<P> How It Feels To Be Colored Me (1928) is an essay by Zora Neale Hurston published in World Tomorrow as a "white journal sympathetic to Harlem Renaissance writers", illustrating her circumstance as an African American woman in the early 20th century in America . Most of Hurston's work involved her "Negro" characterization that were so true to reality, that she was known as an excellent anthropologist, "As an anthropologist and as an African - American writer during the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston was uniquely situated to explore the critical possibilities of marginality ." </P> <P> Coming from an all - black community in Eatonville, Florida, she lived comfortably due to her father holding high titles, John Hurston was a local Baptist preacher and the mayor of Eatonville . After the death of her mother in 1904, at the age of nine years old, Hurston was forced to live with relatives in Jacksonville who worked as domestic servants . In her essay Hurston references Jacksonville where she describes that she felt "thrown against a sharp white background". Eatonville and Jacksonville became the main influential settings for her essay "How it Feels To Be Colored Me" and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God . In both writings Hurston begins to investigate the true meaning of individuality and personality, through the usage of anecdotes, imagery, tone, and figurative language . Hurston's writings allow the reader to understand "personal expression to the arena of public discourse without losing the ties to their home cultures and languages" </P>

Where was how it feels to be colored me published