Zora Neale Hurston recounts the day she began to feel colored in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Hurston does not recall feeling colored until after her thirteenth birthday because up until then she had lived in an “exclusively … colored town.” (1) Thus, surrounded by individuals coming from a similar culture background Hurston never felt different. However, Hurston began to feel colored once she moved schools to the white Jacksonville. Still though, Hurston does not feel too colored until she is “thrown against a sharp white background.” (3) When Hurston feels the most colored she experiences a sense of loneliness because she has no one of the same background to relate to at her current residence, unlike her previous home. However, sometimes feeling colored does not give her negative feedback, rather it empowers her. For instance, when Hurston visits a jazz club she revels in the music and feels as if her “face is painted red and yellow and her body is painted blue,” because she is “in the jungle and living the jungle way.” (3) After, when she looks around and realizes that her white friends did not experience the music as she did, Hurston is grateful to be colored. Because she has a greater appreciation for the rhythm and colors that her white friends cannot see. …show more content…
She does not feel colored when she is walking down Harlem City, rather she feels “as snooty as lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library.” (3) Hurston feels this way because it is then she realizes that she is not alone and that there are others like her. Similarly, she is surrounded by people that see and hear colors, rhythms, and music as she does. Thus, she does not feel colored because she is surrounded by people just like her. Likewise, in her childhood home she did not feel colored because she was surrounded by people like her. That allowed to just be herself rather than a colored girl, she was allowed to just be “everybody’s Zora.”