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know the subject only too well, and he is a monster. Do we have the |
capacity to make a decision鈥攏ow that Dr. Rodney has provided us with the |
knowledge of the subject? The people must answer. |
How It Feels to Be Colored Me |
by Zora Neale Hurston (1891 - 1960) |
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 gatepost. 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 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, a 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 of 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 |