Discussion for Catherine

Discuss and compare Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to be Colored Me” and Marita Bonner’s “On Being Young –A Woman –And Colored.”  How do these women’s perspectives on being African American and female differ and complement one another?  What particular aspects of being African American and female during the 1920s do these women explicate and reveal?  Feel free to bring in other works from this era for relevant comparison.  

1

How It Feels to Be Colored Me

Zora Neale Hurston

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.

I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the
little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white
people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native
whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in
automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they
passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously
from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch
to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got
out of the village.

The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery
seat to me. My favorite place was atop the gate-post. Proscenium box for a born first-
nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn’t mind the actors knowing that I liked it.
I usually spoke to them in passing. I’d wave at them and when they returned my salute, I
would say something like this: “Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin’?” Usually
the automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I
would probably “go a piece of the way” with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of
my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would
be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first “welcome-to-our-state”
Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.

During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode
through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me “speak pieces” and sing and
wanted to see me dance the parse-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.

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, as Zora. When I disembarked
from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea
change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I
found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown–
warranted not to rub nor run.

But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor
lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of

2

Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and
whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I
have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less.
No, I do not weep at the world–I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the 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.

The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a
chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed.
The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of
Eatonville before the Hegira 1. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp
white background.

For instance at Barnard.2 “Beside the waters of the Hudson” I feel my race. Among the
thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea. I am
surged upon and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the
waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the
contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The
New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any
little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt
way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in
circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the
heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on
its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it
breaks through the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen–follow them exultingly. I

1 Exodus or pilgrimage: Hurston refers here to the migration of millions of African Americans from the
South to the North in the early 20th century. (All notes from Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings
unless otherwise cited)
2 Barnard: Barnard College in New York City, where Hurston received her BA in 1927.

3

dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai3 above my head, I
hurl it true to the mark yeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My
face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a
war drum. I want to slaughter something–give pain, give death to what, I do not know.
But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep
back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend
sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

“Good music they have here,” he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

Music! The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only
heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the
continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so
colored.

At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter
down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-
Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins
Joyce4 on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking
together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I
belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. It merely
astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It’s beyond
me.

But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a
wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there
is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond5, an
empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled
away, a rusty knifeblade, 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?

3 Assegai: a weapon for throwing or hurling, usually a light spear or javelin made of wood and pointed with
iron. (Wikipedia)
4 American actress and celebrity (1893-1957). Boule Mich: Boulevard St. Michel, a street on the left bank
of Paris.
5 A diamond of the highest quality (Answers.com)

1264 I PAUL ROBESON

those of his cousins hundreds of years removed in the depths of
whom he has never seen, of whose very existence he is only dimly aware, . ;

His peculiar sense of rhythm alone would stamp him indelibly as Afr:~
can; and a slight variation of this same rhythm-consciousness is to be fou ~
am?ng the Tartars and Chinese, to whom he is much more nearly akin th:n.
he IS to the Arab, for example.

Not long ago I learned to speak Russian, since, the Russians being
50

closely allied through the Tartars to the Chinese, I expected to find myself
more in sympathy with that language than with English, French, or Ger-
man. I was not disappointed; I found that ther~ were Negro concepts which
I could express much more readily in Russian than in other languages.

I would rather sing Russian folk-songs than German grand opera-not
because it is necessarily better music, but because it is more instinctive and
less reasoned music. It is in my blood.

The pressing need of the American Negro is an ability to set his own stan-
dards. At school, at university, at law school, it didn’t matter to me whether
white students passed me or I passed them. What mattered was, if I got 85
marks, why didn’t I get 100? If I got 99, why didn’t I get 100? “To thine own
self be true” is a sentiment sneered at to-day as merely Victorian-but upon
its observance may well depend the future of nations and peoples.

It is of course useful and even necessary from an economic and social
standpoint for the Negro to understand Western ideas and culture, for he
will gain nothing by further isolating himself; and I would emphasize that
his mere physical return to his place of origin is not the essential condition
of his regeneration. In illustration of this take the parallel case of the Jews.

They, like a vast proportion of Negroes, are a race without a nation; but,
far from Palestine, they are indissolubly bound by their ancient religious
practices-which they recognize as such. I emphasize this in contraqistinc-
tion to the religious practices of the American Negro, which, from the
snake-worship practised in the deep South to the Christianity of the revival
meeting, are patently survivals of the earliest African religions; and he does
not recognize them as such.

Their acknowledgment of their common origin, species, interest, and atti-
tudes binds Jew to Jew; a-s’fmilar acknowledgment will bind Negro and Negro.

I realize that this will never be accomplished by viewing from afar the
dark rites of the witch-doctor-a phenomenon as far divorced from funda-
mental reality as are the petty bickerings over altar decorations and details
of vestment from the intention of Christ.

