how it feels to be colored me rhetorical analysis essay

How it Feels to be Colored Me

Zora neale hurston, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

How It Feels To Be Colored Me

Background of the essay.

Financially Hurston was quite wealthy and lived a prosperous life because of her father’s high rank in the society. Most of her years were spent with Black people where she was treated respectfully because of her socially elite status.

How It Feels To Be Colored Me Summary

Hurston mentioned in the essay, at that time, she was aware of the only difference between white and black and that was white people do not live in their town and they paid her for singing, dancing and reciting. It was an amazing thing for her because she was not paid for these activities in her town. Only white people used to do it to her. Even her family disliked her performances yet they proclaimed her as “their Zora … everybody’s Zora.”

Hurston also feels her social superiority when a white person leads her to a black people community. She gives an example of her social importance when she went to a music club in Harlem accompanied by her white friend. She describes when the jazz music was played, it affected her whole body and she started swaying and dancing like an animal. Music awakened wilderness in her and she felt like holding a spear and wearing tribal paints. She was joyfully crazy and terribly wished to kill someone.

How It Feels To Be Colored Me Characters Analysis

Zora hurston, enlightened zora, floridian white folks, black people, themes in how it feels to be colored me, pride in african-american heritage, judgement and prejudice, identity and race.

The author foretells that the white think that black people are preoccupied with the thought they are black and it makes them feel that they are inferior and they are ashamed of their culture and heritage. Being an African American writer, she says that case is not so. The white people have access to power relations and they set everything in society. Through religion, education, morality, economic system and laws, they oppress the black race. 

Abandonment of Racism

Later on, in her essay, she pokes fun on the sobbing schools of Negrohood who make them feel inferior. Such schools make them able to look down to themselves. In this regard, African Americans need to unlearn what they have been taught at schools. Such statements show that including her own black people, she condemns all those who believe that the African blood can make the people inferior and lowly. Nora Hurston rejects this idea of racism and she believes that Africans are as good as the people of other races.

Denial of Pain

With great displeasure and annoyance, Hurston discusses slavery. She says, such people are in abundance around her, who continuously reminds her that she is the granddaughter of slaves. But this fails to get her depressed.

Celebration of the (black) Self (Negritude)

For example, when she was talking about her childhood, she wanted other’s attention very much, she needed bribing to stop that performance.  Her depiction of her childhood age suggests that she was arrogant and attention seeker.  She embraces the aspects that other people criticize. She has learnt the art of celebrating herself. She used the word snooty for herself, which has negative associations. She accepts herself with all her flaws.

History and Opportunity

Performance, how it feels to be colored me literary analysis, interpretation of title, acceptance of racial identity.

In the very first sentence of her essay, she has been seen accepting her racial status. In plain and simple language, she writes that she is a colored girl. It gives a gesture about her race which was thought to be well- mannered about her time. Apart from this clause of three simple words, the remaining sentence is very much complicated. The author denies providing extenuating circumstances. She uses strange and odd diction, which suggest that she might be expecting to apologize for her race and heritage. This strange diction tells other people to think that Hurston takes the race as something bad.

Biblical Allusion and Cultural & Historical Associations

Childhood as a true color, journey from nora to a colored girl, vernacular jazz dance: a key to self realization.

When Hurston grows up, she dances for white people. She goes to a concert in Harlem. In that concert, she witnessed that African beats were used in rhythmic ways. Later on, these beats provided the foundations to the genres; rap, funk and hip-hop. She is fascinated by these rhythms. Hurston understands those beats wholeheartedly because they were the beats of her heritage. But Hurston’s white friends were unable to see this beauty. They could not appreciate it or were not willing to appreciate it. Her white friends merely get entertained by it as it was something manmade to get amused or pleased. But music and its rhythms symbolize human pains and pangs.

Transformation from Zora to Cosmic Zora

Hurston disdains the members of the sobbing schools of Negrohood who believed that nature has given this lowdown and they are meant to be inferiors. It is not without interest, many African Americans blame nature instead of society. She is not prepared to blame nature in that way. Even, she makes association with primitive culture, she does not disdain it. She accepts it and writes, primitive culture is desirable. 

Hurston writes those who succeed in this world, they do regardless of their race and the color of their skins. They are made to succeed. She makes it clear that she considers herself as a strong one. She does not cry at the world but keeps herself busy at sharpening her oyster knife. This vigorous image of the author suggests that she is dangerous as well as ready for action. By using this knife metaphor, she shows herself ready to do good for the world.

Hurston comes to know that race affects her life. She concludes her essay on the point that there exists Zora but without race. Now she has become a cosmic Zora who is eager to see what the world has stored for her. She does not have separate feelings for being an American and colored girl. She considers herself a petty part of the Great Soul.

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How It Feels To Be Colored Me

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Analysis: “how it feels to be colored me”.

Hurston published “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” at the height of the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance, a flowering of African-American culture during the 1920s that brought national attention to black artists, writers, and musicians. Hurston’s essay engages with one of the central questions of the age: what does it mean to be African-American in America? Hurston uses her autobiography, metaphor , and contrast to counter prevailing narratives of African-American identity.

Hurston uses her autobiography as a touchstone for articulating her experience of racial identity. The initial sentence of the essay previews her approach to the task of racial definition. She opens the essay with a joke. The joke hinges on the reader’s familiarity with the spurious claims to Native American heritage by African-Americans. These claims emerge from a sense of shame because African-American heritage is one rooted in slavery, while Native American heritage is seen as one that connects to a popular image of Native Americans as noble and worthy of celebration.

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How It Feels to Be Colored Me, by Zora Neale Hurston

"I remember the very day that I became colored"

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• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Zora Neal Hurston was a widely-acclaimed Black author of the early 1900s.

"A genius of the South, novelist, folklorist, anthropologist"—those are the words that Alice Walker had inscribed on the tombstone of Zora Neale Hurston. In this personal essay (first published in The World Tomorrow , May 1928), the acclaimed author of Their Eyes Were Watching God explores her own sense of identity through a series of memorable examples and striking metaphors . As Sharon L. Jones has observed, "Hurston's essay challenges the reader to consider race and ethnicity as fluid, evolving, and dynamic rather than static and unchanging"

- Critical Companion to Zora Neale Hurston , 2009

How It Feels to Be Colored Me

by Zora Neale Hurston

1 I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.

2 I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.

3 The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I'd wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: "Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin'?" Usually, automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably "go a piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course, negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first "welcome-to-our-state" Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.

4 During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they didn't know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county—everybody's Zora.

5 But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, a Zora. When I disembarked from the riverboat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County anymore, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown—warranted not to rub nor run.

6 But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

7 Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Get set!" and the generation before said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.

8 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. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

9 I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

10 For instance at Barnard. "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.

11 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.

12 "Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

13 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.

14 At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

15 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.

16 Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

17 But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held—so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place—who knows?

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The Use of Setting in How It Feels to Be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston

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