Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston is the essay's author and narrator. In "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Hurston details how she grew up in an all-Black town in Florida, only becoming aware of her race later, when she went to boarding school in Jacksonville. Hurston writes of how she notices when her brown skin makes her stand out among all the white people on the campus of Barnard College. She also notices the difference between herself and her white friends in majority-Black spaces in New York, such as jazz clubs. Hurston experiences discrimination but says she does not feel angry; she is only surprised that someone would "deny themselves the pleasure of her company." Hurston states that she does not belong to "the sobbing school of Negrohood" and says there is nothing tragic about her Black identity. Rather than focus on the legacy and trauma of slavery, Hurston prefers to look toward the future and pursue her ambitions. At the end of the essay, she makes an analogy, likening different skin tones to different containers of more or less the same jumble of contents.
White Northern Tourists
When writing about her childhood, Hurston details how white tourists from the North would drive through her all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida. Hurston would try to talk to the tourists and would perform for them, singing and dancing. Sometimes they gave her dimes, but she says she wasn't performing for the money, she performed out of excitement, and a person would have had to pay her to stop.
The White Friend in New York
Hurston describes how she sometimes goes to jazz bars with white friends. Detailing one occasion, Hurston comments on how the music stirs up her emotions and how she dances wildly inside herself. Her white friend, by contrast, sits still and only hears the music; he does not feel the rhythm and melody with the same depth that she does.