It may be accomplished, or at least furthered, by patient inquiry. To this
end I am learning Swahili, TivV and other African dialects-which come
easily to me because their rhythm is the same as that employed by the American
Negro in speaking English; and when the time is ripe I propose to investigate,
on the spot, the possibilities of such a regeneration as I have outlined.

Meanwhile in my music, my plays, my films I want to carry always this
central idea: to be African.

Multitudes of men have died for less worthy ideals; it is even more emi-
nently worth living for.

1934

3. A language of the Niger-Congo family, spoken in northern Nigeria.

MARITA BONNER
1899-1971

mong the best educated of the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance,
Marita Odette Bonner (sometimes identified as Marieta Bonner) was also one

of the more versatile and talented.
Bonner never lived in Harlem, and seldom visited New York, but certainly left her

mark on the literary movement. She was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, near
Boston. After excelling as a student in Brookline High School, she entered Radcliffe
College in nearby Cambridge in 1918. There she studied English and comparative
literature (she would eventually become fluent in German) and made a name for her-
self as a singer. Admitted to an acclaimed and highly competitive writing seminar,
she also laid, while at Radcliffe, the foundations for her literary career.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1922, Bonner taught for two years at the
Bluefield Colored Institute in Bluefield, Virginia. Then, responding to the growing
excitement among young African Americans about literature and culture, her writ-
ing began to mature with her move to Washington, D.C., in 1924 to teach at a high
school. An important mentor was the poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, who welcomed
Bonner to the celebrated weekly salon at herS Street home that at one time included
Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Alain Locke, Willis Richardson, and most of the
African American writers living in the district.

So multitalented was Bonner that she was able to win, in the .1920s, important
prizes in the field of the essay, the short story, drama, and music. Her keen awareness
of herself as a woman and an African American in an age of profound social change
led to her remarkable landmark essay “On Being Young-a Woman-and Colored,”
which appeared in December 1925 in the Crisis. Her dramatic writing, which included
plays such as The Pot Maker (1927), The Purple Flower (1928), and Exit: An Illusion
(1929), also brought her widespread recognition among black Americans as an
important figure in the theater movement that included \V. E. B. DuBois and the
Krigwa group in New York and Willis Richardson and other playwrights in Wash-
ington, D.C. In the 1920s, she also published several stories that further enhanced
her reputation.

With her marriage in 1930 to an accountant, William Occomy, Bonner left Wash-
ington and settled in Chicago, where she lived for the rest of her life. In the follow-
ing years she concentrated on the demahds of her family, including three children,
but also wrote fiction, principally short stories, that responded to the realities of
Chicago life, especially among black Americans living there. Around 1941, she more
or less stopped writing, although to the end of her life she cherished literature and
saw herself as a writer. In 1941, she resumed teaching, first at the Phillips High
School in Chicago, and then, between 1950 and 1963, at the Doolittle School (also in
Chicago), which served educationally deprived children. In 1971 she died following a
fire at her Chicago home.

In almost everything she wrote, Bonner showed a keen interest in exploring the
distance between the private, inner self of an individual and the suppositions about
that individual generated by prejudices about race, class, and gender. She brought a
special insight to her depictions of black feminine consciousness but never sought
to limit herself to this subject. Her best stories, such as “Drab Rambles” (1927),
“Tin Can” (1934), and “A Sealed Pod” (1936), are often presented as filtered through
a complex, subjective consciousness; at their best, they fascinate the reader with
their poetical and highly sensitive depictions of human character.

1265

On Being Young-a Woman-and Colored

You start out after you have gone from kindergarten to sheepskin covered
with sundry Latin phrases.

At least you know what you want life to give you. A career as fixed and as
calmly brilliant as the North Star. The one real thing that money buys
Time. Time to do things. A house that can be as delectably out of order and
as easily put in order as the doll-house of “playing-house” days. And of
course, a husband you can look up to without looking down on yourself.

Somehow you feel like a kitten in a sunny catnip field that sees sleek
plump brown field ~ice and y~llow baby chicks sitting coyly, side by sid~:
under each leaf. A desire to dash three or four ways seizes you.

That’s Youth.

But you know that things learned need testing-acid testing-to see if
they are really after all, an interwoven part of you. All your life you have
heqrd of the debt you owe “Your People” because you have managed to have
the thlngs they have not largely had.

So you find a spot where there are hordes of them-of course below the
Line-to be your catnip field while you close your eyes to mice and chick-ens alike.

If you have never lived among your own, you feel prodigal. Some warm
untouched current flows through them-through you-and drags you out
into the deep waters of a new sea of human foibles and mannerisms; of a
peculiar psychology and prejudices. And one day you find yourself
entangled-enmeshed-pinioned in the seaweed of a Black Ghetto.

