Excerpt from "How it Feels to be Colored Me" by Zora Neale Hurston
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in
company with other bags, white, red, and yellow. Pour out the
contents, and there is
discovered
a jumble of small things priceless
and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty
spool
, bits of broken glass, lengths of
string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty
knife blade, old shoes saved for a
road that never was and never will be, a nail
bent under the
weight of things too heavy
for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand
is a brown bag
.
On
the ground before you is the jumble it held so much like the jumble
in
the
bags, could they be emptied,
that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled
without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not
matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place - who
knows?
- What is the extended metaphor in this passage?
- What is the theme of the passage?
- Find negative imagery/sensory language.
- Find positive imagery/sensory language.
- Why does Hurston juxtapose positive and negative imagery?
- What qualities of this excerpt are similar to a folk tale?
