Someone Would Have Had to Pay Her to Stop Performing (Situational Irony)
When she recounts her childhood in Eatonville, an all-Black town in Florida, Hurston describes how she liked to engage with the white Northern tourists who drove by her house. Hurston would sing and dance, and the white tourists would give her dimes as payment. However, Hurston writes that she didn't perform for them because she expected or wanted money. In fact, she writes that she "wanted to [dance and sing] so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they didn't know it." In this instance of situational irony, Hurston undermines the expectation that she would perform for money by stating that in reality she would have needed to be paid to stop.
Rejecting the Legacy of Slavery (Situational Irony)
When discussing how she is not "tragically colored," Hurston acknowledges that her own grandparents were slaves. She says the fact does not depress her, however, and that "slavery is sixty years in the past." Rather than identifying with the "sobbing school of Negrohood," Hurston views slavery as having been "the price I paid for civilization" and conceives of her ancestors' struggle for abolition and the efforts of the Reconstruction as events that put her in a position to take advantage of everything life has to offer. In this instance of situational irony, Hurston rejects the more commonly held position that the legacy of slavery puts Black Americans in the early twentieth century at a social and economic disadvantage.
Hurston's "White Neighbor" Is In a More Difficult Position (Situational Irony)
After addressing her view that slavery, having ended sixty years earlier, in no way inhibits her ability to thrive in life, Hurston states that "the position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat." In this instance of situational irony, Hurston inverts the widely held belief that the legacy of slavery continues to disadvantage Black Americans and benefit white Americans. Instead she suggests that it is worse for white Americans to live with the historical guilt of oppressing people under slavery than it is for Black Americans to live with the legacy of oppression.
