Zora Neale Hurston

I like my Thursday night Literature of the South class. The group is a mix of undergraduates (11 of them, I think) and graduates (5). Except for a couple of undergraduates who sleep, both of them sitting at the opposite ends of the same table, the class seems interested and responsive.

This week's class went well, so well, in fact, that we didn't get to cover all the material we had to work with. My favorite passage of the night was from a short essay by African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston doesn't identify with the racial propaganda contrived to support Jim Crow laws in the first half of the 20th-century South, but she does recognize cultural differences, as in the following:

. . . 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 [spear] 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.

"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.

Read the entire essay--again, it's quite short (two pages in our textbook):

http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/wsharpe/citylit/colored_me.htm
Picture: www.barnard.columbia.edu/sfonline/hurston/



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