Zora Neale Hurston’s “How it Feels to be Colored Me” (1928) shares a unique perspective on race through Hurston’s sentiments on living as an Black woman in a time after emancipation. She begins by recalling her childhood interactions with white passerby’s. Seeing as she lived in a colored town, she did not see many white people, but every time she did, she reveled in looking at them and being looked at. She remembers calling out and welcoming them to Florida, getting silver pieces from them in exchange for dancing and singing. After moving to another town in Florida for school, she acknowledges that she is seen as a colored girl. However, this realization does not make her feel any sort of way about herself or her life. She claims that she is different from the “sobbing school of Negrohood” because unlike them, who are busy lamenting on how nature has forsaken them, she sharpens her “oyster knife” in anticipation and preparation for life. The spiel that follows shares Hurston’s perspective on slavery’s impact on Hurston’s daily living as a Black woman. Hurston states that slavery is a thing of the past, sixty years to be exact, and since it is done and gone, she can live in the present as someone with opportunities for glory and recognition.

From reading this piece, one can conclude that Hurston is mostly unbothered by her skin color. Hurston’s way of living is simplified because she doesn’t connect her skin color to herself, she knows what she is and doesn’t see the need to prove anyone anything. Whatever comes to her will, and she is ready to make her own life regardless of her skin color and the difficulties that come with it. Du Bois is starkly different, he stresses over identity, being perceived, his conflicting American self and African self, authenticity, external validation and more. However, they are similar in that they both are ambitious, they have want to accomplish great deeds, and wont let their skin color get in the way, hence Hurston sharpening her oyster knife to make way and enjoy what she’s aiming for. In addition to not being bothered by acts of discrimination, she has adapted a kind of mentality called Cosmic Zora into her life. Cosmic Zora doesn’t hold Zora down to one race or time, and she is depicted as an eternal feminine. When Zora is in the vicinity of elegant and rich Peggy Hopkins Joyce, she activates Cosmic Zora and becomes a being unattached to a physical being, a kind of higher consciousness that connects Zora to the “Great Soul.”

Upon reading about Cosmic Zora, I went back to Emerson’s Nature text and saw that their lifestyles are similar. Hurston is more similar to Emerson than Du Bois is and this is possible because of both of their disconnections with society. Hurston and Emerson both want to look to the future, whether for ideas or experiences. Emerson says traditional and old ideas shouldn’t be the norm, and Hurston does’t want to be held back by her past and family history; they both value what the present has to offer. Emerson believes nature is the way to real enlightenment, and he is able to experience this due to his abandoning society and delving into nature. Hurston is able to separate herself from her experiences too; an act of discrimination is not targeting her, it is targeting her skin, and because she doesn’t think her skin defines her, she doesn’t feel any hatred. She knows she has more to offer, hence the paper bag ending. The paper bag example is to say that despite what we look on the outside, boring or ordinary, all sorts of colors, we all store both valuable and useless items: diamonds, dried flowers, and the like. This is Hurston’s way of saying what’s on the inside is more significant than anything the exterior could have to offer the world.

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