Title: How it Feels to be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston Plot Summary | LitCharts
Headings: How it Feels to be Colored Me Summary
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How it Feels to be Colored Me Summary

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How It Feels to Be Colored Me
Zora Neale Hurston opens the essay by explicitly stating that she is “colored,” or African-American, and that she has no desire to minimize that identity by claiming Native-American ancestry, as other African-Americans of her time might. She remembers the first day she felt colored. Before then, Hurston grew up in the black town of Eatonville, Florida. The only white people she saw were passing through on their way to Orlando. Although the locals paid no special attention to southern whites, who rode through on horses, they made a commotion over northern tourists who drove through in their cars, often coming out to the porch to observe them. Get the entire How it Feels to be Colored Me LitChart as a printable PDF. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
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Growing up, Hurston relished the visits of these traveling white people and didn’t bother with subtlety when watching them from her porch. She would even greet them and walk alongside them as they traveled, and she jokes that the Chamber of Commerce should have taken notice of her efforts. Hurston recalls that, in her childhood, she didn’t draw a distinction between white and colored people, only observing that the former rode through her town but never stopped.