How It Feels To Be Colored Me Tone
How it Feels to be Colored Me | Quotes
1.
I am colored simply ... offering goose egg in the fashion of extenuating circumstances except ... [that my] grandfather ... was non an Indian master.
Narrator
In the opening of her essay, Zora Neale Hurston identifies her race clearly and proudly. And so she slyly refuses to offer "extenuating circumstances," as if her racial identity is a matter of guilt that she is expected to excuse. This passage does not propose she feels guilt; rather, she is poking fun at readers who think she will experience bad about beingness African American.
At the cease of this sentence, Hurston implies that most African Americans merits they have Native American blood. She does non make any such claim for herself. Instead, she mocks people who make claims that cannot all be true.
This sentence establishes a proud, empowered, and irreverent tone. Hurston signals to the reader that she likes herself every bit she is, and she does not demand to apologize or make simulated claims to feel proud. She as well suggests that she will not shy away from stating her opinion, even if some people object.
2.
I remember the very day that I became colored.
Narrator
Hurston implies that being colored is not intrinsic to any person. Although she has had dark skin since birth, this did not always impact her sense of identity. In one particular flow in her childhood, she understood that some people thought of her as a bottom human beingness considering of her pare colour.
By making this statement before describing her idyllic childhood in Eatonville, Florida, Hurston creates a sense of tension around those memories. Readers know from the outset that the spunky girl in the passage will not ever be and so carefree and innocent.
iii.
White people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived at that place.
Narrator
As a girl, Hurston has no sense of racism, nor does she suspect that she will occupy a second-class identify in society when she grows up. To her, the difference between blackness and white people is only a matter of practicality. I grouping lives in her hometown, and ane simply passes through.
4.
I was non Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl.
Narrator
Hurston leaves abode fully centered in her ain identity. She has a name, and she is rooted in a place. Her experiences with racism on the riverboat to Jacksonville strip that identity away. Hurston does not only gain an understanding of what it means to be a person of color in a white-dominated society, she loses her sense of herself. She shows this loss past identifying herself simply and impersonally as "a little colored girl," no longer rooted in that potent identity she has ever known.
5.
I constitute it out ... In my heart ... I became a fast brown—warranted non to rub nor run.
Narrator
Hurston refuses to say what happened to make her understand her position in a racist society. Her restraint suggests that her experiences were very painful, just her syntax makes it sound as if she was in charge. By proverb "I found it out," she makes it sound every bit if she conducted an investigation to acquire sure truths. In other words, she does not frame herself as a victim who had something atrocious done to her. She does not let her persecutors, whoever they were, take over the action and gain the upper mitt. She keeps the attention on herself, refusing to offering any of it to the people who hurt her.
Hurston speaks of her coloration as if it were applied to her peel with a very strong dye. She talks about information technology well-nigh every bit if she were an advertiser, saying the dye is guaranteed non to rub off or launder out. This metaphor communicates the deep, painful alter to her identity. But its quirky, ad-similar linguistic communication retains the lively spirit of her tone elsewhere in the essay. Even when she is describing a painful moment, Hurston refuses to sound meek.
6.
But I am not tragically colored.
Narrator
After describing her transformation from "Zora of Orangish Canton" to "a picayune colored daughter," Hurston reaffirms her unwillingness to discuss her race in a negative way. But unlike the little girl at the beginning of the essay, the adult Hurston must consciously cull to be positive. When she claims she is not "tragically colored," Hurston shows an sensation of the negative lens through which others view people like her.
7.
I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature ... has given them a ... muddied deal.
Narrator
Here, Hurston is openly contemptuous of African Americans who have negative feelings about their racial heritage. She refers to this group as "the sobbing schoolhouse of Negrohood," every bit if complaining almost being African American is an artistic or literary movement with many members. In her view, people of this grouping see themselves equally victims of "nature," not society. This suggests that they somehow believe themselves to be naturally inferior to white people. Hurston vehemently rejects this supposition of inferiority.
8.
No, I do not weep at the earth—I am besides decorated sharpening my oyster knife.
