Howard. The troupe performed the work again in
1923 at Howard’s Rankin Memorial Chapel as part
of a fund-raising effort to establish a theater labora-
tory. Genefredewas published in 1935 in Negro His-
tory in Thirteen Playsedited by WILLISRICHARDSON
and May Miller. The troupe also performed the one-
act play The Yellow Treeby De Reath Beausey, a
work that was published in The Crisisin 1922.
Under Gregory’s direction, the Howard Uni-
versity Players also developed successful produc-
tions of works by professional playwrights such as
PAULGREEN,EUGENEO’NEILL, Willis Richardson,
and RIDGELYTORRENCE. One of their best-known
productions featured a collaboration with Charles
Gilpin in O’Neill’s THEEMPERORJONES.In the
1923–24 season, the troupe produced JEAN
TOOMER’s one-act play BALO.
The Howard University Players were recog-
nized nationally as one of the most innovative col-
lege dramatic troupes. George Pierce Baker, drama
scholar at Harvard University, insisted that the
Howard University Players were one of the top two
troupes in the nation. In the years following the
Harlem Renaissance, the group gained interna-
tional status. In 1949, they traveled to Norway,
Denmark, Sweden, and Germany as goodwill am-
bassadors, the first college drama troupe to do so.
“How It Feels to Be Colored Me”
Zora Neale Hurston(1928)
A powerful essay on racial identity and society by
ZORANEALEHURSTON. The essay appeared in the
May 1928 issue of THE WORLDTOMORROW, a
Protestant magazine whose staff at the time in-
cluded WALLACETHURMAN, Hurston’s colleague
and collaborator.
The essay is hailed as an especially memorable
and insightful meditation on autonomy and the
evolution of self. Hurston engages popular myths
about racial identity as she works toward an asser-
tion about how history both defines and underesti-
mates African Americans. The piece begins with
Hurston’s sardonic comment about her ancestry
and the ways in which contemporary society con-
tends with blackness. “I am colored,” she declares,
“but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating cir-
cumstances 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’s striking opening lines lead to other ob-
servations about the ways in which others try to
define and limit her identity in the context of slav-
ery. She defies the investment in the dehumanized
and powerless figure of the slave, a characteriza-
tion that is meant to render her “tragically col-
ored.” She insists that she is investing in a life of
mobility and self-determination. “I do not belong
to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that
nature somehow has given them a low-down dirty
deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it,” she
writes.
Hurston’s essay is part of a major canon of
African-American coming-of-age narratives such
as RICHARDWRIGHT’s Black Boy,James Baldwin’s
Notes of A Native Son,and fictional accounts such
as JESSIEFAUSET’s short story “EMMY” and NELLA
LARSEN’s PASSING.Hurston links her racial aware-
ness to performance, the opportunities she had to
“speak pieces” and “sing and... dance the parse-
me-la” for the white people who traveled through
and lived outside of the all-black town of
EATONVILLE, Florida. She also notes that particu-
lar settings or environments provoke her sense of
race. While she admits, “I do not always feel col-
ored,” she goes on to note that she feels “most col-
ored when... thrown against a sharp white
background.” Her immersion in white environ-
ments or situations in which whites subject her
every move to scrutiny can be problematic. While
she may react powerfully to music, a white com-
panion may remain unmoved. It is at these mo-
ments when there is such a sharp contrast in
receptivity and response that Hurston imagines
that a companion has “only heard what I felt...
He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so
colored.” The essay closes with a dynamic image of
humanity like a set of colored bags “of miscellany”
filled by God, “the Great Stuffer of Bags.”
The circumstances surrounding the publica-
tion of the essay were especially fraught with ten-
sion for Hurston. She had been engaged in a rather
unfortunate exchange with CHARLOTTEOSGOOD
MASON, her wealthy and domineering patron.
Mason had been angered by Hurston’s critique of
the recent collection of African-American work
songs by HOWARDODUMand GUYJOHNSON.Ac-
cording to Hurston biographer Valerie Boyd, Mason252 “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”