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 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-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,
