How It Feels to Be Colored Me

"How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (1928) is an essay by Zora Neale Hurston published in The World Tomorrow, described as a "white journal sympathetic to Harlem Renaissance writers".

After the death of her mother in 1904, at the age of thirteen, Hurston was forced to live with relatives in Jacksonville, Florida who worked as domestic servants.

She describes watching white people from her front porch, and dances and sings for them in return for money.

At the age of thirteen her mother passes away and Hurston was sent away to leave her home in Jacksonville to attend a boarding school.

[3]: 359  She mentions her experience at a jazz club with a white friend, where through the music she expresses the racial differences and distance between their lives.