Zora Neale Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida, an all-Black community, in 1891.¹ While in New York attending Barnard College and studying anthropology under Franz Boas, she made significant contributions to the Harlem Renaissance. “From the 1930s through the 1960s, Hurston was the most prolific and accomplished black woman writer in America.”² In spite of her historic accomplishments, Hurston spent her last years unnoticed and died in obscurity in 1960. It was not until the 1970s, when writers such as Alice Walker made a conscious effort to restore Hurston's status as the ‘foremother’ of African American literature, that Hurston was awarded the attention she deserved.³ Since then Hurston's work has inspired many African American writers and feminist thinkers. Presently, she is best known to the general public as the author of the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). In recent years, there seems to be a “Zora fever,” as manifested in the journals, conferences, and festivals devoted to her. Yet, despite the enthusiasm for re-discovering everything written by Hurston, one of her earlier works, the play Color Struck, remains neglected.

In 1925, Hurston wrote Color Struck for Opportunity's Literary Contest. Both the play and Hurston's short story, Spunk, were awarded second prize. These awards brought Hurston to the attention of the most important and promising Black literary talents of the Harlem Renaissance. She seized the opportunity and “jump(ed) at the sun” as her mother had encouraged her. Eager to remind people of her accomplishment, she walked into the party following the Opportunity Award Dinner, flung her “long, bright-colored scarf” around her neck, and dramatically called out, “Calaaaah struuuck.”⁴ However, despite this flamboyant entrance and Alice Walker's subsequent retelling of this antic of Hurston's, Color Struck, has never gained much of Hurston's biographers' or critics' attention. Until today, references to the play in the bibliographies and biographies of Hurston amount to little more than this anecdote of her eccentricity. For example, Robert Hemenway, discusses Color Struck in only one paragraph; he labels it “an apprentice work” and then devotes his attention to her other literary works.⁵ Warren J. Carson, one of the few scholars who has written about Color Struck, argues that her plays have not generated enough critical attention, “particularly when we consider that it was a play that brought her to the attention of Harlem Renaissance circles, and when we consider her life-long interest in drama and the stage.”⁶ As a theatrical debut, Color Struck has been judged amateurish in comparison to Hurston's short story, Sweat, written at approximately the same time. Hemenway hails Sweat as “remarkable,” and “her best fiction of the period.”⁷ Yet the play deserves greater scholarly scrutiny if one seeks to reconstruct a more complete image of Hurston. I intend to re-evaluate Color Struck through a study of the content and structure of the play, the techniques employed by the dramatist, and the social and cultural significance of the play itself. I also wish to unravel some of the mystifying contradictions in Hurston's personalities by looking at Hurston's choice of topic, colorism, against the background of 1920s' Harlem, and her use of “camouflage” as a survival tactic in the male-dominated Harlem Renaissance.⁸ Lastly, by restoring Color Struck to our memory of Hurston, I wish to argue for Hurston's place as a pioneer in African American drama of social commentary.

Color Struck: A Play in Four Scenes, is set in the first decade of this century. It opens with a boisterous scene on a Jim Crow coach in which a group of black people gaily board the train bound for St. Augustine for a cakewalk contest. Within this group are John and Emmaline, the most promising contestants. On their journey Emma accuses John of paying ‘unwarranted' attention to every light-skinned girl he meets, especially Effie, who is also on the train. In Scene Two Hurston transports the audience to the anteroom to the dance hall where the contestants are feasting on home-made pies and fried chicken and amusing themselves before the contest. Emma's jealousy and suspicion strike again when she sees John with Effie. Emma asks John to quit the contest and go home with her. John adamantly refuses and enters the dance hall alone, leaving Emma behind. In the next scene (the cakewalk scene), John and his new partner, Effie, win the contest. Emma remains alone on stage after the crowd carries John and Effie away in triumph. Scene Three, the final scene, takes place twenty years later. John finally finds Emma again and asks her to marry him. In the course of their reunion Emma misconstrues John's efforts to comfort her ill, light-skinned daughter and rebukes him. Frustrated and angered by Emma's obsession with skin color, John leaves. During the delay resulting from this misunderstanding, Emma's daughter dies for lack of medical care.

