How It Feels to Be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston (1928)

Zora Neale Hurston, author of How It Feels to Be Colored Me, grew up in an all-Black community in Florida. In her early adulthood she quickly became a member of the Harlem Renaissance and won a scholarship to Barnard College, where she was the first Black woman to attend. Hurston wrote many award-winning novels and inspired other novels through her research. In her essay How It Feels to Be Colored Me, she explores her self identity with the purpose of convincing society that no matter what color skin someone has, we are all filled with the same “priceless and worthless” (Hurston 117) things.

Hurston shares anecdotes in which she feels she “[has] no race” (Hurston 117) and instances in which her “color comes” (Hurston 116). She explains that in her childhood, “white people differed from colored…only in that they rode through town and never lived there” (Hurston 115) but when she moved to a different school, she could feel her color; although, she was “not tragically colored…[she did] not mind at all” (Hurston 115). Her use of imagery when describing her experiences successfully attributes to the reader’s understanding of her message that skin does not matter. This attitude of hers is addressed once again at the end of the essay with her analogy of people to paper bags against a wall. She says that other bags are “white, red and yellow” and if one were to “pour out the contents,” they would discover “a jumble of small things priceless and worthless” (Hurston 117). She then exclaims that if all the paper bags were to be emptied of their contents, they could all be “refilled without altering the content of any greatly” (Hurston 117). This metaphorical analogy successfully presents Hurston’s argument that we are all generally the same inside. Hurston’s use of imagery, metaphors and analogies successfully communicate her message that people consist of the same things inside of them, regardless of how they look on the outside.

We are made up of "priceless and worthless" (Hurston 117) things.
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