Question

Reread the selection.

Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen—follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something—give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.
"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
Music! The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

Question
What evidence does Hurston give to support her claim that her white friend was not as affected as she was by the music at the jazz club?
Select one:
a. He remains motionless as the orchestra plays.
b. He merely says the music is "good."
c. He looks disinterested.
d. He turns pale.

Answer 1

Zora Neale Hurston contrasts her own intense reaction to jazz music with her white friend's unmoved response; he stays motionless and remarks that the music was simply 'good'.

Step-by-step explanation:

The evidence Zora Neale Hurston gives to support her claim that her white friend was not as affected by the music at the jazz club is multi-faceted.

She describes her own deeply visceral and transformative reaction to the jazz music, contrasting it with her friend's detached and mild response.

Specifically, she notes that he remains motionless during the performance and afterward, only comments that the music is "good" while calmly drumming his fingertips on the table, completely unaffected on a deeper emotional level by the robust and passionate jazz that profoundly moved her.