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Title: How it feels to be colored me
Author: Zora Neale Hurston
Release date: May 5, 2024 [eBook #73549]
Language: English
Original publication: Carlisle, Mass: Applewood Books, 1928
Credits: Carla Foust, Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOW IT FEELS TO BE COLORED ME ***
How It Feels
to Be Colored Me
By
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 for 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-go-in’?” Usually 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 Negrohood who hold that nature
somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all
but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life,
I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little
pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world--I am too
busy sharpening my oyster knife.
Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter
of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty
years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is
doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American
out of a potential slave said “On the line!” The Reconstruction said
“Get set!” and the generation before said “Go!” I am off to a flying
start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep.
Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not
with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through
my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for
glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to
think--to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much
praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center
of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh
or to weep.
The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown
specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark
ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one
has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious
Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am
thrown against a sharp white background.
For instance at Barnard. “Beside the waters of the Hudson” I feel my
race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon,
and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the
waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.
Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our
midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I
sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white
person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that
we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way
that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no
time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts
the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies.
This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks
the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it
breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow
them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop;
I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww!
I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red
and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a
war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what,
I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their
lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we
call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting
motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.
“Good music they have here,” he remarks, drumming the table with his
fingertips.
Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him.
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.
At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a
certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling
as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library,
for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce
on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees
knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The
cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal
feminine with its string of beads.
I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and
colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within
the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry.
It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my
company? It’s beyond me.
But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against
a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and
yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of
small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an
empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door
long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a
road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of
things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little
fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is
the jumble it held--so much like the jumble in the bags could they be
emptied that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled
without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass
more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of
Bags filled them in the first place--who knows?
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOW IT FEELS TO BE COLORED ME ***
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