In this essay, Hurston adopts a rhetorical voice that defiantly and boldly declares her enjoyment of being black. Her voice is that of someone who can't be kept down or defeated. She declares early that she is not a victim:
I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal ... No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
In the other words, the world is her oyster, and she is going to feast on it.
Slavery happened 60 years ago, and if it was the price of civilization, she says, so be it. She's over it.
In addition, she doesn't have to fear, as whites do, the loss of her status or of what she already has to another race. She says this adds pizzaz to her life:
The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
Further, whites can't experience jazz the way she can. She says of a white man who comes into her local Harlem caberet:
Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him.
In the end, however, she asserts she feels no different from a white person:
I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
Hurston takes on a jaggy, jazz-like, almost Whitmanesque voice to take ownership of her space as an American. This is the rhetoric not of someone docile, begging for a place at the table, but one who will sweep in with her head held high and take what is her due.
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