I Feel Most Colored | 2019

In 2019, I was gifted the opportunity to live on Anastasia Island off the coast of St. Augustine, near Lincolnville, FL. Not many know about the incredible archives of Black history housed in that part of the country, including the fact that Zora Neale Hurston loved the place so much that her old home there is still standing, though privately owned and lovingly dilapidated, shrouded in an elegant mural of her painted by a local artist.

While living on the island, I was able to visit the house, which stirred something deeply within me.

The property is quite derelict as the state & federal government refuse to fund it as a historical site-aside from the peeling, sad & sorry placard placed in the front lawn. When I visited, I stood in the long dead patch of grass that made up the yard, stared at the bloated wood of the sagging porch and allowed myself to bask in my emotions. St. Augustine is ripe with Black history, but most of it is reserved to Lincolnville, where the bulk of the Black population was seemingly redlined into residing forever.

This was no hopelessly sad story; I cried with gratitude and rage at the sudden familiarity.

It reminded me so heavily of my hometown of St. Louis, MO in so many ways. Despite the generations of systemic barriers put into place that had attempted to snuff out the richness of Lincolnville’s history, they had a bustling cultural center housed within the first Black high school in town, a volunteer run historical tour and many thriving Black owned businesses to patronize during my time there. It felt like home away from home and a glimpse into both the future & past, simultaneously.

I visited Lincolnville during a time where I was struggling to create work because, on Anastasia Island, I was surrounded by people who saw Blackness as otherness or inherently wrong. Being in Lincolnville, where Blackness was celebrated, platformed and honored, was a much needed and appreciated shock to the senses after my time on the island.

Though I was delighted to find the cultural center especially, where the first piano Ray Charles ever played rested, paintings depicting America’s early entrepreneurs (Black women selling bread & other artisan goods) and many other amazing historical artifacts and places while in Lincolnville, merely visiting wasn’t enough. I still could only grasp for my inspiration, not hold it.

The struggle to create didn’t end once I stepped foot back on Anastasia island. Because Blackness is a key factor in my artistic practice and I wasn’t in Lincolnville with the rest of the Black folks. I was off the mainland again, on a ridiculously overpriced resort island that had only recently removed a billboard that declared, “Muslims would NEVER be allowed residence here.”

I have never felt more colored than while stepping off Zora’s porch—while leaving Lincolnville to go back to Anastasia Island.

In How It Feels to be Colored Me, while also speaking about visiting a porch in a mostly Black town, Zora Neale Hurston says:

“I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. […] Beside the waters of the Hudson, I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.”

In leaving Lincolnville, I fully understood what she meant. Being surrounded by white people on the island again, some of whom literally screamed when I got close to them, had started to drive me insane. I felt my Blackness so starkly that I grew a new limb made from my loneliness. I felt so alone that I wasn’t able to create art, so I wasn’t able to be happy.

On the island, I was a dark rock, surged upon & overswept-but once I stepped into Lincolnville, I was revealed again. I’m forever grateful for the experience because it put me into Zora’s shoes and birthed some of my greatest collage work.

With that being said…I will never bless any place with my presence that refuses to honor my Blackness and the Blackness of those before me ever again. Anastasia Island is a blank nightmare. If you’re in the mood for a Florida vacation, go to Lincolnville instead and find yourself some color.

Click here to purchase an 11x14” fine art print of I Feel Most Colored.