An Upbeat and Resilient Black Woman from Eatonville

Zora Neal Hurston was a famous anthropologist, folklorist, serious student voodoo, all-around women in the period of Harlem Renaissance. She is still known to many people by her daring behavior of measuring random black men’s heads just to prove that black people have as large brains as white people to be normally intelligent. In her work How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928), her upbeat and resilient character was revealed once again. The story is very simple, poetic, and profound, mainly revolving around the formation of her identity as a black woman and her attitude of her race. This essay is trying to introduce two impressive features of Zora Neal Hurston as a black woman in the face of so many prejudices, either from her black folks or from white people and the connection between her works and her character.

The first aspect of Zora Neal Hurston is her optimism. Born in a town Eatonville, Florida, an exclusively colored town, she seems to be jovial and daring by nature. When white tourists travelled through her hometown, the black people would react in a different way from what they do to their fellowmen. They would stop chewing cane. They would move backward and become too intimidated to look at the white except from a hidden place, say, a small window upstairs and those who sit at the door porch would be astonishingly regarded as brave. What would Zora Neal Hurston do then? She imagined the streets with white tourists zipping and zooming back and forth as a dramatic stage and her task was to sit on the top of porch pole with her legs dangling and watch them happily. She showed a great amount of optimism to these white people to such an extent that her fellowmen even pitied her and blamed her. In addition to sitting atop a high place as a spectator, she even neared the street to greet white tourists. “Hello, how are you doing? How’s the trip?” She might yell so along the highway with her hands waving passionately and her cheeks blushed out of excitement. As the white tourists came to notice this unprecedentedly daring girl, they would mostly pull over and merrily talk to her. And Zora, with relentless passion, even offered to perform for the tourists coming from afar. She sang with her sweet voice, she danced, swirling and twirling so sprightly that these “impatient” tourists decided to bribe her out of it. In fact, the optimism of Zora herself in her earlier life in Eatonville is the exact ideal she pursues and puts in the form of Jani Crawford, the character she creates in her work, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Optimism and happiness can also be found in Jani Crawford. For example, she liked wearing blue crystal scandals and dazzling skirts and dancing as much as Zora does in the condition that these things are regarded as outrageously abnormal and weird. Enjoying herself and feeling confident, she also makes out the skeletons in the white’s closet. While black people can pursue their happiness in a struggling way, white people have to be alert in order to remain the unfair situation, she optimistically claims that the game of getting is far more exciting than the game of keeping. When discriminated against, she still keeps a positive and humorous mindset as she wonders that why people can be so foolish that they deny the pleasure of her company.

It is well-grounded to argue that the optimism of Zora is owing to her innocence, namely, her lack of knowledge of what’s like to be a black person among a great number of white people. Actually, at the age of thirteen years old when her mother died and her father became bankrupted, Zora was forced to work for her relatives as a servant. She looked herself in the mirror finding that her spirit and look had changed upside down. She came to be aware of her identity as a black girl and more importantly perceived the psychology of her fellowmen. She found out that most of her people were resentful about their categorical destiny---being subjugated, subjected and controlled. In the meantime, they sunk into abyss of self-pity and self-loathing. However, Zora, as she was by thirteen years old, still remained upbeat and positive. She was grateful for the contributions her ancestors had made in the struggle for their liberation from slavery and decided to like a sprinter on a 100-meter event where she braced herself on the line, kept concentrated at the signal of “ready”, and shot forward without any hesitance and any inclination to look back. In her mindset, the success is not so relevant of the color of skin but of the strong qualities. This idea was well represented in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Jani Crawford firstly marries a rude farmer, who always dictates to and bosses around her with an attempt to work herself to death. Jani Crawford, unwilling to yield to such savageness, runs away for a better life. In her second marriage, her husband treats her as a queen. Though being a queen, she has to stay with restrictions and loneliness as her second husband just wave his trophy around when he is happy and sets it aside without care when he is attracted to other pleasures. Jani Crawford doesn’t collapse still. On the other hand, she waits patiently and succeed living to see her husband’s death. She sits by her husband’s corpse with tears, crying for her bygone youth, and laughs by herself at her own room, happy for her freedom. The reason why Jani Crawford drag through all these difficulties is that she is strong and patient. She fights when conditions work her in favor and waits when things are unfavorable to her. In other words, she shows an extraordinary quality of resilience in a miserable situation. In reality, she also works on what she believes. On the one side, she was faced with great challenge in terms of her race and her sex. At a new place named Jacksonville where white people were dominant, Zora did find it overwhelmed when walking on the street. The whiteness of white people put her color into a great contrast and thus stood her out. But her source of insecurity and doubt not only comes from her differences from other racial people, but also from others’ differences from her. It is a matter of perspective indeed. When Zora went to a drafty basement with her white friend where a heady orchestra played a rhythmic and stimulating music, she also noticed a separation in reaction that might be deeply rooted in genes. Listening to the loud and exuberant music, Zora became a wild, brutal, and primitive savage in her fantasy. Marked blue and purple, she swung from a branch of a tree to another, she stamped vigorously the earth with heavy thuds and bared her teeth to threaten and frighten affected civilized man, including, of course, her white friend. As the music came to an end, the whole room returned to the former state. Zora looked back to her friend, only to find him chill and calm sitting at the corner as if nothing had happened before. It took a quite while, after he drank a cup of beer, let out a brief and even curt praise: “That’s quite something”.

Mindful that she, as a black woman, has inherently different characteristics from white people, Zora isn’t as pessimistic as her fellows. In her mind, she is not that tragically colored. She compares herself to a brown stone surged on by white waves. It is true that she is covered by white sprays off and on but she always remains her, the singular brown Zora before, when, and after the waves retreat back to the sea. More so, she sometimes neglects her identity as a brown woman and doesn’t think she belongs to any race. For her, she just emerges from between the boundary in an assertive way. She even feels relieved that she doesn’t have to behave in a rather affected way like Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich who carry themselves so elegantly that they can’t enjoy sitting freely with their knees set apart wildly open.

At the end of How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928), Zora makes a last poetic and pregnant metaphor, she compares different races to bags of different colors which contain miscellaneous things such as a water diamond, bits of small glass, some tubes of paints, a withered rose with lingering fragrance and the like. There is no much difference between these bags except that some of them contain more pigments. Zora then concludes that all bags are of Great Sufferers’ and that there have more similarities than differences between them. She encourages people to focus more on their self-awareness rather than race. This is Zora, an upbeat and resilient woman from Eatonville, a woman who always at the bright side at all odds.

Works Cited

Hurston, Zora Neal. How It Feels to be Colored Me. Massachusetts: Applewood Books, 1928. Print.

—. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1937. Print.