Narrator
Once once more, Hurston emphasizes that she feels no regret that she has been born into difficult circumstances in a racist society. She uses a vibrant metaphor of sharpening an oyster knife to communicate that she actively pursues opportunity.
An oyster pocketknife is a tool used to pry open oyster shells and extract the meat or a pearl. Past depicting herself sharpening such a knife, Hurston makes herself audio assuming. Because this type of knife is used to pluck morsels of delicious, high-quality food or gems from the source, this line also makes her seem gear up to become out and get what she wants and needs from the earth.
ix.
Slavery is the price I paid for civilization ... Information technology is a bully take chances.
Narrator
The relentless positivity of Hurston's attitude extends even to slavery, which she credits with giving her the opportunity to live the life she is living at present. She calls this life a "bully adventure," using the discussion bully here in the sense of excellence or excitement. This passage shows Hurston's deep commitment to her focus on time to come happiness rather than past pain.
This sentence is also deeply self-centered. Hurston speaks as though slavery does not matter except in its effects on her. In the process she shrugs off the suffering of an enormous number of people.
10.
This orchestra grows rambunctious ... and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury ... I follow those heathen—follow them exultingly.
Narrator
This sentence personifies a jazz orchestra, speaking of it equally a wild beast that can rear and attack. Although Hurston is literally sitting in a jazz club listening to music in this passage, she describes her emotions equally following the music into a jungle. This helps convey the primal, visceral event the music has on her.
This passage utilizes words that typically have negative connotations in English, only Hurston'southward exulting tone changes the feelings associated with these words. Fury is often associated with violence and suffering. The word primitive is often used in a demeaning way to contrast groups that are seen as less advanced with groups that are not. Infidel is another word that is usually used by people of a dominant grouping to refer to people they consider uncivilized or irreligious. In this passage, however, Hurston is and then swept up in the music that she seems extremely fortunate to be a role of all this "primitive fury" and heathenness. In the process, she manages to disconnect the words from their negative connotations so that they exist outside order's normal patterns of judgment, in a realm of unfettered emotion.
xi.
Music. The great blobs of imperial and crimson emotion have not touched him ... He is so pale with his whiteness so.
Narrator
When Hurston notices the difference in the ways she and her white friend react to a jazz performance, she feels shocked past his lack of emotion. He calls it "music," when to her information technology is a profound multisensory, emotional experience. She attributes this to the racial difference between them. Just, unlike the other parts of the essay in which she says she feels colored, the color difference here is expressed as her friend's disability to feel something she finds deeply important.
12.
Sometimes, I experience discriminated against ... It merely astonishes me. How can whatsoever deny themselves the pleasance of my company?
Narrator
With characteristic positivity, Hurston dismisses bigotry equally surprising and ridiculous. Rather than responding like a victim, she says the racists miss out when they exclude her.
13.
I feel similar a chocolate-brown bag of miscellany ... Cascade out the contents, and there is discovered ... minor things priceless and worthless.
Narrator
At the end of the essay Hurston develops an extended metaphor of people equally numberless of assorted objects. The numberless have colors, only she does not examine the colors at all. Instead she focuses on the contents, only some of which accept value and all of which are surprising and interesting. By placing her focus on the contents of the numberless, she suggests the lack of importance of the outside.
14.
All might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly.
Narrator
In her metaphor of people as numberless of odds and ends, Hurston does not claim that each person is unique. In fact, she suggests the reverse: she says that if the contents of anybody's bags were dumped out into a big mixed-upwardly pile, the bags could be refilled at random without whatsoever sick effects. People are all substantially the same, fifty-fifty in their quirks and diversity.
15.
Perchance that is how the Dandy Stuffer of Bags filled them in the commencement place—who knows?
Narrator
At the cease of the essay Hurston calls God "the Keen Stuffer of Numberless." She suggests that God may have given people their unique traits at random, but she does not claim to know with certainty. This open-ended determination subtly suggests a limit to the writer'south self-centered point of view. She insists on viewing herself and telling her story in her ain way, only she does non claim to know everything.
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