Not a Ghetto, placid like the Strasse1 that flows, outwardly unperturbed
and calm in a stream of religious belief, but a peculiar group. Cut off,
flung together, shoved aside in a bundle because of color and with no more
in common.

Unless color is, after all, the real bond.

Milling around like live fish in a basket. Those at the bottom crushed
into a sort of stupid apathy by the weight of those on top. Those on top leap-
ing, leaping; leaping to s~ale the sides; to get out._.

There are two “colored” movies, innumerable parties-and cards. Cards
played so intensely that it fascinates and repulses at once.

Movies.

Movies worthy and worthless-but not even a low-caste spoken stage.
Parties, plentiful. Music and dancing and much that is wit and color and

gaiety. But they are like the richest chocolate; stuffed costly chocolates that
make the taste go stale if you have too many of them. That make plain whole
bread taste like ashes.

There are all the earmarks of a group within a group. Cut off all around
from ingress from or egress to other groups. A sameness of type. The smug
self-satisfaction of an inner measurement; a measurement by standards known
within a limited group and not those of an unlimited, seeing, world …. Like
the blind, blind mice. Mice whose eyes have been blinded.

Strange longing seizes hold of you. You wish yourself back where you can
lay your dollar down and sit in a dollar seat to hear voices, strings, reeds that
have lifted the World out, up, beyond things that have bodies and walls.

I. Street (German).

ON BEING YOUNG-A WOMAN-AND COLORED I 1267

Where you can marvel at new marbles and bronzes and flat colors that will
make men forget that things exist in a flesh more often than in spirit. Where
you can sink your body in a cushioned seat and sink yo~n soul at the same
time into a section of life set before you on the boards for a few hours.

You hear that up at New York this is to be seen; that, to be heard.
You decide the next train will take you there.
You decide the next second that that train will not take you, nor the

next-nor the next for some time to come.
For you know that-being a woman-you cannot twice a month or twice

a year, for that matter, break away to see or hear anything in a city that is
supposed to see and heqr too much.

That’s being a woman. A woman of any color.
You decide that something is wrong with a world that stifles and chokes;

that cuts off and stunts; hedging in, pressing down on eyes, ears and throat.
Somehow all wrong.

You wonder how it happens there that-say five hundred miles from the
Bay State2-Anglo Saxon’ intelligence is so warped and stunted.

How judgment and discernment are bred out of the race. And what has
become of discrimination? Discrimination of the right sort. Discrimination
that the best minds have told you weighs shadows and nuances and spiri-
tual differences before it catalogues. The kind they have taught you all of
your life was best: that looks clearly past generalization and past appear-
ance to dissect, to dig down to the real heart of matters. That casts aside
rapid summary conclusions, drawn from primary inference, as Daniel did
the spiced meats. 3

Why can’t they then perceive that there is a difference in the glance from
a pair of eyes th~t look, mildly docile, at “white ladies” and those that,
impersonally and perceptively-aware of distinctions-see only women
who happen to be white?

Why do they see a colored woman only as a gross collection of desires, all
uncontrolled, reaching out for their Apollos and the Quasimodos4 with avid
indiscrimination?

Why unless you talk in staccato squawks-brittle as seashells-unless
you “champ” gum-unless you cover two yards square when you laugh-
unless your taste runs to violent colors-impossible perfumes and more
impossible clothes-are you a feminine Caliban craving to pass for Ariel?5

An empty imitation of an empty invitation. A mime; a sham; a copy-cat.
A hollow re-echo. A froth, a foam. A fleck of the ashes of superficiality?

Everything you touch or taste now is like the flesh of an unripe
persimmon.

. .. Do you need to be told what that is being … ?
Old ideas, old fundamentals seem worm-eaten, out-grown, worthless,

bitter; fit for the scrap-heap of Wisdom.
What you had thought tangible and practical has turned out to be a col-

lection of “blue-flower” theories.
If they have not discovered how to use their accumulation of facts, they

are useless to you in Their world.
Every part of you becomes bitter.

2. Massachusetts.
3. See Daniel 1.8-16, where he refused to “defile
himself with the portion of the king’s meat.”
4. Quasimodo is the central character in Victor

Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831).
5. Savage and ugly trying to pass as noble and
beautifu I. Cali ban and Ariel are characters in
Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

“‘”~IIJ\ DUNNtR

But-“ln Heaven’s name, do not grow bitter. Be bigger than they are’l…,u
exhort white friends who have never had to draw breath in a Jim-Crow
train. Who have never had petty putrid insult dragged over them-drawin ·
blood-like pebbled sand on your body where the skin is tenderest. On yo.!
body where the skin is thinnest and tenderest.

