How it Feels to be Colored Me by Hurston and Hughes’ The Negro Mother

It is strange that two of the most prominent artists of the Harlem Renaissance could ever disagree as much as or be as different as Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. Despite the fact that they are the same color and lived during the same time period, they do not have much else in common. On the one hand is Hurston, a female writer who indulges in black art and culture and creates subtle messages throughout her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. On the other hand is Wright, who is a male writer who demonstrates that whites do not like black people, nor will they ever except for when they are in the condition “…America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.” Hurston was also a less political writer than

In Hughes poem “Note on the commercial Theatre” he started off with an angry tone, upset that African American music was used by the whites, but the African Americans didn’t receive the credit for the artistic work: “You’ve taken my blues and gone you sing them on Broadway” (1043). Furthermore, at the end of the poem Hughes does expresses a powerful ending, our culture is beautiful, but you will never be me: “Black and beautiful and sing about me, and put on plays about me! I reckon it’ll be me myself” (1043)! Hughes poems focused on the urban cultures, while Zora Neale Hurston short story “How it feels to be Colored Me” focused on her as a woman who is discovering herself and her worth.

Zora Neale Hurston is unequivocally open about her race and identity in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” As Hurston shares her life story, the reader is exposed to Hurston’s self-realization journey about how she “became colored.” Hurston utilizes her autobiographical short story as a vehicle to describe the “very day she became colored.” Race is particularly vital in Zora Neale Hurston’s essay, “How it Feels to Be Colored Me” as she deals with the social construct of race, racism, and sustaining one’s cultural identity.

Realizing the quality of an individual varies depending on the environment they are in. This relates to Zora Neale Hurston in her article, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me.” She states, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” Hurston does this to convey her ideal message in her article, which is being proud of her race and deterring the racial remarks forced on her even after being put in an environment making her further aware of her color. This statement fuels and is central to her argument by turning her living situation into a sarcastic analogy, as well as using the tool of imagery to help her argument. In turn this simplifies her emotional feelings and transition between locations to allow the audience to

While reading literature, we manage to forget that they have true roots to what is being written and what they actually represent. When looking at the similarities of how literature is represented it obvious to see that there are certain socially constructed groups presented. Although these socially constructed groups do vary throughout literature, they still tend to be very similar. In Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use,” Lorraine Hansberry play “A Raisin in the Sun,” and Langston Hughes’s poems “Harlem” and “Theme for English B” they evaluate the social construction of African Americans. What makes these authors so alike is the similarities that they share; being that they were all born in the early 1900’s, are all of African American ethnicity, and acknowledge the social construct of African Americans in these works. Looking at each of these works of literature they represent the struggles that African Americans faced when trying to be seen as equal, by allowing these works to be shown in different insights towards the battles faced in their movement towards being seen as equal.

In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston points out she realized she was colored when she went to Jacksonville. Before Hurston left Eatonille, she lived within a whole African American environment. The authors used metaphor to demonstrate that she felt colored by comparing with other people. She notes, “I found it out in certain ways; I was now a little colored girl. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown-warranted not to rub nor run” (186).

In her life and in her writings, Zora Neale Hurston, with the South and its traditions as her backdrop, celebrated the culture of black Americans, Negro love and pride with a feminine perspective that was uncommon and untapped in her time. While Hurston can be considered one of the greats of African-American literature, it’s only recently that interest in her has been revived after decades of neglect (Peacock 335). Sadly, Hurston’s life and Hurston’s writing didn’t receive notoriety until after her death in 1960.

The Great Depression, Segregation, and the Harlem Renaissance were all undeniably important parts of our country’s history, and Zora Neale Hurston was one extraordinary woman who lived through all three. Today considered to be one of the most important African American authors ever, Hurston was a successful author at the peak of her career. Although she had to endure a great deal to get to where she was, Hurston never let her surroundings get her down, “I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife” (Zora). Hurston’s effects on the writing community and the world demonstrate the struggles she had to go through throughout her life.

Being Different When you are in a crowd of people, do you ever feel you do not fit in? The essay How It Feels to Be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston, shows how a person can feel different just by being in a new place. The essay was written in 1928 during a time when there was a lot of racial discrimination between whites and blacks. The setting was in the Deep South, Florida.

In Zora Neale Hurtson's “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” we encounter a very broad descriptive essay where Hurston explores the new found discovery of her self-admiration. To complement the wide variety of description used throughout the essay, Hurston includes imagery and figurative language to capture the reader with a first class seat on a journey with her. At the beginning of the essay, Hurtson dives into her childhood in Eatonville, Florida, describing moments using anecdotes when she sang and danced throughout the streets and greeted the neighbors. Back then she was free from the scaring feeling of being different and was "everybody's Zora". But she immediately became different when she was thirteen and her mother passed away and she left home to attend boarding school in Jacksonville.

I. Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels To Be Colored Me” was a writing that was one of the brightest representatives of the period, “The Harlem Renaissance”. Zora Neale Hurston supported the same rebuff against white culture as her male counterparts, however, made it in her own manner - to focus on the problems of the ordinary level (in other words, she described the everyday experience of African American people). Her essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” describes the life of a girl who was living in a small town called Eatonville and was forced to move into a boarding school in Jacksonville. Since that time she “was not Zora of Orange County anymore, was now a little colored girl” (Hurston 153).

When men of that time, such as Langston Hughes or W.E.B. Du Bois, talked and wrote about the “New Negro”, they were actually talking about the “New Negro Man”. Hurston provided an answer to the question “Who was the New Negro Woman?” She represented the women of the time period, with her strong personality and writing. However, Hurston could not represent every African American woman in the Harlem Renaissance, let alone the world. She was more interested in expressing her own individual style and personality, not wanting to be seen as a tragic ex-slave (Shmoop Editorial Team). While Hurston wrote about race and segregation, she did so in a subtle way, making race an underlying motif in her writing rather than a theme, wanting people to focus on her writing rather than her skin color

In Zora Neale Hurston’s short story, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”, there is a contrast between how black and white people approach things in life. Hurston is an African American woman and she shares her own perspective of how black and white people achieve things in life. She mentions that people are constantly reminding her about how African Americans suffered through slavery however, this doesn’t “…register depression with [her]” (Hurston 976). Hurston instead sees this as an advantage over the white people because African Americans have had several opportunities to prove their achievements in life giving unlike the white people. This would mean that African Americans have an easier approach to achieving things at life because they set

Zora Hurston is an african american writer who writes about what life was like during the harlem reniasssance. In the short “How it Feels To Be Colored Me” Zora is writig about her life and what it was like during the Harlem Renaissance. Zora starts the short story off by telling the reader that she is the negro in the United States whose grandfather was not an Indian Chief, which shows she is different from any other person. Throughout the story Zora explains that when she was 13 she had to move away form the only place she knew. Zora moved so that she could attend a school in Jacksonville. She explains how there is always that one person who reminds her that she is a granddaughter

Most of the works during the Harlem Renaissance had to do with addressing feelings of estrangement and marginality experienced by “the smaller number” in American society discovering to inspire those troubled by pervading racism and labeling. Some excerpts of poetry in which I examined in which relates to the primary themes during the Harlem Renaissance would be that of Langston Hughes poem, “Let America Be America Again”. In terms of how this poem relates to the primary themes, I would like to refer to the specific lines of “I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-And finding only the same old stupid plan Of a dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.” In regards to Zora Neale Hurston’s poems relating to the primary themes during the Harlem Renaissance era, her works “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” relates to this time period and the specific line in which I sought was line 8, “The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of