On the surface, the play is divided into two parts: the comic and festive drama of the first two scenes, in which Hurston emphasizes “authentic” dialects and portrayals of the folk, and the last scene which has greater similarities to the style of genteel writers, such as Angelina Grimke and Georgia Douglas Johnson. The episodic structure was a novel practice at a time when most one-act plays followed a straight plot line from the beginning to the end. The resulting montage-like effect of Color Struck may have resulted from Hurston's inexperience as a playwright, but it may well have been a deliberate choice. Regardless, she should receive credit for experimenting with a new form and attempting to offer American theatre something untraditional. In addition, the juxtaposition of the comic and tragic elements of this play can be viewed as an attempt to unite folk drama and social protest plays. Hurston depicted the social phenomenon of color consciousness together with folk music and dance. This amalgamation may have been a covert challenge to the limited function of art advocated by prominent leaders of the Harlem Renaissance.

Hurston's attention to social issues has been overlooked by scholars who depict Color Struck “not a very effective drama” or criticize the play for its loosely connected structure.⁹ These scholars are only partially correct. The play appears loosely connected and ineffective when it is only read. But we have every reason to believe that Hurston did not write this play merely for the pleasure of reading; she expected the play to be produced. Hurston was introduced to theatre at an early age; while a teenager, she worked as a wardrobe girl in a Gilbert and Sullivan repertory company. Moreover, she attended Howard University when the Howard Players was flourishing. Alain Locke, who was responsible for introducing Hurston to the chief editor of Opportunity in 1925, was one of the Players most enthusiastic supporters. Later, she was admitted into Stylus, the campus literary club formed by Locke and Montgomery Gregory, organizer and director of the Howard Players.¹⁰ Throughout her life, she showed great interest in having her plays produced,¹¹ and even thought of “redoing the railroad coach scene from her play Color Struck.¹² In theatrical production, music, light, choreographic movement, and scenery would help to to integrate the themes of the play into a single entity. Color Struck was already composed with the music and dance elements needed to integrate the first three scenes and compensate for the lack of dialogue in Scene Three. The greatest challenge is the ending, which seems to be of a different style than the previous scenes. Critics have ultimately argued that the mixture of comic and tragic elements seems to bring confusion, hinder a full development of the scenes, and thus weaken the force of the play.¹³

If the reader avoids the initial temptation to type this work as a hybrid folk drama, the play actually displays great dramatic effect. In every scene Hurston skillfully mixes the earthy festival spirit with the journey toward Emma's tragic downfall. The first scene opens with witty wordplay between the passengers on board. The excitement this generates is further heightened by the music and dancing. The argument between John and Emma is soon resolved and a moment of intimacy is shared between them. But by the curtain's fall Emma and John are alone on stage, and the scene ends on Emma's ominous line, “Just for myself alone is the only way I know how to love.”¹⁴ The next scene also starts with a festival atmosphere. People around John and Emma are enjoying themselves, but against the background of the jubilant dance hall, Emma and John have another vehement quarrel. Hurston creates an atmopshere in which, in the midst of a bright and joyful space, a cloud of darkness encompasses the two of them. Again, the scene ends when everyone leaves for the party; only this time Emma, bitter and sorrowful, is left alone on stage. Scene Three is the stunning cakewalk scene. The atmosphere is gay, boisterous, and almost frantic. Lynda Marion Hill describes a cakewalk dance as “a precursor to chorus-line dancing in musical theatre. A high-kicking movement, half strolling, half prancing … [in which] the spotlight is on music … and the spectacular bowing, petticoat flinging, silk hat-tipping, graceful gesturing, precision strutting and parading, singing hand-clapping accompaniment.”¹⁵ Emma, in contrast to the public celebration, is rendered wordless. The first part of the play then ends in a note of frenzied excitement when Effie and John are carried away in triumph by the cheering crowd, which obscures Emma from the view of the audience. Yet the silent figure of Emma still looms over the dance hall, foreshadowing a fall after this climactic moment. With the sounds of exhilaration still ringing in the ears of the audience, the fate of Emma and John remains unresolved. In Scene Four, the audience discovers Emma sitting alone in a gloomy shack. According to the stage directions, the stage is dark (98); the foreboding darkness from previous scenes has accumulated and is now materialized on stage. The scene presents an astonishing contrast to the festivity of the previous moment, and at the same time an inevitable denouement following the crescendo of Emma's sorrow, anger and frustration. Instead of indicating an ineffective drama, this ending, with thoughtful direction, can impress upon the audience the destructive force of colorism and racism.

