and social.

The second section of the essay sees Hurston comparing how others think she should feel about being African American to how she actually feels. Hurston describes how she felt when she would travel to places outside of Eatonville and experience more diversity and persecution. She says, however, that her identity remained stable. She seems to resent the suggestion that she should dwell on the history of slavery:

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. (para 7)

Hurston feels that since was born after slavery and Reconstruction, she should be able to move forward. She looks at slavery as something that could hold her back. As in the rest of the essay, Hurston's point is clear but she conveys it with a sense of humor.

The third and fourth sections of the essay stray from what we expect in nonfiction writing. They are more figurative and vibrant that what we normally see in the essay form. Nonetheless, Hurston makes strong points, or rather, restates her original point in new and exciting ways.

The third section presents an anecdote about Hurston in a jazz club. The scene has both literal and figurative elements, as Hurston attempts to convey to the reader how she feels when listening to jazz. She writes,

I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something—give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly. (para 11)

In the scene, Hurston is literally in the jazz club sitting at a table, listening to music. But inside, she feels "wild." She dances and feels the desire "to slaughter something." Her vivid imagery and figurative language in this section further establishes Hurston's vibrant and exuberant identity. A personality like hers cannot be shut down by other people's racism.

Finally, Hurston ends the essay with an extended metaphor comparing people's souls to bags with various, mixed contents. She writes,

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 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, 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? (para 17)

Hurston's closing argument is that she shouldn't feel angry or upset about racism because she knows that behind or under the skin colors that result in so much discrimination, we are all basically the same. The "bag of miscellany" may be filled with slightly different pieces, but if we dumped them all out and collected them into bags again, it wouldn't make much difference. Essentially, people are the same: they have the same loves, fears, and experiences. She even implies that a deity—"the Great Stuffer of Bags"—intended for all people to be similar in this way, which gives her personal opinion even more weight.