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What is the main idea of each paragraph in "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"?

Paragraph 1: Hurston describes herself as "colored" and doesn't pretend to have Native American heritage.


2: Hurston brings up the idea that there was a particular day that she realized she was "colored." She and her neighbors grew up in a small town, Eatonville, with other black people, and they would stare at travelers from the North as they drove through town.


3: Hurston, as a child, would watch the travelers from her front porch and call out friendly greetings to them.


4: Hurston "belongs" to the black people of her town, and the white visitors who pass through are different because they give her coins to talk, sing, and dance for them.


5: Hurston felt that she transformed into "a little colored girl" the day she arrived in Jacksonville at age 13 to attend school there. (This is the idea that she brought up back in Paragraph 2.)


6: Being "colored" doesn't make Hurston feel sorrowful or unlucky at all. She believes that life requires personal strength.


7: Although Hurston's ancestors were slaves, she doesn't dwell on this fact. She believes that the world is watching her as she works toward her own goals, and that the world is too ready to praise or her criticize her simply because her ancestors were slaves.


8: Hurston feels that white people have an easier but less exciting experience in life.


9: Hurston often only feels "colored" in some situations. In others, she's simply herself.


10: For example, she felt "colored" while attending college at Barnard, where most everyone was white, but she still maintained her own identity.


11: She also sometimes feels "colored" when there's just one white person near her in a crowd. At the jazz club, she feels deeply affected by the music while the white person sits calmly.


12: This friend simply states that the music is good as he taps his fingers.


13: Hurston feels extremely far away from this friend. (Again, it's because the music has affected her and not him.)


14: Sometimes Hurston feels proud and somehow timeless, with no race at all.


15: She feels more connected to all humans or perhaps to God ("the Great Soul") than to her particular country.


16: Discrimination doesn't upset Hurston. Instead she feels surprised that people are denying themselves the joy she would have brought to them.


17: Mostly, Hurston feels like a brown bag filled with all kinds of random objects. If everybody were a bag like this, you could dump out all the bags and restuff them randomly with the objects, and everybody would pretty much stay the same. (She probably means that people of different races share most everything else in common.)

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