shalinialisha/ai-for-all · Datasets at Hugging Face

text stringlengths 0 305
know the subject only too well, and he is a monster. Do we have the
capacity to make a decision—now 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

know the subject only too well, and he is a monster. Do we have the

capacity to make a decision—now 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