford; a column in the Black political and literary magazine The Messenger called him “the high priest of intellectual snobbocracy.” Johnson was a sociologist and the founding editor of Opportunity magazine, the pre-eminent Black magazine of the time.

“The thing has gone over big,” Johnson wrote to Locke in the days leading up to the dinner. “Nothing can be allowed to go wrong now.”

The evening is impossible to capture in full because so little was written about it in the mainstream news media. But we’ve reconstructed as much as we can, relying on rarely seen letters and other archival material to piece together the evening that set the Renaissance in motion.

A Call for Cultural Revolution

In the Civic Club, among over 100 attendees, Locke and Johnson rubbed shoulders with a cadre of white publishers. Elsewhere, leaders from the National Urban League, the N.A.A.C.P. and the Y.M.C.A. compared notes. Every relationship was a matrix of creative possibility and promise.

The evening’s guest list had been drawn up by, among others, Regina Andrews (then Anderson), one of a number of women essential to the movement who went unrecognized for decades. As one of the few Black librarians in the city, she found herself assigned to the branch in Harlem. (That library branch would become the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, named for Arturo Schomburg.)

Her nearby apartment, which she would eventually share with two roommates, both of whom worked at Opportunity magazine, became known as “Dream Haven.” The apartment was where friends and neighbors workshopped poems, got book recommendations and couch-surfed.

The most recognizable figure at the dinner, to guests both Black and white, was Du Bois, the first African American to earn a doctorate at Harvard University and one of the most important public intellectuals of the 20th century. His 1903 book “The Souls of Black Folk” was an instant classic, and he was both a pre-eminent scholar and activist. He arrived at the dinner freshly returned from Liberia, where he traveled as a representative of President Calvin Coolidge, as well as Senegal and Sierra Leone.

When Fauset, the 41-year-old literary editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the N.A.A.C.P., stood up to thank her friends who had supported the publishing of her debut novel, she praised Du Bois, calling him her “best friend and severest critic.”

The evening’s programming also highlighted a new, young Black guard. Gwendolyn Bennett, 21, read “To Usward,” a poem dedicated to Fauset and to every Black youth “who have a song to sing, a story to tell or a vision for the sons of earth.” Countee Cullen, an N.Y.U. undergraduate who had already been published, also read a recent work.

The more established among the group used their remarks to call for a generational shift.

Carl Van Doren, a white Columbia University professor and literary critic, spoke earnestly about how essential it was for the publishing world, and the nation at large, to hear from young Black writers.

“What American literature decidedly needs at this moment is color, gusto, the free expression of gay or desperate moods,” he said. “If the Negroes are not in a position to contribute these items, I do not know what Americans are.”

Van Doren was referencing the growing interest in Black American voices during the Roaring Twenties, in part because the soundtrack of the time was blues and jazz. “Shuffle Along,” among the earliest, major all-Black Broadway musicals, and one of its breakout songs, “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” were both hits. Louis Armstrong’s first recorded solo appeared in 1923, the same year Duke Ellington moved to Harlem. The attendees of the dinner — Black and white — were plotting how to capture some of the magic of the Jazz Age in books, magazines, plays and paintings.

Though the event itself may have glittered with promise, the writers at the Civic dinner were very aware that beyond the doors of the club, Jim Crow was still rampant — including uptown in Harlem. By 1920, largely because of the Great Migration, Black people made up over 30 percent of Central Harlem (compared with just under 1.5 percent of the entire city). Yet even as lynching numbers began to drop, in October 1925, a young Black man from Harlem was beaten by a mob who believed he had attacked a white girl.

“We can’t lose sight of the fact that the weight of these artists’ contributions is not only due to their mastery of form,” Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, said in a recent interview, “but also the juxtaposition of the beauty they created against the ugliness and indignities they had to endure at that time.”

A Complicated Legacy

It would take time for the seeds of the Civic Club event to fully take root. Locke, Du Bois and Johnson spent the next year writing letters, raising money and convincing young artists like the painter Aaron Douglas to come to Harlem. Zora Neale Hurston arrived in Harlem in 1925 as the first African American student at Barnard College. She spent her first few nights in town sleeping on the couch at Dream Haven.

Du Bois remained the elder statesman of the emerging movement. When Regina Anderson and her Dream Haven roommates, Ethel Nance (then Ray) and Louella Ray Tucker, would find themselves short on money at the end of the month, DuBois would take them out for a meal.

For Cullen, the N.Y.U. student, Du Bois’s influence was both professional and personal. Four years later, Du Bois would bless the union of his rebellious only surviving child, Yolande, and Cullen. Just weeks before the wedding, Cullen became one of the first Black writers to be awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, a sum so great that it would allow him to live in Europe for a year. He wrote to his soon to be father-in-law that he was sure that the award was “due to no small degree to your endorsement of my application.”

The Black news media covered every detail of the wedding; 1,200 people were invited, 3,000 showed up. Shortly after, Cullen took off on a yearlong trip to Europe — with his best man. Two years later, he admitted to his wife that he was attracted to men and the couple divorced.

Fauset, for her part, never got over having her event appropriated. In 1933, she wrote Locke a scathing letter, reminding him that in his “consummate cleverness,” he had managed, on that evening in 1924, to “keep speech and comment away from the person for whom the occasion was meant.”

