Hurston and the Rhetoric of Identity

Zora Neale Hurston, a novelist, folklorist, and essayist of the Harlem Renaissance, brings a distinct, playful, defiant voice to "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928): "I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief." The wry self-aware humor of that opening line signals a rhetorical register entirely different from Douglass's restrained precision (Week 18) or Jacobs's appeal to shared womanhood (Week 20). Hurston is not writing to prove her humanity to a skeptical audience the way the earlier slave narratives had to; she is confidently defining herself entirely on her own terms, a rhetorical freedom her essay itself demonstrates by its very tone.

The essay's closing image compares people to labeled paper bags, each filled with an assorted, random jumble of small objects, "priceless and worthless" mixed together without any real order. Hurston suggests that if many such bags, of different colors, were all dumped out together, no one could sort the contents back into their original bags by color alone -- a metaphor arguing that individual identity and worth have little reliable connection to race, however different the bags themselves might look from the outside. Read alongside Douglass's and Jacobs's very different rhetorical strategies, Hurston's essay shows how the same broad subject, defining Black identity and selfhood for a divided readership, could be approached from confident self-definition just as powerfully as from the earlier narratives' careful self-authentication.