Moreover, as I have stated previously, Hurston's effort to combine a representation of the “authentic” folk and an implicit critique of colorism may have been a covert challenge to the heated debates between leaders of the Harlem Renaissance over the function of art. The two literary giants of the Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, pointed to two distinct directions for the artistic output of the New Negro. Alain Locke advocated “Art for Art's Sake.” He rejected “overt propaganda and ‘racial rhetoric’ for the most part as obstacles to literary excellence and universal acceptance.”¹⁶ By contrast, Du Bois made clear his objection to Locke's proposal when he proclaimed, “I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”¹⁷ Although the two men seldom acknowledged the similarities in their philosophies, Locke included Du Bois' article of social protest, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” in his era-defining anthology, The New Negro, and Du Bois also sided with Locke in the promotion of Negro folk art, especially in theatre. Hurston accepted their guidance and their rhetoric with some suspicion. She recognized the barrier between the two views to be superficial, while many scholars of the Harlem Renaissance still fail to do so. The artificial divisions between colors in Color Struck physicalizes and reflects the superficiality of this barrier. Furthermore, I contend that, when read with an awareness of marasa consciousness, Hurston's work can be seen as a challenge to the artificial binaries between art and politics. Vèvè A. Clark has argued that this marasa consciousness can be used to interpret diasporic African literature. According to Clark, “Marasa is a mythical theory of textual relationships based on the Haitian Vodoun sign for the Divine Twins, the marasa. … Marasa states the oppositions and invites participation in the formation of another principle entirely. … marasa consciousness invites us to imagine beyond the binary.”¹⁸ The play illustrates that the two ends can be brought together not only through the two-part structure but also through recognition of Hurston's ability to embed social protest in a genuine folk drama. By doing this, Hurston created something new and vivacious.

The story of Hurston's project takes an ironic turn when it is noted that one of the three judges for the drama section in the Opportunity's Literary Contest was Montgomery Gregory. He and Alain Locke generally shared the same view of the New Negro art. With Locke's assistance, Gregory founded the Howard Players. The ostensibly non-political purpose of the organization was, according to Gregory, “to fashion a drama that shall merit the respect and win the admiration of the world.”¹⁹ Because of Hurston's international camouflage, the aspect of social criticism in Color Struck had been overlooked. Hence Gregory, by awarding Color Struck a prize, presumably considered it a work engaged more in folk art than in social protest. This interpretation of Color Struck as a work of pure art rather than of social consciousness is further manifested by the fact that the play was published for the first time in Fire!! in 1926.

Fire!! was an ambitious enterprise taken up by the younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance including Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas, and Hurston. They aspired to “create a magazine which would be unconcerned ‘with sociological problems or propaganda.’ Fire!! was to be a ‘non-commercial product interested only in the arts.’” What was more central in these young artists' aesthetics was the demand to go to the “proletariat rather than to the bourgeoisie for characters and material, … to people who still retained some individual race qualities and who were not totally white American in every respect save color of skin.”²⁰ That Color Struck was included in a magazine that repudiated any art with a social message is somewhat puzzling. But Hemenway's interpretation of the play may demonstrate one way to read Color Struck according to the literary criteria of Fire!!:

Its subject is the intraracial color-consciousness exercised by the bourgeoisie, and it addresses those who envy whites biologically or intellectually. It is an account of a poor woman so self-conscious about her dark skin that she is unable to accept the love of a good man. … [I]t comes to life only when the folk of north-central Florida engage their wit in friendly verbal competition. … but its theme is consistent with Fire!!'s aims. It celebrated the proletariat, and it condemned a common bourgeois attitude.²¹

