How It Feels to Be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston - Analysis

Themes

·       Living in an all-black town

·       Whites as tourists

·       Realization that she is colored

·       Fine with being black

·       Delight with white scrutiny

·       Black ancestors fought for equality and she reaps the fruit

·       Delight with whites' scrutiny of blacks

·       Blacks are at the center of American cultural attention

·       Relishing jazz music

·       Difference between black and white music appreciation

·       Identities: colored vs. no race

·       Nostalgia

·       Everyone is the same when it boils down to it

Style and devices

·       Speaks in the first person for black people

“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.”

·       Heathen jazz music metaphor

“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.”

·       We are all bags metaphor

“But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall, in company with other bags… 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?”

Places and People

·       Eatonville, Florida

·       Jacksonville

·       Orlando

·       Hudson

·       Barnard

·       Zora

·       Harlem City

·       Peggy Hopkins Joyce

·       Boule Mich

Keywords

·       Colored

·       Zora

·       Jazz and music words

Zora Neale Hurston. Illustration by Monica Ahanonu. Source