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How It Feels to Be Colored Me
Zora Neale Hurston
I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact
that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was
not an Indian chief.
I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the
little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white
people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native
whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in
automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they
passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously
from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch
to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got
out of the village.
The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery
seat to me. My favorite place was atop the gate-post. Proscenium box for a born first-
nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it.
I usually spoke to them in passing. I'd wave at them and when they returned my salute, I
would say something like this: "Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin'?" Usually
the automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I
would probably "go a piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of
my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would
be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first "welcome-to-our-state"
Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.
During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode
through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and
wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for
doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I
needed bribing to stop. Only they didn't know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They
deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to
them, to the nearby hotels, to the county-- everybody's Zora.
But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in
Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked
from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea
change. 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.
But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor
lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of