In this type of reading, Color Struck becomes a play that recounts a personal tragedy that Emma has brought upon herself. It attacks the Black middle-class and all those who accept their values; it thus glorifies the proletariat and those who reject the bourgeois ideology. Instead of commanding the reader's sympathy, Emma is viewed unsympathetically, and John, ironically, is identified as the victim of her jealousy. According to this interpretation, Hurston, by dramatizing Emma's tragic ending, condemned the self-pity and self-indulgence that result from accepting the bourgeois color-complex.²² The preconception of Hurston as a folklorist who lacked concern for the social plight of her people is held by many of Hurston's critics and has been the foundation for attacks against Hurston's character and works alike. In their eagerness to criticize Hurston for being “more interested in folklore and dialect than in social criticism” and for neglecting “racial tensions,”²³ these critics overlook the social problem raised by the play. It is disturbing to think that a play such as Color Struck can be interpreted as a criticism of the victims of colorism, instead of a criticism of colorism itself.

Such a misreading implies a forgetfulness of history. Unquestionably, John is depicted as a kind and faithful man throughout the play, and his frustration with Emma's paranoia warrants the audience's sympathy. However, the play is not about a good man rejected by an unworthy woman obsessed with her own skin color. Rather, the influence colorism exerts upon Emma is the unifying force of the whole play. The folk scene, the cakewalk, the dance, and the music all are the background for the tragedy of a dark-skinned woman. Amid the play's colorful events, songs, and humor, the plot is propelled by Emma's growing jealousy, obsession, rage, fear, and desperation. And finally, only when the stage is stripped bare of color and excitement in the last scene is the pathos felt most forcefully. Emma's desolation is materialized on stage through the darkness, the sound of the rocking chair, her “monotonous gait,” and “a dry sob now and then” as the curtain falls (102). To see Emma in a sympathetic light, to understand her obsession, one needs to acknowledge the existence of colorism. Hurston assumed her audience would know this form of prejudice, and at the same time, challenged her audience to face its ramifications. The unspoken history of prejudice and paranoia is embedded in Emma's own prejudice and paranoia. The invisible scar on the Black soul is shown through Emma's brutal denial of her self-worth.²⁴

The seeds of Emma's colorism had been sown even before the first shipment of African slaves arrived in the New World, when women were raped on slave ships. The history of colorism is entrenched in the history of slavery. Rapes, sexual exploitation, and, though relatively rare in the earliest periods, legal and illegal interracial marriages, resulted in a wide spectrum of skin tones among African Americans. In the beginning, the color caste system was created and propagated by white racists who believed that white skin represented advanced civilization, intelligence, and morals. The light-skinned slaves were then used as house servants since they were considered to be closer to the White race. The situation was complicated by the high proportion of female house servants raped or sexually exploited by the men in the house. Even after the Civil War, it was still much easier for lighter-skinned ex-slaves to find employment or education with Whites. Because from the beginning, the light-skinned Black Americans had a better chance to improve their lives socially and economically than people of darker skin, and also because the imprinting of the dominant ideology carries with it the idea of the color caste, intraracial color discrimination developed.²⁵ Emma's anger towards light-skinned women and her self-hatred burst forth in violent tirades:

Oh—them yaller wenches! How I hate ‘em! They gets everything they wants—. … Oh, them half whites, they gets everything, they gets everything everybody else wants! The men, the jobs—everything! The whole world is got a sign on it. Wanted: Light Colored. Us blacks was made for cobble stones (96-7).