You long to explode and hurt everything white; friendly; unfriendly. But
you know that you cannot live with a chip on your shoulder even if you can
manage a smile around your eyes-without getting steely and brittle and
losing the softness that makes you a woman.

For chips make you bend your body to balance them. And once you bend
you lose your poise, your balance, and the chip gets into you. The real you:
You get hard.

… And many things in you can ossify …

And you know, being a woman, you have to go about it gently and quietly,
to find out and to discover just what is wrong. Just what can be done.

You see clearly that they have acquired things.
Money; money. Money to build with, money to destroy. Money to swim

in. Money to drown in. Money.

An ascendancy of wisdom. An incalculable hoard of wisdom in all fields,
in all things collected from all quarters of humanity.

A stupendous mass of things.
Things.
So, too, the Greeks … Things.
And the Romans … .

And you wonder and wonder why they have not discovered how to handle
deftly and skillfully, Wisdom, stored up for them-like the honey for the
Gods on Olympus-since time unknown.

You wonder and you wonder until you wander out into Infinity, where-if
it is to be found anywhere-Truth really exists.

The Greeks had possessions, culture. They were lost because they did not
understand.

The Romans owned more than anyone else. Trampled under the heel of
Vandals and Civilization, because they would not understand.

Greeks. Did not understand. ~
Romans. Would not understand.
“They.” Will not understand.

So you find they have shut Wisdom up and have forgotten to find the key
that will let her out. They have trapped, trammeled, lashed her to “them-
selves with thews and thongs and theories. They have ransacked sea and
earth and air to bring every treasure to her. But she sulks and will not
work for a world with a whitish hue because it has snubbed her twin sister,
Understanding.

You see clearly-off there is Infinity-Understanding. Standing alone,
waiting for someone to really want her.

But she is so far out there is no way to snatch at her and really drag her in.
So-being a woman-you can wait.
You must sit quietly without a chip. Not sodden-and weighted as if your

feet were cast in the iron of your soul. Not wasting strength in enervating
gestures as if two hundred years of bonds and whips had really tricked you
into nervous uncertainty.

But quiet; quiet. Like Buddha-who brown like I am-sat entirely at
ease, entirely sure of himself; motionless and knowing, a thousand years

STERLING A. BROWN 1269

before the white man knew there was so very much difference between feet
and hands.

Motionless on the outside. But on the inside?
Silent.
Still … “Perhaps Buddha is a woman.”
So you too. Still; quiet; with a smile, ever so slight, at the eyes so that

Life will flow into and not by you. And you can gather, as it passes, the
essences, the overtones, the tints, the shadows; draw understanding to
yourself.

And then you can, when Time is ripe, swoop to your feet-at your full
height-at a single gesture.

Ready to go where?
Why … Wherever God motions.

STERLING A. BROWN
1901-1989

1925

ames Weldon Johnson seems to have spoken for the majority of modern African
American critics when he declared that the use of dialect in literature was funda-

mentally limited to the expression of humor and pathos. While admitting the exception
of Paul Laurence Dup.bar, who for Johnson was the first poet to use dialect “as a
medium for the true interpretation of Negro character and psychology,” Johnson none-
theless argued in the influential preface to his 1922 Book of American Negro Poetry that
dialect, given its long-standing assqciation with min~trelsy and its stock of racist stereo-
types, was unable to capture the full richness of modern black life in the United States.
But when Johnson revised and expanded his anthology in 1931, his additions included
two young writers who had, he recognized, broken the “mold of convention” of dialect
poetry, demonstrating its potential as a literary instrument: Langston H.;ghes and Ster-
ling A. Brown. The next year Johnson wrote the preface to Brown’s first book, Southern
Road (1932), praising the way Brown “infused his poetry with genuine characteristic
flavor by adopting as his medium the common, racy, living speech of the Negro in cer-
tain phrases of real life.” On the basis of that single collection of verse, Brown estab-
lished himself as a major voice in the renaissance, equaled only by Hughes and Zora
Neale Hurston in his use of black vernacular speech and culture as a literary resource.

Brown was born in Washington, D.C., with advantages and options that were avail-
able to few blacks at the turn of the century. His father, Sterling Nelson Brown, who
had counted Frederick Douglass and Paul Laurence Dunbar among his personal
friends, was a former slave who worked his way through Fisk Univ~rsity and Oberlin
College Seminary before becoming a professor of religion at Howard University as
well as the pastor of Lincoln Temple Congregational Church. The young Brown
attended Dunbar High School, where he encountered suer teachers as Angelina
Grimke and Jessie Redmon Fauset. He graduated from Williams College in 1922,
then went on to take his master’s degree in English from Harvard the following
year. Nevertheless, he maintained throughout his life that his best teachers were
the poor black folk of the South, particularly in the Lynchburg, Virginia, area,
where he taught English at the Virginia Seminary and College for three years. In