25 pages • 50 minutes read
How It Feels To Be Colored Me
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Literary Devices
Metaphor
A metaphor is defined as the implied comparison of two unlike things. Hurston uses metaphors in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” to communicate the reality of her sense of identity to readers.
Hurston first uses metaphors to describe herself and her attitude towards the world outside of Eatonville, particularly whites. When she describes seeking out encounters with tourists coming through Eatonville, she uses an extended metaphor drawn from the world of the theater. In this metaphor, the front porch—located at a distance from the tourists on the road—is an inferior seat to the gatepost, a “[p]roscenium box”—a seat right beside the stage—that allows her to have aclose view of whites, whom she imagines as actors (par. 3, lines 2-3).
In this metaphor, whites are there for Hurston’s entertainment, a reversal from the usual perception of blacks as objects of entertainment or observation for whites. Hurston reverses the metaphor in the next paragraph when she describes the tourists as paying for her performances. Her puzzlement over their decision to pay her for things she enjoys emphasizes that as a child, she understood herself to be on equal footing with whites. The theatrical metaphors also emphasize Hurston’s sense that racial identity is a kind of performance, instead of being a biological essence.
Another metaphor Hurston uses is the idea of her approach to life as sharpening an oyster knife. An oyster knife is a tool used to pry open the tightly clamped oyster to get at the tasty meat inside. In this metaphor, Hurston’s self-representation as a person sharpening the usually dull oyster knife communicates her intellectual curiosity, her sense of competitiveness with whites, and her sense of the world as a place filled with potential for a person like her.
Hurston also uses metaphor to communicate the psychological reality of the title of the essay. Hurston’s implied comparison of herself to a “dark rock” temporarily overwhelmed by an ocean of whites at Barnard College portrays the sense of hypervisibility or even alienation African-Americans may experience when confronted with majority-white spaces for the first time (par. 10, lines 3-4). When she describes herself listening to music, she uses an extended metaphor to portray her emotional response to listening to jazz in Harlem. She compares the jazz orchestra to a jungle beast that breaks through to an imagined Africa (par.11, lines 6-8).
The comparison of the music to a beast, and her later comparison of herself engaged in a theatrical reenactment of a hunt in the jungle,show the emotional intensity of listening to jazz when you are a black person in Harlem. Her comparison of music to “great blobs of color” (par. 13, line 2)—also an example of synesthesia, figurative language that uses multiple sensory descriptions to communicate an idea—further emphasizes the strong emotion she experiences as she listens. It contrasts with the “paleness” that she associates with the understated reaction of the white listener (par. 13, line 5).
Through her use of metaphors, Hurston communicates the reality of her subjective experience of her identity.
Contrast
Contrast is the highlighting of differences to define more clearly important characteristics of the two things being compared. Hurston uses contrast to define African-American identity and to communicate racial difference. Hurston also uses dark-light imagery as a motif in the essay to draw these contrasts more clearly.
Hurston contrasts herself with African-Americans throughout the essay. She contrasts her eagerness to interact with white tourists with the reticence of some of Eatonville’s other inhabitants to engage with the tourists, and the desire of others (those who sat on their porches) to observe whites only at a distance. Hurston, by contrast, narrows the distance between herself and whites by sitting on a gatepost at the end of town and attempts to close it completely by trying to hitch rides with the visitors. In this instance, Hurston uses the contrast to show that—unlike the black adults in her life—she had not yet internalized the idea that racial differences were important.
Hurston also contrasts herself with the “tragically colored” (par. 6, line 2), that “sobbing school of Negrohood” (par. 6, line 4) whose identity she sees as being founded on victimhood. Hurston instead associates African-American identity withpotential and represents herself as ambitious and eager to succeed.
Finally, Hurston also uses contrasting visual elements in the essay to highlight racial differences. At Barnard College, her description of herself as a “dark rock” and the whites around her as an ocean communicates how isolating the initial experience of entering such a space can be (par. 10, lines 3-4). She contrasts the discomfort of “white neighbors” with the interjections of the “brown specter” and “dark ghost” of African-Americans competing with them, despite a history of inequality that gave whites a leg up (par. 8, lines 1-3).
Vignette
A vignette is an impressionistic scenethat is used to communicate the emotional reality of a particular experience or feeling. Hurston’s description of her response to jazz music in the New World Cabaret is an example of a vignette. Nothing occurs in the physical world as Hurston listens to the music. She, like, her white friend, has been sitting at the table listening to the music. The reality of this kind of experience for Hurston is that all her senses and attention are engaged by the sound of the music. The highly-descriptive passage, with its vivid colors, loud sounds, and drastic movements, lets the audience know how profoundly Hurston is moved by the music, while the prosaic description of the friend, who merely remarks on the music and drums the table with his fingers, shows by contrast how different the listeners’ respective experiences of music, and respective relationships to Africa as an imagined space, are.
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By Zora Neale Hurston