A little over a year after the Civic Club dinner, Carl Van Vechten, a white writer and photographer, said in a letter to the white journalist and critic H.L. Mencken that “Jazz, the blues, Negro spirituals, all stimulate me enormously at the moment. Doubtless I shall discard them too in time.” During the economic trials of the Great Depression, support for Black artists plummeted and many of the most talented members of the Renaissance felt they had been discarded, just as Van Vechten had flippantly predicted.

“We always have the talent, but then the opportunity collapsed,” Farah Griffin, a professor of English and comparative literature and African American studies at Columbia University, said in a recent interview. “And I think the Black Arts movement in the ’60s and ’70s tried to learn from what happened when Black artists were dependent upon white philanthropy and white publishing institutions.”

Still, the audacious bet by Locke, Johnson, Du Bois, Anderson and many others in the room that first night more than paid off. In the decade after the dinner, the writers who were associated with the Renaissance published more than 40 volumes of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. That body of work transformed a community as well as the landscape of American literature.

And the Harlem Renaissance is still both inspiration and object lesson for groups of Black writers. Over the past three decades, members of the Cave Canem artists’ collective, for example, have won, as of November 2023, six Pulitzer Prizes, three MacArthur “genius” fellowships and 24 Guggenheim fellowships.

“The Harlem Renaissance is both mythology and history,” said Lucas, the publisher. “It really happened. Those works were really created. It’s a beautiful thing that all American boys and girls get to grow up and read about this magical moment when these people that America didn’t want to be free took their instruments and their paint brushes and their pens, their feet and their fingers, and they got free.”

That freedom took more time and strategy than the mythology sometimes suggests. On May 1, 1925, Johnson hosted the first Opportunity Literary Awards dinner at the Fifth Avenue Restaurant, off 24th Street. This time, more than 300 guests gathered, including figures that would come to define the Renaissance: the singer and actor Paul Robeson; Van Vechten; Hurston; and Langston Hughes, who signed his first book contract just four weeks later with the publisher Alfred Knopf.

The After-Party

If the Civic Club dinner was the seed of the movement, the Opportunity dinner was where its growth gained momentum. Hughes, then in his early 20s, had returned from Paris and won first prize for what would be considered his signature poem, “The Weary Blues.” Hurston had come to Harlem and won second prize for her play “Color Struck.”

Finally, the Renaissance had the attention of the mainstream news media. The New York Herald Tribune wrote in May 1925 that the Opportunity dinner was “A novel sight, that dinner — white critics, whom ‘everybody’ knows, Negro writers, whom ‘nobody’ knew — meeting on common ground.”

It was, as The Herald Tribune observed, a moment when “the American Negro is finding his artistic voice and that we are on the edge, if not already in the midst of, what might not be improperly called a Negro Renaissance.”

Veronica Chambers is the editor of Projects and Collaborations at The Times. Michelle May-Curry, Ph.D., is a Washington-based curator and writer and lecturer of engaged and public humanities at Georgetown University.

Susan C. Beachy and Sejla Rizvic contributed reporting.

Opening images credits: Barbecue painting by Archibald J. Motley Jr.: Chicago History Museum/Estate of Archibald John Motley Jr. via Bridgeman Images. Arturo Schomburg, Gwendolyn Bennett, Regina Anderson, the office of The Crisis magazine: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. Eugene O’Neill: General Photographic Agency/Getty Images. James Weldon Johnson: FPG/Getty Images. Eva D. Bowles: photographer unknown. W.E.B. Du Bois: Underwood Archives/Getty Images. Mary White Ovington, Jessie Fauset: Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images. Carl Van Doren: Doris Ulman. Charles S. Johnson: U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Countee Cullen: Carl Van Vechten via Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Van Vechten Trust. “Quicksand” by Nella Larsen, “The New Negro” by Alain LeRoy Locke, “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neal Hurston: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. “Black No More” by George S. Schuyler, Survey Graphic “Harlem Mecca of the New Negro,” “Home to Harlem” by Claude McKay, “There is Confusion” by Jessie Fauset, Fire!! A Quarterly Devoted to Younger Negro Artists, “The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man” by James Weldon Johnson: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library/James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection. “Color” by Countee Cullen: Harper and Brothers. “Cane” by Jean Toomer: Boni & Liveright. Duke Ellington Orchestra: “Black and Tan” film by Dudley Murphy via CriticalPast. Dancers performing at the Cotton Club circa 1930: via CriticalPast.

Because of an editing error, a picture caption misstated how long the writer Countee Cullen spent in Europe after his wedding. It was a year, not six months.

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A New Light on the Harlem Renaissance

A century after it burst on the scene in new york city, the first african american modernist movement continues to have an impact in the american cultural imagination..

The Dinner Party:  When Charles Johnson and Alain Locke thought that a celebration for Jessie Fauset’s book “There Is Confusion” could serve a larger purpose, the Harlem Renaissance was born, a flowering of intellectual and artistic activity .

An Ambitious Show:  A new exhibition, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, aims to shift our view  of the time when Harlem flourished as a creative capital. It gets it right, our critic writes .

An Enduring Legacy: We asked six artists to share their thoughts on the contributions that the Harlem Renaissance artists made to history. Here is what they said .

Crafting a New Life: At the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance, Augusta Savage fought racism to earn acclaim as a sculptor. The path she forged is also her legacy .

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Zora Neale Hurston, "Reveries" (1922)

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