Analysis of Zora Hurston

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Suendos (Sue) Beydoun Professor Jordan ENG 3140 23 October 2012 Ignorance is Bliss Zora Neale Hurston, author of “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” has a different understanding of what it means to be African American in the early 20th century. She began in a world where she was sheltered from the idea of “color” and what it means to be “colored.” Hurston grew up in the town of Eatonville, Florida that was exclusively Black town and the only Whites that were there were simply going through the town. She gets her culture shock at the age of thirteen and holds a stance on the subject of color and how it feels to be colored that is nothing less than extraordinary. Zora Neale Hurston was ahead of her time in terms of her thinking because she held an idea that diminished the weight of color in the social arena and believed that color should not make a difference in how someone was treated or viewed. This position on the issue, however, came from a very instant culture shock. Hurston recalls the journey from Eatonville to Jacksonville: “I left Eatonville, the town of oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked from the riverboat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora… I was now a little colored girl” (Hurston 539). Suddenly, everything was different in Hurston’s point of view. She was now incredibly conscious of her skin color and what that meant for her social, political, and intellectual standing. She recalls, “In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown—warranted not to rub nor run” (Hurston 539). She uses words such as “fast brown” to describe how quickly she became conscious of her skin color, to show the drastic change that she was mentally trying to comprehend. When she says “warranted not to rub” she means it in a way where others like her advise her not to try and escape this fact because

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