Zora Neale Hurston's essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" opens with the author declaring that she is colored, and that she offers no "extenuating circumstances" for being colored. She says she is "the only Negro in the United States" who doesn't claim Native American heritage.
Hurston says she "became colored" when she was thirteen and moved to Jacksonville, Florida for boarding school. Having grown up in Eatonville, an all-Black municipality, the only white people young Hurston saw were local Southerns on horses and Northern tourists in automobiles. Hurston treated the passing tourists like a theater show, and liked to watch from her gatepost, often chatting with the white people, and singing and dancing for them.
At thirteen, Hurston's father sent her to boarding school and, in Jacksonville, she found she no longer had the familiar identity of being the joyful Zora people knew in Eatonville but merely "a little colored girl." However, Hurston does not view herself as being "tragically colored." She doesn't mind being Black, and has no built-up sorrow over the matter. She defines herself in opposition to what she calls "the sobbing school of Negrohood"—Black Americans who dwell on the unfairness and injustices that come with being Black. Hurston sees the world as belonging to the strong, and she is "busy sharpening her oyster knife" in preparation for feasting on the world's opportunities.
Hurston acknowledges that her grandparents were slaves, but the fact does not make her depressed. Slavery is sixty years in the past, she says. In her opinion, the interventions made to end slavery have functioned well. Hurston sees her ancestors' sacrifices as having put her in a position to succeed in life. She finds it exciting to be, as a Black person, at the center of the American public's attention. Hurston states that it would be more difficult to be a white American because they have to live with the guilt of having enslaved others.
Hurston says that she doesn't always feel colored, and can tap back into the blissfully unaware mindset of her child self. But she does feel colored on the campus of Barnard in Manhattan. As one of the few Black people on campus, she equates herself to a dark rock upon which white waters surge. Despite the whiteness pressing in all around her, she remains herself.
Hurston also notices her race in situations like when she brings a white friend to a jazz bar. While she feels the music stir up her emotions, she feels she is connecting with her African ancestry in a way the white friend, who sits calmly, will never understand. He simply hears the music. She notices a stark difference being their racial identities.
Hurston mentions times when she does not feel her race but simply lives as herself, the "cosmic Zora" who belongs to no race or time. She sees herself as being like any other American, a fragment of the Great Soul that surges in the boundaries of the nation. When people discriminate against her, rather than become angry she is astonished that anyone wouldn't want to spend time in her company.
Ultimately, Hurston says she feels like a "brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall." She outlines an analogy in which there are other bags of different colors. Even if all the bags' contents were dumped out into a jumble, mixed together, and put back in the bags at random, she doesn't think there would be much of a difference. She suggests that God—the Great Stuffer of Bags—might have used this method to create human life in the first place, giving each human container a randomly composed, but ultimately equal soul.
