How It Feels to Be Colored Me

"How It Feels To Be Colored Me" by Florida native Zora Neale Hurston was originally published in The World Tomorrow in May 1928. In this autobiographical piece about her own color, Hurston reflects on her early childhood in an all-black Florida town and her first experiences in life feeling "different." In this beautiful piece, Hurston largely focuses on the similarities we all share and on her own self-identity in the face of difference. "Through it all, I remain myself." This short work is part of Applewood’s "American Roots" series, tactile mementos of American passions by some of America’s most famous writers and thinkers.

"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."