To argue that Emma here is being irrational or that she is merely carried away by her jealousy denies the genuine injustice she experiences; she is expressing the historical anguish suffered by dark-skinned Blacks.²⁶

In order to further understand the criticism embedded in the play and to surmise the reason behind Hurston's creation of as “unsympathetic” a character as Emma, one must understand the social and cultural context of the 1920s. By the 1920s, although interracial marriages were still illegal in the South and in many northern states, “marriages between black men and white women had increased significantly.”²⁷ In the 1930s, in an article entitled “America's Changing Color Line,” Heba Jannath went so far as to claim that America was becoming Black through a steady increase of the mixed population.²⁸ Nevertheless, the myth of the “tragic mulatto” did not disappear with the increased number of mulattoes. Instead, the ability of many to pass as white allowed them to disappear from the Black population. The “vanishing mulatto” became, by 1925, what editorials referred to as “one of the most important, the most enigmatic, and romantic small groups on earth.”²⁹ Through the 1920s mulattoes remained one of the favorite inspirations of aspiring writers.³⁰ “Let us train ourselves to see beauty in black,” Du Bois called out in 1920.³¹ Yet, despite the praise of Blacks' innate beauty by leaders such as Locke, Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey, the public perception of beauty had been molded by the dominant, white values. The theatrical practice during the era, the “Roaring Twenties,” clearly reveals the adoption of the dominant aesthetic standard. Encouraged by the raving success of the all Black musical Shuffle Along in 1921, Black musicals became a sensation for both Black and white audiences. Unfortunately, the success of musicals, instead of affirming Black beauty, only furthered the color caste system. In order to be accepted into the mainstream culture and attract more clientele, most of the imitative musicals and revues employed exclusively light-skinned actresses. Donald Bogle points out that “the black chorus line was … distinguished by the fact that its members were almost cafe-au-lait cuties. … In photographs of the old chorus lines, occasionally a brown face appears, but there is never a dark one.”³² In addition to the theatrical reinscription of the color caste system, the film industry developed its own color “casting” system for Black actresses. Similar to the trend in literature, the tragic mulatto had been “a movie maker's darling” since the silent period of motion pictures. The popularity enjoyed by movies only highlighted the appearances of light-skinned Black actresses as the romantic interest, and, the darker-skinned actresses, in contrast, as maids or other minor roles. Even in the more than twenty films of the most famous Black film maker, Oscar Micheaux, only light-skinned Black performers could be found.³³

On the one hand, Hurston, writing in 1924 and 1925, was reflecting these cultural and aesthetic trends. On the other hand, Color Struck also anticipated the series of light-skinned movie stars who were about to appear on the silver screen with the emergence of sound motion pictures. They would play an important role in defining the meaning of Black beauty up until the 1950s. By the 1960s Black Americans would directly attack the bleaching of the Black beauty standard and reaffirm the “Black is Beautiful” credo. Curiously, despite such an obviously provocative title, with few exceptions, discussions of Hurston's play did not address the sociopolitical issues raised by the term “color struck.” The play is still seen as the personal tragedy of a color-struck woman rather than an allegory about the community.³⁴ In the face of blatant interracial racism, discussions of intraracial colorism have been silenced. Especially in a time when White racism was being collectively attacked, and Black pride was fiercely asserted, Black audiences neither expected nor welcomed criticism from within the community.³⁵ Moreover, during periods of race consolidation, such as the Harlem Renaissance, outspoken people who engaged in self-criticism were often denounced as traitors who washed their dirty linen in front of Whites. With a theme such as colorism, a suspicious and also embarrassing subject for Black leaders as well as the Black public, Color Struck would not win approval without the disguise of a play celebrating the folk spirit. As Hurston was usually determined to have her works published and plays produced, she naturally used the tactics of camouflage—presenting (and seeing) this play as a story with a Southern folk flavor—when writing and promoting Color Struck.

