Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston

by Valerie Boyd

I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief,” Hurston wrote with a personalized, unapologetic sense of race pride. “I am not tragically colored,” she declared. “There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt

about it. … No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”