Just a Creamy Sea of White...

Zora Neale Hurtson’s essay, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”, although short, is full of various rhetorical strategies that affect the overall meaning and purpose expressed in the essay. Her opinions about being colored and how her changing environment altered the way she felt about her race were the principle areas where these multiple and effective rhetorical devices were used. Among many similes, metaphors, and hyperboles, the way in which Hurston used imagery was the most effective rhetorical device that conveyed the purpose of the essay; which was that even in a town of all white people she does not belong to any one race and at that one’s race is one of the many components that make up a person. After Hurston describes her life before she recognized the color of her skin, where the only difference between Negros and whites was that the whites were just tourists in the town of Negros, she paints a picture in the mind of the reader of her as a dark rock in a creamy sea of white. This rhetorical strategy allows the reader to see exactly what the author herself felt at this point in her life, at this point when she discovered the color of her skin. The second use of imagery she uses is the more powerful of the two. Hurston relates what makes up a human being to the components of a brown bag. She illustrates herself as a brown bag propped against a wall with many other bags, of different colors. Her bag contains things priceless and worthless, a metaphor to the different attributes of each person. After detailing the many things that consume her “brown bag”, she logically explains that one colored piece of glass really has no if any effect to the bag as whole. Thus one’s race is not as important as some may view it. These two uses of imagery beautifully illustrate the way in which Hurston overcame the recognition of being colored. She came from a black stone in the abyss of white waters into the revelation of being human and belonging to no race or time other than “the eternal feminine with its string of beads.”