How It Feels to Be Coloured Me — Zora Neale Hurston
Updated: Oct 16
On identity, belonging, and the freedom to define oneself
Zora Neale Hurston: The Writer and Her World
Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) was an American novelist, essayist, anthropologist, and folklorist whose writing explored African American life through its language, traditions, and everyday experiences. Raised in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first incorporated Black towns in the United States, Hurston developed an enduring interest in the stories and cultural practices of Black communities.
She later studied anthropology at Barnard College in New York and became associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a period of remarkable literary, musical, and artistic activity during the 1920s and 1930s. Her best-known novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), explores questions of independence, identity, and self-expression.
Hurston's writing is distinguished by its attention to individual experience. Rather than presenting African American life through a single perspective, she frequently explored the differences among people, communities, and personal histories.
Historical and Literary Context
Published in The World Tomorrow in May 1928, How It Feels to Be Colored Me appeared during an era when racial segregation shaped much of American public life. In the South, Jim Crow laws enforced racial separation in schools, transportation, and public facilities. Discrimination and racial inequality also existed beyond the South, though their legal forms differed.
At the same time, the Harlem Renaissance brought renewed attention to African American literature, music, and intellectual life. Writers approached questions of race, identity, and cultural belonging from different perspectives, sometimes disagreeing about the responsibilities of Black artists and the purposes of literature.
Hurston's essay belongs to this wider conversation, but its perspective is distinctly personal.
About the Essay
How It Feels to Be Coloured Me begins with Hurston's memories of childhood in Eatonville, where her experience of community shaped her early understanding of identity. Her move to Jacksonville introduces a different awareness of racial distinctions.
As the essay develops, Hurston moves between recollection, observation, humour, and metaphor. She considers how identity changes according to circumstance, how people perceive one another, and whether an individual's sense of self must be determined by the categories imposed by society.
The essay's most memorable passages resist a simple opposition between racial identity and individuality. Hurston neither denies the existence of racial difference nor allows it to account for the entirety of her experience.
Her reflections invite readers to consider a larger question: to what extent do the identities we inherit, claim, or receive from others determine who we are?
A Note on Historical Language
The essay contains racial terminology characteristic of its historical period, including words that are no longer generally considered appropriate in contemporary usage. These expressions have been preserved in the original text and should be understood within the historical and literary context in which Hurston wrote.
How It Feels to Be Coloured Me
by Zora Neale Hurston (1928)
I am coloured but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.
I remember the very day that I became coloured. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a coloured town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.
The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favourite place was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box for a born first- nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn’t mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I’d wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: “Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin’?” Usually automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably “go a piece of the way” with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first “welcome-to-our-state” Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.
During this period, white people differed from coloured to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me “speak pieces” and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they didn’t know it. The coloured 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.
But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little coloured girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown– warranted not to rub nor run.
But I am not tragically coloured. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world–I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
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. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said “On the line!” The Reconstruction said “Get set!” and the generation before said “Go!” I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think–to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the centre of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.
The position of my white neighbour is much more difficult. No brown spectre pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
I do not always feel coloured. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most coloured when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
For instance at Barnard. “Beside the waters of the Hudson” I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.
Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen–follow them exultingly. 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.
“Good music they have here,” he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
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 coloured.
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. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.
I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and coloured. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.
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 coloured glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place–who knows?
Originally published in The World Tomorrow, May 1928.
Notes on Language and Historical References
The following notes explain selected expressions and references that may be unfamiliar to contemporary readers.
Proscenium box: A privileged seating area in a theatre. Hurston compares her position on the gatepost to that of a spectator watching a performance.
Speak pieces: To recite memorized poems, speeches, or literary passages.
Parse-me-la: A reference to a popular dance associated with early twentieth-century entertainment.
Fast brown: An allusion to advertising language for colourfast fabrics, whose dyes were guaranteed not to fade or run.
Reconstruction: The period following the American Civil War, during which the former Confederate states were reintegrated into the United States and the legal status of formerly enslaved African Americans was transformed.
Hegira: A departure or migration. The word derives from the Prophet Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina.
Barnard College: A women's college in New York City, affiliated with Columbia University, where Hurston studied anthropology.
Assegai: A type of spear historically associated with peoples of southern Africa.
Forty-Second Street Library: The main building of the New York Public Library, famous for the two stone lions guarding its entrance.
Peggy Hopkins Joyce: An American socialite and celebrity of the 1920s, known for her wealth, marriages, and glamorous public image.
Boule Mich: A colloquial name for Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris.
First-water diamond: An older expression describing a diamond of exceptional quality or brilliance.
For Teachers
Suggested Grade Levels: 10–12
Genre: Personal essay / Literary nonfiction
Central Themes: Identity, belonging, racial consciousness, individuality, self-definition
Literary Features: Autobiographical narrative, metaphor, imagery, irony, shifts in tone, figurative language
Classroom Considerations
Hurston's essay offers opportunities to examine how personal experience shapes an individual's understanding of identity. Its movement between childhood memories, social encounters, and philosophical reflection makes it particularly suitable for close reading and literary analysis.
Students may benefit from an introduction to Jim Crow segregation and the Harlem Renaissance before reading. Attention should also be given to the essay's historical language and the differences among African American writers' responses to racial inequality during the period.
Although the essay's narrative passages are relatively accessible, its more abstract reflections and extended metaphors may require additional support.
Suggested Discussion Questions
How does Hurston's understanding of her racial identity change between Eatonville and Jacksonville?
What does Hurston suggest about the relationship between individual identity and social circumstances?
How does the contrast between Hurston and her companion at the jazz club contribute to the essay's exploration of difference?
What does the final metaphor of the coloured bags suggest about the similarities and differences among human beings?
To what extent does Hurston's emphasis on individual identity complicate our understanding of racial and social belonging?
Delphi Learning Press — Nonfiction Collection
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