Zora Neale Hurston, an important voice of the Harlem Renaissance, was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and novelist best known for her work, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Sadly, she died in 1960 after suffering financial and medical difficulties. In 1973, Alice Walker, another famous American writer, "rediscovered" Hurston and promoted her body of work. In the classic essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Hurston explores the idea that all of us have multiple selves, depending upon the context and environments in which we find ourselves. Hurston's writing has an ebullience, self-assertiveness, and pride that is particularly evident in this text. She was a flamboyant and dramatic personality, at times clashing with fellow writers from the Harlem Renaissance, who believed that black Americans should use their art to speak out against racial oppression and the white majority. Hurston chose not to align herself with the political ideologies of other writers from that time period and instead used her writing to celebrate the rich traditions of her race, as well her personal identity. In this essay, Hurston famously proclaimed, "I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal."
In this text, Hurston is playing with the idea of performance, a trope that pervades the essay. Pay attention to any diction and/or metaphors associated with the theater and performance. Hurston is a provocateur, writing sentences that elicit a strong response from the reader. The essay presents the "multiple selves of Zora," structured in a series of vignettes from different time periods in her life--the child Zora to the cosmic Zora, who "belongs to no race or time." Much of her prose is a masquerade of her real self. I believe the true Zora emerges in the last paragraph, which has a vastly different tone and mood from all that comes before. In the following paragraph, which appears midway in the essay, Hurston is intentionally provocative and defiant:
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line! " The Reconstruction said "Get set!" and the generation before said "Go! " I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think--to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.
Her tone seems almost annoyed. Someone is always reminding her of her slave ancestors. Hurston asserts that the institution of slavery is something that she does not prefer to dwell upon. Using the metaphor of a patient (the "colored" person), she flippantly writes, "and the patient is doing well, thank you," as if to imply that she doesn't want to hear any more about the horrible legacy of slavery. Then, utilizing the extended metaphor of a race (notice the implied pun), she writes: "On the line! . . . Get set! . . .Go!" to challenge the notion that slavery was necessarily all bad. She writes, "Slavery is the price I paid for civilization . . . It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it." The statement is shockingly truculent. The holocaust of slavery, an institution that caused so much death and suffering was "worth it"?! She subverts the expectation of both whites and blacks--the idea that all blacks should be offended and appalled by slavery, instead declaring that as a result, "I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame . . . It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage." Hurston has, in effect, belittled the horrific suffering that so many slaves endured. She is trying to provoke a response in her audience, and this passage certainly achieves that. One cannot read her words without being surprised, and perhaps outraged, at the way she cavalierly dismisses this blight of American history.
In the passage below, Hurston agains surprises us with her point of view. She chooses to write about the perspective of a white man, even pitying (perhaps condescending) his lack of passion. In a wonderful extended metaphor that compares the jazz band to a wild animal in the African jungle, she writes how she is figuratively transported back to Africa. Enthralled by the musicians' "narcotic harmonies" she returns to her tribal roots, her face "painted red and yellow" and her body "painted blue." She participates in a hunt with primal fury, shaking her spear above her head, "dancing wildly inside myself." The music of the orchestra makes her want to "slaughter something--give pain, give death" until the music ends and the "veneer" of civilization supplants her imaginative fierceness, and she notices the passive, deadpan, soulless response of her white neighbor: "Good music they have here," the man says "sitting motionless," "smoking calmly," "drumming the table with his fingertips." Hurston is juxtaposing the stereotypes of the soulful black person with the soulless white person. Again, she purposefully goads, causing the reader to question his/her own stereotypes, perceptions, and preconceived notions about racial differences. "He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored," she writes.
SOMETIMES IT IS the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue, My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.
"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.
In the final section of the essay, there is a dramatic shift in mood and tone. With insouciance and feigned confident indifference, Hurston writes, "How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me." But the paragraph that follows, and ends the essay, achieves the greatness of this text. The authentic Zora emerges. All cockiness and masquerading of confidence has ended. In one of the most humble metaphors for a human being, Hurston compares herself to a "brown bag of miscellany." With one dramatic transition--"But in the main"--Zora has plummeted from her position in the cosmos, where she belongs to "no race or time" and is "the eternal feminine," "a fragment of the Great Soul [God]" to a paper sack "against a wall in the company with other bags [races], white, red and yellow." Using diction that evokes brokenness, sadness, frailty, and even hopelessness--"small things," "priceless and worthless," "broken glass," "crumbled away," "rusty knife," "empty spool," "nail bent," and "dried flower," Hurston admits that all human beings, no matter what color, possess insecurities, broken dreams, diminished hopes, and imperfections. At base, she says in this final passage, we are all the same, no matter how we are "colored." All of our figurative insides could be "dumped in a single heap" and refilled into a bag, "without altering the content of any greatly." It is in this final surprising passage, so different in mood than what has come before, that Hurston drops her pretense and reveals her authentic self, even ending the essay with a final question mark, as if to suggest that after all, she really has no answers, only questions. She is just as unsure and insecure as the rest of humanity about true meaning and identity in a world of such variance.
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.
But in the main, 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. A first-water diamond, an empty spool bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife?blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. in your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held?so much like the jumble in the bags could they be emptied that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place--who knows?
("How It Feels to Be Colored Me" is from Mules and Men: Ways of Seeing) |
Rhetorical Strategies in "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"
themes, irony, tone, hyperbole, colloquialisms, diction, metaphor, extended metaphor, humor, overstatement, mood, shifts, structure, personification, analogy, implied pun, aphoristic statement, contrast as a rhetorical mode, allusion, trope, motif, onomatopoeia, simile, synesthesia, cadence, sentence length, punctuation, rhythm, rhetorical questions, use of second person, specificity and choice of details
