How It Feels To Be Colored Me

The front porches of Eatonville—one of the earliest incorporated black towns and a place in which African-Americans regularly held positions of authority, after their emancipation from slavery—are spaces where the black inhabitants of the town “got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village,” according to Hurston (par. 2, line 9). The equivalence between blacks and whites looking at each other as objects of curiosity underscores the extent to which Eatonville is a place that is associated with black identity that assumes equality with white identity. The irony of Hurston’s sense of freedom here is that it is one made possible only because ofabsolute separation and distance from the segregated world outside.

The gatepost on the edge of Eatonville, where Hurston performs for and attempts to hitch rides with tourists as a child, serves to emphasize Hurston’s confidence and her intellectual curiosity about the world. Hurston’s emphasis on the gatepost as being much more exposed than the interiors and porches of the houses also serves as a means to characterize her as a child who was much bolder than the other members of her town. This distinguishing trait allows Hurston to make an early