Summary
Hurston says that her white neighbor occupies a more difficult position than her, because no “brown specter” (i.e. Black person) pulls up a chair beside her when she sits down to eat. No “dark ghost” thrusts a leg against hers when she is in bed. She is not haunted by guilt about slavery the way white people are. Hurston says that the game of keeping what you have is never as exciting as the game of getting things.
Hurston says that she does not always feel colored. Even now, at the time she writes, she often finds herself back in the mindset of the not-race-conscious Zora of Eatonville. Hurston says she feels most colored when she is “thrown against a sharp white background.” At Barnard College, in upper Manhattan, next to the Hudson River, she feels her race. Among thousands of white people on the college campus, she is a dark rock that the white waters surge upon. Despite the whiteness covering her, impressing itself on her, she remains herself.
Hurston says that the experience of noticing her race is sometimes reversed. When a white person goes with her to the drafty basement jazz bar The New World Cabaret, she feels the same sharp racial contrast she does at Barnard. Hurston discusses how they sit at a table and the jazz orchestra begins to play. The song constricts her thorax and splits her heart with its tempo and “narcotic harmonies.” The orchestra gains in intensity, becoming like a wild animal attacking “the tonal veil with primitive fury … until it breaks through to the jungle beyond.” Hurston follows along, dancing wildly inside herself. She is “in the jungle and living in the jungle way.” She says her face is painted red and yellow, and her body is blue. Her pulse throbs like a war drum. She feels the need to slaughter something but does not know what.
When the song ends, she “creeps back slowly” to civilization and finds that her white friend is sitting motionlessly in his seat and smoking calmly. The white friend drums the table with his fingertips and remarks that the music is good. Hurston realizes the “great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him.” Instead of feeling what she felt, he only heard it. The white friend seems far away, as if an ocean and a continent have fallen between them. In this moment, the man’s whiteness is especially pale and Hurston is very colored.
Hurston says that there are certain times when she has no race and is simply herself. For instance, when she sets her hat at an angle and saunters down Seventh Avenue in Harlem, feeling as snooty as the lion statues outside the Forty-Second Street Library. She feels more stately and refined than a French aristocratic lady. The “cosmic Zora emerges” and she belongs to no race or time. She is the “eternal feminine with its string of beads.”
Hurston says she feels no separation between being an American citizen and being colored: she is a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries of the country. It is her country, right or wrong as it may be. She sometimes feels people discriminate against her, but she does not get angry. She is merely astonished because she does not know how anyone could deny themself the pleasure of her company.
Hurston says she feels most of the time like “a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall.” There are other bags against the wall with her: white, red, and yellow bags. When the contents are poured out of each, a jumble of small priceless and worthless things are revealed: a diamond, an empty thread spool, broken glass, a rusty knife, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for it, “shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be.”
The essay ends with Hurston addressing the reader as you. Hurston says that in your hand is the brown bag. On the ground is the jumble it held, which is so much like the jumble in the other bags that, if they could be emptied, all the contents could be collected in a single heap and redistributed to the bags without any individual bag’s content being altered too greatly. Hurston says “a bit of colored glass more or less would not matter.” Hurston suggests that perhaps “the Great Stuffer of Bags” (i.e. God) used this method to fill the bags in the first place. Hurston closes the essay by asking, “Who knows?”
Analysis
In an instance of situational irony, Hurston inverts the idea that Black Americans would have difficulty living free in a country built on slavery by suggesting that white Americans have more difficulty in contemporary times because they have to contend with the guilt of slavery. While white Americans are in “the game” of keeping the advantages and privilege they have, Hurston is engaged in the more exciting game of attaining success. The idea presents another example of how Hurston rejects the idea that she should see herself as a victim.
Returning to the theme of racialized public spaces, Hurston discusses how she feels colored in certain contexts. Sometimes she manages not to think about her race and to access again the innocence of her child self, but in public spaces like Barnard College, Hurston feels her race because she is “thrown against a sharp white background.” Hurston uses a metaphor to illustrate how out of place she feels on the majority-white campus, saying she is “a dark rock surged upon” in white water. But she again rejects the idea that her race is a burden: she remains herself no matter how the waters surge upon her.
Hurston builds further on the theme of racialized public spaces with an anecdote about bringing a white friend to a jazz bar. Using ironic language that plays with the white racist stereotype that associates African Americans with primitiveness, Hurston details how the music transports her to the extent that she is “in the jungle and living in the jungle way.” While the music draws up strong emotions and she feels its rhythms and melodies deeply, Hurston finds that her white friend is unmoved.
At the end of the song, he merely drums his fingers on the table and compliments the music weakly. Hurston feels the difference between their races in that moment. Although she views race as a social construct, nonetheless there is a chasm between their experiences that is so vast it is as if an ocean and continent have fallen between them. The result: she feels especially Black, and her friend seems especially white.
Hurston contrasts the experience at the jazz bar with the moments when she taps into the “cosmic Zora” identity that remains untouched by considerations of racial identity. Although she is a descendant of slaves (in contrast to those descended from people who chose to come to the United States), Hurston still identifies as an American citizen. She feels a claim to the country, despite the historical injustices bound up in the nation. Without getting into much detail, Hurston acknowledges that she is discriminated against, but that the discrimination doesn’t anger her. Instead, she questions how anyone could not be charmed by and drawn to her.
Hurston ends “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” with an analogy. Likening herself to a brown paper bag of miscellany, Hurston outlines a scenario in which the brown bag is against a wall with other bags, variously colored white, red, and yellow. The colors denote the common associations used at the time for skin tones.
Hurston suggests that if the contents of each bag—each of which represents a different ethnicity—were dumped out, mixed around, and put back, the contents wouldn’t be much different in the end from what they were at the start. She closes the essay by suggesting that God may have distributed souls to humans in the same randomized fashion. With this analogy, Hurston shares her view that all human beings are more or less the same inside, containing the same jumble of precious and useless experiences, feelings and memories. Any apparent differences are merely superficial.
