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How It Feels To Be Colored And Me By Zora Neale Hurston

509 Words3 Pages

Zora Neale Hurston, the author of How It Feels to Be Colored and Me explains through her essay how she created her identity by refusing to victimize herself in societies hands regarding race. She does this effortlessly with the use of diction, syntax, parallelism, and metaphors. Hurston expresses culture and racial pride while overlooks the differences between ‘whites’ and ‘colored’ and introduces her unique individual identity as a colored woman.
The essay starts off by Hurston contrasting her childhood to her adult life. More importantly, this is the time she became ‘colored’ when she was thirteen. Recounting how, as a child, she used to sit on her front porch and watch white people pass through town. Using parallelism she describes how “The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles” (Hurston, paragraph 2). This use of parallelism introduces to the reader how Zora interpretation who was colored and who was not. …show more content…

Describing herself as “not tragically colored” (6). Through this use of syntax, the reader realizes that Hurston wants her identity, not one to condemn to her because she is a woman of color. Instead, she loves her uniqueness. Stating that “No, I do not weep at the world-- I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife” (6). Through this choice of diction, Nora views that she is too busy worrying about herself to be sad against racial segregation. Furthermore, she occasionally separates herself entirely from the notion of racial identity stating several times that ‘at certain times, I have no race’ (8). For she only feels colored when she is, “Thrown against a sharp white background” (9). This use of imagery makes the reader visualize Nora against a white wall, exposing the dark pigments of her skin adding to Nora's transformation towards her true self beyond the segregation block of being colored or

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