From the beginning, Hurston startles us: "I remember the very day that I became colored." Why does Hurston insist that one becomes colored? What...

The shift that occurs for Hurston's younger self was not really felt until she was thirteen and sent to Jacksonville to attend school. She writes, as follows:

"I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more...I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror. I became a fast brown -- warranted not to rub nor run."

In Eatonville, a small, predominately black town where black people were marginal but known by the whites who passed through, she is left alone to be herself -- even though that sense of self concerns the black people around her. She makes a note of this when she recalls singing and dancing for whites in exchange for dimes. She recalls how the colored people "deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless." She is an innocent, unaware of how her song-and-dance routines satisfy white stereotypes about black people, but the locals love her anyway. 

In Jacksonville, a larger city, she is simply one among many black people -- all undesirable, all subjected to second-class citizenship. During the Jim Crow era, a black girl would have learned this from the signs posted all around her: "Coloreds Only," "Whites Only." She would not have seen these signs in Eatonville. In Jacksonville, it would have been made clear to her when and where she was welcome. In Eatonville, she would have been welcome everywhere. 

So, if you read the essay, you will see that there is no particular day on which she realizes that she is different from everyone else. Instead, it is something she learns in her day-to-day experiences in Jacksonville and, later, during her time at Barnard College. 

The notion of "becoming colored" is the realization that every young black person has of being "other," or outside of the white mainstream. It is learning that your presence as a black being is undesirable, questioned, suspect, and even hated.  

This, of course, is the social view of black identity. Hurston's view is quite different. She insists that she is "not tragically colored." She embraces black identity and, particularly, the artistic forms it has created. Toward the end of the essay, she describes herself at a jazz concert with a white friend. The music allows her to tap into something native and ancestral within her. The white friend, on the other hand, fails to connect with the music she has heard:

"He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored."

The notion of being colored takes on a different meaning here. It is a positive. Semantically, it works as a pun: she is "colored" in the sense of not being white, but she is also "colored" in the sense of having color -- vividness, authenticity. The white friend is dim and "pale" in comparison. He is the one lacking something.