Hurston songs

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 be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap 
and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. 
A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. 
Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags 
filled them in the first place–who knows

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 a
nd whose feelings are all hurt 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 or 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.