In her piece "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Zora Neale
Hurston writes,
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 be long to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given
them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but 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 of less. No, I do not weep at the world. I am
too busy sharpening my oyster
knife.
This is very same
attitude that Miss Hurston conveys in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching
God. At another point Hurston writes, "At certain times, I have no race, I
am me." And, it is this search for self that Janie engages in during the narrative of
Hurston's novel. For, Janie must separate herself from her first two husbands who wish
her identity to be derived from theirs only. Instead of being merely a servant for her
old husband, Logan Killicks, and an ornament, whose beauty must be hidden from other men
for Joe Starks, Janie finally finds her own consciousness after meeting Tea Cake, who
treats her as an equal.
After Tea Cake's tragic death,
Janie, now in the bloom of true womanhood, returns to her hometown after having been
acquitted of her mercy killing of Tea Cake, who raged at her. Janie, like Hurston, has
found her voice and she feels the "kiss of Tea Cake's memory" upon her and finds peace.
Clearly, Zora Neale Hurston's perspective is reflected in this Janie, who comes to a
consciousness of her own as a black woman.
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