Analyze how the narrator's racial identity impacts how she views herself and the world. Use details from the text in your response.

Zora Neale Hurston speaks to the fact that her identity feels colored only in contrast to whites and after being identified as such upon leaving her small town in Florida for school in a city which wasn't familiar to her. Before leaving home, when tourists would visit, she considered herself as just Nora:

During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there [...] The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county—everybody's Zora.

Ms. Hurston didn't view herself as “tragically colored,” meaning, she did not lament her condition in life simply over her color. For her, slavery was past and she was an American. The only time she felt different was in certain instances, like when the beat of jazz music jumped into her soul, urging her to dance, in contrast, again, to a white friend who just listened to the music:

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

In this essay, Ms. Hurston stated there were times when she didn't consider her race as part of her identity, and to capture this part of her personality, it is best to quote her very words here:

At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance.

Most of all, it appears that Ms. Hurston thought of herself just like anyone else. Using the analogy of a brown bag in comparison to others that might contain the same amount of trinkets and worthy goods as others, she states that she is like anyone (or in this case, anything) else:

But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall [...] In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held—so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied [...].