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Hurston says she grew up in Eatonville, Florida, an all-Black town, where white people were only travelers passing through. She watched them from her front porch and performed songs and dances for them for spare change. At thirteen she was sent to school in Jacksonville, and she writes that there she 'became colored': she had not changed, but the setting now marked her by race, and she found this out 'in my heart as well as in the mirror.'
Racial identity is not a fixed inner feeling. It is set off by the setting, strongest when a person is the minority against a contrasting background. Hurston puts it as 'I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,' and says that at other times she has no race at all and is simply herself.
Hurston rejects the story that being Black is a wound or a grievance, and refuses to join the 'sobbing school of Negrohood.' She says slavery is 'the price I paid for civilization' and is past, and that the struggle puts her in the thick of the race, where she can win or lose. Taking charge of how one's position is interpreted turns an assigned disadvantage into a source of energy.
Hurston describes sitting beside a white companion in a Harlem cabaret while a jazz orchestra plays. The music sweeps her into wild, 'primitive' feeling, painting herself and raising a spear, while he sits unmoved and says only 'Good music they have here.' In that moment the gap between them feels vast. She is 'so colored' while he is 'so pale,' showing race felt as a difference in how people respond, not just in how they look.
Hurston pictures each person as a brown, white, red, or yellow bag stuffed with a jumble of objects: broken glass, a rusty knife, a dried flower, precious stones. If all the bags were emptied and refilled, the contents would hardly differ. The color of the outside is incidental to shared, messy human contents, and she suggests the 'Great Stuffer of Bags' may have filled them all the same way.