TOW #6 - "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (Written)

Zora Neale Hurston pushes a powerful lesson towards the people of the past and present world who are something that makes them feel different in "How It Feels to Be Colored Me". With a title like that, the reader may make an initial assumption that this essay is about having pride in your race, but that is not the case. Hurston shows people that although people may feel different because of their gender, race, sexuality, etc., they cannot allow that to define them. She tells of the importance of pushing past these boundaries and allowing yourself to be your own person. She fully accomplishes this through personal anecdotes as well as a powerful metaphor. She tells the reader of when she moved and first realized her skin color made her different but she did not allow it to affect her when she writes, "I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl [...] but I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all [...] someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me" (Hurston 115). Even from a young age, she did not allow for her skin color to define her or keep her from being herself. She clinches the end of her essay with a metaphor that leaves the reader with a thought-provoking question. She speaks of people as paper bags of different colors with jumbled contents, and if one were to dump all the contents into a huge pile and refill them all, the contents wouldn't be much different. She ends the essay with, "perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place - who knows?" (Hurston 117). She is suggesting that the color of a person's bag (or skin) will never define what contents are on the inside, which is the message she conveys all along.