Barnard College (Symbol)
The Barnard College campus Hurston writes of is a symbol for de facto racial segregation. A women's liberal arts college connected to Columbia University, Barnard was open to enrollment from Black students like Hurston, but she discovered she was one of only a few Black people on the campus. Referring to Barnard as a "stark white background" against which she felt most colored, Hurston likens herself to a dark rock in a whitewater river. Even though the college is open to all races, it is a space of de facto racial segregation due to the low enrollment of Black students.
Jazz Music (Symbol)
The jazz music Hurston "feels" at the New World Cabaret is a symbol for Black cultural connection shared between her and the musicians. Hurston writes of how the musicians create melodies and rhythms that stir up a physiological response in her body. The music tears at "the tonal veil ... until it breaks through to the jungle beyond." Hurston writes that when the music makes her dance wildly inside herself she is "in the jungle and living in the jungle way." While Hurston is likely playing with the racist stereotype of Black people being more in touch with a "primitive" way of life, she nonetheless values jazz music as something to which she connects on a visceral level. Hurston contrasts her experience with that of her white friend, who enjoys listening to the music but does not feel it in the way she does.
Brown Bag of Miscellany (Symbol)
Hurston ends "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" with an analogy in which she compares humans to "bags of miscellany." This analogy is a symbol for the universal spirit shared among individual human beings. Thinking of herself as a "brown bag of miscellany," Hurston outlines a situation in which there are other bags with different colored exteriors. When all the contents are dumped out, Hurston says, the heaps they create look more or less the same. Hurston suggests that it would make no difference if what was inside one bag was put in another. Drawing out the symbolic significance of the analogy, Hurston suggests that maybe God—"the Great Stuffer of Bags"—may even have randomly distributed human souls to different colored body containers in much the same way, leaving everyone with their own fragments of a universal spirit.
