No, I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

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 that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. 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.

–Zora Neale Hurston from “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”, in The World Tomorrow (May 1928)

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