The Practical Work of Analyzing Hurston's Essay
Most people read "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" and walk away thinking it is a straightforward celebration of Black identity. That reading is not wrong. It is just incomplete. The essay works on multiple levels at once, and treating it as a single-note piece of uplift misses the friction that makes it worth dissecting in the first place. Published in 1928 in The Writer's to Disk, Hurston's essay opens with a vivid childhood memory in Eatonville, Florida, then pivots through several major episodes before closing with the Zora the cat story. The structure itself is the argument. She moves from sensory innocence to social awareness to a deliberate, almost performative rejection of victimhood. The transitions are where most readers gloss over, and they are the most important parts. One thing that trips people up consistently is the tone shift around paragraph eight, where Hurston describes being swept into the "Great Sewing Circle of the North." She writes about the gasp of white students at Howard University as though she is reporting a mildly amusing weather event. The casualness is intentional. She is refusing to let white shock dictate her emotional register. When I teach this essay, I have students underline every instance where she undercuts what should be a serious moment with irony. You end up with almost half the essay functioning as tonal defiance.
The famous "brown bag" metaphor near the end is the part everyone quotes. Hurston lines up representatives of various racial groups inside a burlap bag and shakes them out, arguing that underneath, we are all the same color. Some readers take this as proof that Hurston was colorblind. That interpretation collapses under a closer reading. She is actually making a more complicated claim about visibility and erasure. The bag metaphor demonstrates that identity is something others project onto you before you can define it yourself. The brown bag was already colored before anyone stepped inside it. That distinction matters for any serious analysis. I spent years working with Hurston's archive materials at the Beinecke Library, and I will tell you plainly that the essay only makes full sense when you read it alongside her fiction. Their Eyes Were Watching God expands the same philosophical concerns. Janie Crawford's journey through silence and voice mirrors Hurston's own movement from Eatonville innocence to Northern scrutiny. The essay is not a standalone manifesto. It is a fragment of a larger project that Hurston spent her entire career returning to. There is also a common misreading around Hurston's rejection of the Dred Scott reference. When she writes that she does not feel condemned, many instructors treat this as political indifference. It is not. Hurston is actively disputing the framework that says Black suffering must be the lens through which Black life is understood. She is making a methodological claim about what kind of writing and what kind of criticism she will tolerate. That stance was controversial even in her own time. W.E.B. Du Bois and other Black intellectuals of the era expected Negro writers to produce protest literature. Hurston refused. The tension between those two positions generated most of the critical debate that followed.
Another detail that gets overlooked is the essay's relationship to Hurston's anthropological training. She studied under Franz Boas at Columbia, and the fieldwork methods she learned there shaped how she constructed this piece. The observational precision, the refusal to moralize about what she witnesses, the attention to dialect and vernacular speech patterns—these are all anthropological habits transferred into literary form. If you read the essay purely as memoir or purely as manifesto, you flatten the technique. The ethnographic impulse is what gives it its distinctive texture. The Zora the cat anecdote at the end functions as both humor and thesis. A white woman offers to adopt Zora, assuming the cat belongs to the servant quarters because it is Black. The joke lands because it reveals how absurd the assumption is, but also how ingrained it has become. Hurston laughs at the woman rather than at the racism itself. That choice of target for the laughter is deliberate and worth tracking throughout the essay. If you are doing this analysis for a class or a paper, the most productive angle is probably to focus on the gaps. What does Hurston leave out? Who is not present in these scenes? The essay mentions her father and the all-Black town of Eatonville with considerable warmth, but the Northern sections are notably thin on Black community. The people around her at Howard are white. The cat is Black. Everything else is largely abstract. This is not necessarily a failure of the essay. It may be the point. Hurston is constructing a version of herself that does not require a Black crowd to validate her existence. But that ambition has costs, and pointing them out strengthens any analysis significantly.
A word of caution on secondary sources. The critical apparatus around this essay is enormous and some of it is circular. People keep quoting each other rather than going back to the primary text. The best single introduction to the scholarly conversation remains Mary Helen Washington's work on Hurston, though even that was written decades ago and the field has moved on. For contemporary perspectives, look at the special issues of African American Review and Callaloo from the early 2000s. They contain the most useful recent arguments without too much repetition. The essay is short. Maybe twenty pages in most editions. It does not need to be padded with summary. The argument should do the heavy lifting. Pick one or two of the structural decisions Hurston makes and trace them through the entire piece. The brown bag moment, the cat story, the Howard gasp—any of those can carry a full analysis if you follow them far enough.
