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exciting to hold the center of the 4
national stage, with the spectators
not knowing whether to laugh or chapter 4
to weep.
The position of my white neigh-
bor is much more difficult. No brown
specter pulls up a chair beside me
when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost Classic Essay / Zora Neale Hurston
thrusts its leg against mine in bed.
Copyright (c) 2023 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Uncorrected proofs have been used for this sample chapter.
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. 2
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Strictly for use with its products. Not for redistribution.
I feel most colored when I am thrown
against a sharp white background.
For instance at Barnard. “Beside 10
the waters of the Hudson” I feel my
race. Among the thousand white
persons, I am a dark rock surged
upon, and overswept, but through it
all, I remain myself. When covered ©Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York.
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 American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) completed
Self-Portrait as a Heel Part Two in 1982.
I sit in the drafty basement that is Does this painting embody Hurston’s main argument in
The New World Cabaret with a “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”? If so, how? If not, why
white person, my color comes. We not, and what argument does the painting make?
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, the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmo-
this one plunges into a number. It loses no nies. This orchestra grows rambunctious,
time in circumlocutions, but gets right down rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal
to business. It constricts the thorax and splits veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it
until it breaks through to the jungle beyond.
I follow those heathen — follow them exult-
2 Journey to escape danger. Specifically, Muhammad’s departure
from Mecca in 622 C.E. to escape an assassination plot. — Eds. ingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell
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DIFFERENTIATION
Mode of Expression
Students might be able to relate to the trans-
formative power of music that Hurston
describes in paragraph 11. You could ask
them to create an annotated playlist of songs
that transform them, that make them lose
themselves, that take them out of “civiliza-
tion” and into another place. You could chal-
lenge students to focus more on a song’s
music than on its words, as Hurston does.
Their annotations could describe the effects
each song has on them. They could then pick
one song to describe in detail, modeled after
Hurston’s description. Students could share
in groups what their playlists suggest about
their identity.

Classic Essay / Zora Neale Hurston 183

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