Inner Pece

Salah O. Ahmed Intro to Afro-American Literature Professor Todd Duncan (This could use a longer conclusion) Inner Peace In the essays, "How it Feels to be Colored Me" and "On Being Young-a Woman-and Colored", the authors, Zola Neale Hurston and Marita Bonner, respectively, tell a similar story of having grown up and had to deal with racism in the Post-Bellum Era. In their appeal to a new generation, one less stigmatized by slavery and more hopeful about the future than its predecessor, Hurston and Bonner take divergent paths to point to a common understanding. The convergence between their works centers on the idea that in order for the young people of their generation to achieve a sense of peace with the world around them, they must first find peace within themselves.

Hurston and Bonner wrote with a passion that was quite different from that felt by the authors who had come before them. While the older generation was still dealing with memories of slavery and gross injustices, the newer was looking to the future and, having migrated north, a life that bore little resemblance to anything that African-Americans-at-large had ever experienced. The period, encompassing the literature as well as blues, jazz and dance, came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance and was influenced in large part by this younger generation. This was literature that was marked not only by extraordinary creativity but also by new perspectives and motivations. Whereas the authors of the Post-Bellum era sought to explore slavery to its roots, the new writers chose to delve enthusiastically into the present. While the first were bent on carefully paving the way for a people newly released from the nightmare of bondage, the second bulldozed their way into the hearts and minds of the masses, inspired by the growing appeal of jazz, blues and dance, and stimulated by the readiness of newspapers and magazines to carry their message. The literature of the Post-Bellum, concerned primarily with