How It Feels to Be Colored Me Analysis Essays

How It Feels to Be Colored Me Analysis Essays How It Feels to Be Colored Me Analysis Essay How It Feels to Be Colored Me Analysis Essay How it Feels to be Colored Me was written in 1928. Zora, growing up in an all-black town, began to take note of the differences between blacks and whites at about the age of thirteen. The only white people she was exposed to were those passing through her town of Eatonville, Florida, many times going to or coming from Orlando. The primary focus of How it Feels to be Colored Me is the relationship and differences between blacks and whites. In the early stages of Zoras life, which are expressed in the beginning of How it Feels to be Colored Me, black and whites had little difference in her eyes. She didnt even seems to differentiate between the two until her early teens. She says, I remember the very day I became colored. Before this time, she cites the only difference being that [white people] rode through town and never lived there. During this part of her work, Zora is showing her childhood view that whites and blacks are no different from one another. This view changes as a result of her being sent to a school in Jacksonville. Now being outside her town of Eatonville, she began to experience what it was like to be colored. But I am not tragically colored, she says. Zora makes it a point to show how she is not ashamed to be colored. At this point she seems to attack whites who continue to point out that she is the granddaughter of slaves by saying that blacks are moving forward. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said on the line! The reconstruction said Get ready! ; and the generation before said Go! Blacks have the opportunity to advance, and they should make the most of it. I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. She refuses to stay bound by the memory of slavery and by the fact that she is black. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background. This same feeling is also related to a white person being set against the background of colored people. Unlike her childhood views, she now sees a difference between whites and blacks. This is explained by the reaction of each to a jazz orchestra at a Harlem night club. The music has a profoun dly different effect on her than it does on a white person sitting next to her. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rendering it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen follow them exultantly. I dance wildly inside myself; yell within, I whoop My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter somethinggive pain, give death to what, I do not know. The contrast is created by the remark that the white person makes: Good music they have here. Where the music has driven Zora to these inner feelings, the white person can only sit and admire the music itself. He can get no further meaning out of it as Zora has. As she shows this difference between the white person and the black person, she also says that there are times when she has no race. During these times, she seems to revert to her childhood view that people are just people. She realizes the differences but chooses to ignore them. She ends by speaking of times when she sees her self as being a brown bag along a wall in company with many other bags or different colors. These bags can be emptied into a pile and refilled and nothing would change. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. In How it Feels to be Colored Me, Zora talks of when she first discovered the differences between white people and black people. Her childhood view that all people are the same was changed with her experience in life. The music that drives Zora to internal fury, the white person sees as entertainment. While these differences are apparent she knows it is not the color of skin that makes the difference. People are all the same on the inside. They could be poured out, mixed up, and filled back to be the same as they were. Like the bags along the wall, people can be different on the outside but be still be the same. How it Feels to be Colored Me. 123HelpMe. com. 13 Dec 2011