his poetry and wrote: ’Yet do I marvel at this curious thing/To make a poet black, and bid him sing!’ His desire to be known as a poet, not as a black poet, is central to “Yet Do I Marvel.” In this poem the character does not doubt God’s goodness or his willingness to explain curious phenomena, but he has finally been pushed to the limit of Christian creditability. The poem laments a clash between blackness and creativity, but he finds a contradiction of his own predicament in a racist society: he is black and a poet.Zora Neale Hurston was the most creative and accomplished black woman writer in America from the 1930s through the 1960s. Zora, growing up in an all black town, started to notice the differences between blacks and whites at about the age of thirteen. Growing up in Eatonville, Florida, Zora was only exposed to white people as they drove through her town to get to Orlando. In the early stages of Zora’s life blacks and whites had little difference in her eyes. This view changed as a result of her being sent to a school in Jacksonville. Now being outside her town of Eatonville, she began to experience what it was like to be colored. In “How it Feels to be Colored Me”(1928), Zora talks of when she first discovered differences between white people and black people. As she shows this difference she claims that she has no race. During these times, she seems to revert to her childhood view that people are just people. Zora Neale Hurston called attention to herself because she insisted upon being herself when blacks were urged to make an effort to promote better relations between the races. She felt there was something special about her blackness that others can benefit by just being around her. Her works may be seen as manifestos of selfhood, as affirmations of blackness and the positive sides of black life.Part of the energy that fuelled the Harlem Renaissance was the belief that...
