How it Feels To Be Colored Me - Zora Neale Hurst Analysis

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

“We are all alike, on the inside.” - Mark Twain

In How It Feels To Be Colored Me, author Zora Neale Hurst effectively uses anecdotes to share times of her childhood with her 1928 audience. Neale Hurst is an African American author that was praised for her writing by Alice Walker and has published more than fifty pieces of work. Some of her most popular works include: Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mules and Men, and Dust Tracks on a Road.

When Zora was a little girl, she grew up in Eatonville, Florida, a town that was predominately black.  Zora knew that she was different from the white people that were driving through her town, but she didn’t exactly know what made her so different. To everyone in the small town of Eatonville, she was “everyone’s Zora” because of her welcoming personality.

It was not until she relocated to Jacksonville, when she realized she was not “everyone’s Zora,” but now was better known as She knew that she is unlike her peers because she was colored. But, within the first paragraph of her essay she blows an African American stereotype out of the water by using sarcasm. “… I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.” This is a stereotype that many African Americans say, because many are unaware of their roots and heritage due to slavery.

In conclusion, I can infer that Hurst’s purpose for this essay is simple. She wants to project the fact that we are all the same. The only time we realize that we as human beings notice our race is when we are alone. Zora explains this more by saying “I do not always feel colored… I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” In my opinion, Zora reaches her purpose. This essay spoke to me greatly because it ensures me that other people know that we are all the same underneath our skin.

“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.”