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Born in Eatonville, Florida, Zora Neale Hurston moved to Harlem in 1925 at the urging of scholars Charles S. Johnson and Alain Locke. Hurston’s short story “Spunk” and her play Color Struck had just won her second place in a writing contest sponsored by the magazine Opportunity.

For Hurston, the name of that publication proved to be prophetic: Harlem gave her a chance to meet and mingle with like-minded artists and intellectuals—notably the poet Langston Hughes—at gatherings and parties thrown by Carl Van Vechten, A’Lelia Walker, and others. Hurston also met a wealthy widow named Charlotte Mason, who would support Hurston financially.

Hurston’s writing explores the courageous struggles of African American civilians living in the rural South in the early 1800s. It brings to life the dialects, customs, and folklore of the region.

Her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine—set in a small, all-Black Florida town—was published to critical success in 1934. Her acclaimed 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, describes an independent Black woman’s search for self-fulfillment.

Hurston’s career path did not lead steadily upward. Nearing the end of her life, this successful novelist and pillar of the Harlem Renaissance was forced to support herself as a maid. Yet through times thick and thin, she never blamed events on the color of her skin. In her 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she wrote: “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.”

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 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. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

Kennedy Center Education Digital Learning

Eric Friedman 
Director, Digital Learning

Kenny Neal 
Manager, Digital Education Resources

Tiffany A. Bryant 
Manager, Operations and Audience Engagement

JoDee Scissors 
Content Specialist, Digital Learning

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