How It Feels to Be Colored Me Literary Elements

Essay

The essay is set in Eatonville, Florida and New York City in the late 1800s and early 1900s; the essay was published in 1928, during the Black American cultural revival period known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Zora Neale Hurston is the essay's first-person narrator; the essay is told from her point of view.

The tone is often ironic, at times sarcastic; the mood is contemplative and joyful.

Zora Neale Hurston is the protagonist; antagonists include her family, unnamed New Yorkers who discriminate against her, and the white friend she brings to a jazz club.

The major conflict in the essay is that Hurston rejects the idea that the legacy of slavery and racism in the United States in any way inhibits her ability to live confidently and securely as herself. Her complicated ideas around race seem to suggest she sees racial identity as a social construct but refuses to see herself as a victim, refuting the idea that the social construct of race negatively impacts her opportunities as an American.

The essay reaches its climax when Hurston uses an analogy to encapsulate her view of race. Likening humans with different skin tones to different colored paper bags full of miscellany, Hurston suggests that the contents, if dumped out and jumbled together, could be randomly redistributed among the bags. She believes the end result would be more or less the same, and suggests that maybe God stuffed the bags—i.e. humans—with random, universal contents.

Hurston references Reconstruction, the period following the American Civil War. From 1865 to 1877, Reconstruction saw the former Confederate states being controlled by the federal government. Social legislation that granted new rights to African Americans was introduced.