How It Feels to be Colored Me: Zora Neale Hurston

               How It Feels to be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston is a commentary on how the color of her skin made Hurston feel when she was a child. It recounts how it made her feel different, the same, and how it had no bearing on her character at times, depending on her surroundings. Hurston was a prominent African American author in the 20^th century, and many of her works focused on breaking the stereotypes of how African American stories were told. This is echoed in How It Feels to be Colored Me because instead of focusing on the negatives alone, Hurston shows the wide range of emotions about her skin color. She is writing for the people who do not understand the complex emotions of being black, mainly, white people. She wants them to see that she understands that horrible things happened in the past, but they have no bearing on her present choices and that she is free to do as she pleases. Hurston uses her personal voice, recounting her childhood and beyond, to show how race affected how she felt, but makes the point that it does not make her special.
               Hurston uses a lot of metaphors in this piece to get her point across. To help the notion that her race does not make her special, Hurston writes, “Against the wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow” (Hurston 117). She is comparing people to plastic bags, each the same no matter what color they are. I think that using metaphors and personal stories, Hurston does a very good job of getting her point across. The plastic bag metaphor was what really drove it home for me, as well as the quote, “I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries” (Hurston 117). Meaning, as different as they are individually, when they come together they are very similar.

Different, but the Same by Roger Evans