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.