Quotes About Identity

As Hurston herself noted, "Roll your eyes in ecstasy and ape his every move, but until we have placed something upon his street corner that is our own, we are right back where we were when they filed our iron collar off.

She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was there.

Oluale Kossola was not just a repository of black genius, tapped for a few stories, tales, and colorful phrases, and Zora Neale Hurston knew this. She did not perceive Barracoon as another cultural artifact illustrating the theoretical characteristics of Negro expression but as one, singular, portrait of black humanity.

My name, is not Cudjo Lewis. It Kossula.

Unless you see de fur, a mink skin ain't no different from a coon hide.

If it wuzn't for so many black folks it wouldn't be no race problem. De white folks would take us in wid dem. De black ones is holdin' us back.

Ah'm uh man even if Ah is de Mayor. But de mayor's wife is somethin' different again.

Ah can't die easy thinkin' maybe de menfolks white or black is makin' a spit cup outa you: have some sympathy fuh me. Put me down easy, Janie, Ah'ma cracked plate.

It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different: it put you in a wonder.

Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman.

If Wright, Ellison, Brown, and Hurston were engaged in a battle over ideal fictional modes with which to represent the Negro, clearly Hurston lost the battle. But not the war.

I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. For instance at Barnard. Beside 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 by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

Janie stood where he left her for unmeasured time and thought. She stood there until something fell off the shelf inside her. Then she went inside there to see what it was. It was her image of Jody tumbled down and shattered.

Here, finally, was a woman on a quest for her own identity and, unlike so many other questing figures in black literature, her journey would take her, not away from, but deeper and deeper into blackness, the descent into the Everglades with its rich black soil, wild cane, and communal life representing immersion into black traditions.

She must lend her ears to the sounds of mighty words boiling out of futile men. She must bear something in male form, for after all that is what she was born for—a passageway for boy children.

But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods—come and gone with the sun. She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn't value.

Once, when they used to set their mouths in what they thought was the Boston Crimp, and ask me about the differences between the ordinary Negro and "the better-thinking Negro", I used to show my irritation by saying I did not know who the better-thinking Negro was. I knew who the think-they-are-better Negroes were, but who were the better thinkers was another matter.

He felt as empty as a post hole for he was none of the things he once had been. He was a man sitting on a rock. He had crossed over.

You'se different from me. Ah can't stand black niggers. Ah don't blame de white folks from hatin' 'em 'cause Ah can't stand 'em mahself. 'Nother thing, Ah hates tuh see folks lak me and you mixed up wid 'em. Us oughta class off.

But mostly she lived between her hat and her heels, with her emotional disturbances like shade patterns in the woods--come and gone with the sun. She got nothing from Jody except what money could buy, and she was giving away what she didn't value.

You tries tuh be so much-knowin'. You got tuh learn how tuh speak when you spokin to, come when youse called. Ah ain't got tuh do but two things--stay black and die, Sister Berry snapped.

The devouring force of the future leered at him at unexpected moments. Then too his daily self seemed to be wearing thin, and the past seeped thru and mastered him for increasingly longer periods.

Ah ain't got tuh do but two things--stay black and die, Sister Berry snapped.

Ah'm uh bitch's baby round lady people.