How It Feels to Be Colored Me
Zora Neale Hurston 1928
This personal essay reflects on being Black through memories of childhood and encounters with white Americans. Hurston recalls watching travelers pass through Eatonville, Florida, from her seat on a gatepost.
7 pages 8 min reading time
- One of the most widely read and taught personal essays in American literature, and a key work of the Harlem Renaissance.
- Argues that a person is not born "colored" but becomes aware of race through how others treat her, as Hurston did when she left her all-Black hometown at age thirteen.
- Rejects the idea that being Black is a tragedy, with Hurston saying she is not "tragically colored" and refusing to see herself as a victim of history.
- Ends by picturing people as bags of mixed items poured out together, suggesting that underneath their different colors, people hold much the same contents.
- Has become a standard text in schools and colleges for discussing race and identity, and it inspired artist Glenn Ligon's well-known text paintings that repeat its lines.
Printed in a pacifist magazine
It first appeared in The World Tomorrow, a Christian magazine that argued against war, not in a Black publication.
Written as a college student
Hurston was finishing her degree at Barnard College, where she was often the only Black student in the room.
Drawn from a Harlem nightclub
One scene describes Hurston and a white friend hearing jazz together at a Harlem club, and reacting in very different ways.
Rescued from near obscurity
Long forgotten after Hurston died poor in 1960, it won new readers in a 1979 collection edited by Alice Walker.