How it feels to be Colored Me written by Zora Neal Hurston (1891-1960) and American writer of several novels and short stories. Hurston’s piece How it feels to be Colored Me comes across as an autobiography narrative describing the moments she realized how different being colored made her. Her story features a very confident, hyper young version of herself in Jacksonville, Florida. She started in Eatonville, Florida where travelers going to and from Orlando would give her dimes to talk, dance, and sing, but when she turned thirteen and moved to Jacksonville she was no longer a person of interest, but someone being constantly reminded that “[she was] the granddaughter of slaves.” Throughout the story though we see that Zora is determined to
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She provides a striking contrast from her beloved endearing hometown to the more discriminative unwelcoming new town. She further brings us into this new memory describing the actions of a general populous to her. She uses descriptive diction with phrases like “lowdown dirty deal,” “sharpening my oyster knife,” and “ brown specter.” She changes tones closing in on a memory in a Jazz club called “The New World Cabaret” where she relies heavily on imagery, “great blobs or purple and red emotion,” personification,”rears on its hind legs,” and similes, “pulse is throbbing like a war drum.” She describes how she no longer feels defined by race a “cosmic Zora” She closes out her story by bringing it to a wider worldview asking questions, using parallel structure, and more descriptive diction. Overall she leans heavily of Ethos using empathy to draw us in and place her in her position. This allows the reader to feel her liberation in a world against her. She uses examples of feeling the same as everyone else without the determining factor of her race, but she counters this saying when she feels “most colored.” In the end though, she is who she is and she is proud of it, “[she] belongs to no race nor
She provides a striking contrast from her beloved endearing hometown to the more discriminative unwelcoming new town. She further brings us into this new memory describing the actions of a general populous to her. She uses descriptive diction with phrases like “lowdown dirty deal,” “sharpening my oyster knife,” and “ brown specter.” She changes tones closing in on a memory in a Jazz club called “The New World Cabaret” where she relies heavily on imagery, “great blobs or purple and red emotion,” personification,”rears on its hind legs,” and similes, “pulse is throbbing like a war drum.” She describes how she no longer feels defined by race a “cosmic Zora” She closes out her story by bringing it to a wider worldview asking questions, using parallel structure, and more descriptive diction. Overall she leans heavily of Ethos using empathy to draw us in and place her in her position. This allows the reader to feel her liberation in a world against her. She uses examples of feeling the same as everyone else without the determining factor of her race, but she counters this saying when she feels “most colored.” In the end though, she is who she is and she is proud of it, “[she] belongs to no race nor