Stories Inspired During the Harlem Renaissance

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“How It Feels to Be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston, shows use how Zora Neal Hurston personally describes the change in herself and in her life when people began to differentiate by just because of her color and the way she considered that being black, or any color, would make you feel more inferior/superior than the person next to you. In the beginning of her life, Hurston didn’t experience much differentiation for being black since she lived in a small Negro town, named Eatonville, where the only white person that traveled there were the ones that passed through the town, coming and going from Orlando. Hurston, in her early life, was known to everybody as “everybody’s Zora.” However, everything changed in her life at the young age of thirteen. She was sent to a school in Jacksonville where she, for the first time in her life, felt the full extent that being colored at the time would make you different and even said “I remember the day I became colored.” Throughout the story, I believe that Hurston says that her skin color is the problem or reason for her discrimination, but in fact the way society views skin color. “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes was one of Hughes’s first major accomplishments. This poem, begin with the speaker going someplace where he heard a piano player singing the blues. As it turns out, the speaker went to a bar on Lenox Avenue, now Malcolm’s X Boulevard. The speaker described the musician playing a slow blues with his voice, body, and soul singing the sad song. When the musician finally begins to sing on line 19, the musician sings, “Ain’t got nobody in all this world, Ain’t got nobody but ma self. I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’ And put ma troubles on the shelf.” This shows that not even though he is miserable, he’s going to put is worries aside and his “troubles on the shelf.” His second verse wasn’t as positive as the

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