Hurston constantly subverted the traditional and dominant ideology behind a facade of conformity. Since Alice Walker rediscovered Hurston, the ambiguities of Hurston's personalities and politics have been explained as a means of survival in the white-centered and male-dominant literary world. “If the Renaissance had a gender, it was male,” argues Erlene Stetson.³⁶ Ralph D. Story also emphasizes Hurston's role as a “southern black woman challenging the traditional position of women and exceeding the aesthetic space they had been traditionally provided.”³⁷ In order to have Color Struck published, Hurston chose not to flaunt the social criticism in the play or to explicitly contradict the editorial criteria of Fire!!. She thus avoided discussing any deeper intentions for writing Color Struck. In this context, the play serves to defend Hurston against critics who criticize her as “a woman predisposed to identify more with whites (and whose) parents had large quantities of white blood in their veins,”³⁸ or accuse her of being a colorist simply because Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God is light-skinned.³⁹ Walker suggests that Hurston chose a light-skinned woman as the protagonist for her novel not because she was a colorist, but “because Hurston was not blind and therefore saw that black men (and black women) have been, and are, colorist to an embarrassing degree.”⁴⁰ By using a light-skinned mulatto heroine, she improved her chances of obtaining patronage, having her work published, and surviving as an artist. But unlike Jessie Fauset's mulatto heroines who are cultured and fragile in the tradition of the tragic mulatto, Hurston's Janie marries three times, kills her abusive third husband, and faces life on her own. Janie is indeed an “anti-romantic symbol of the mulatto ‘type’.”⁴¹ I contend that Hurston used the strategy of camouflage—seemingly saying (or showing) something, while signifying (or pointing towards) another.⁴² This act of camouflage enabled Hurston to challenge the status quo, even inside the Harlem community, and to compete against her male contemporaries.

To counteract the traditional devaluation of Hurston's works based on her personal behavior and statements Alice Walker and other scholars advocate an aesthetic approach to appreciating Hurston's art. They succeed in re-establishing an image of Hurston so confident and triumphant in her ability to be who she was, that she was able to declare, “I love myself when I am laughing … and then again when I am looking mean and impressive,” and to wonder, “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.”⁴³ Nevertheless, Hurston's behavior and a number of her statements belied this image of self-confidence. As an adolescent, Hurston “grew self-conscious about her looks, feeling that no man could really care for her.”⁴⁴ The willful subterfuge regarding her age also shows that Hurston cared about how she was seen by others, especially as a woman.⁴⁵ In addition, she seemed to be quite self-conscious about her skin color. When commenting on the novelist Fannie Hurst's desire to be seen with Hurston in public, she claimed “It was because Hurst liked the way [my] dark skin highlighted her own lily-like complexion.”⁴⁶ Hurston's physical appearance is a matter of some dispute. According to some sources, Hurston was “reddish light brown,” “big-boned, with freckles and high cheek bones.”⁴⁷ Regardless of her genuine skin color, judging from Hurston's own words and obsession with her own skin color, she thought of herself as a dark-skinned woman. Supported by these accounts of Hurston, a conclusion can be justly drawn that Hurston did not write Color Struck with only folk art in mind, nor did she write it from a completely objective perspective. She likely wrote the play out of her personal experience, and the writing became an outlet for her angst as a “dark-skinned” woman.

Having been raised in an all-Black community, Hurston naturally experienced ‘culture shock’ when she arrived in a city that judged her by her skin color. In her essay, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,” Hurston recollected the day she became “colored”:

I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville … as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown—warranted not to rub nor run.⁴⁸

Given the psychological significance of the contradiction between the childhood affirmation of her Black self and her experience in the world outside Eatonville, it is not surprising that Hurston's persona is rich with contradictions for her contemporaries and later generations. Hemenway summarizes the complexity of Hurston's personality by claiming that Hurston appeared to be “a woman who rejoiced in print about the beauty of being black. … [Though] she retreated into a privacy that protected her sense of self; publicly, she avoided confrontation by announcing that she didn't look at a person's color, only one's worth.”⁴⁹ Therefore, when Hurston lamented bourgeois colorism and praised the beauty of being Black, she could at the same time show compassion towards the self-deprecatory Emma, a fellow victim of dark skin and racism.

In 1926, Du Bois wrote to Hurston, “No black people ever considered their color unusual or unbeautiful [sic] until they were taught to through others and then could only be taught this through physical force.”⁵⁰ Intraracial prejudice is caused by interracial discrimination; the reality of colorism always carries with it the invisible presence of racism. Acknowledging this reality allows us to see operating in Color Struck Sandra Richards' notion of the absent potential. Richards argument can be applied to Color Struck once we understand that “[t]he unwritten, or an absence from the script, is a potential presence implicit in performance.”⁵¹ In the opening scene of Color Struck, without the presence of a single white person, the stigma of racism is poignantly felt in the Jim Crow railroad car. Emma's near white daughter also suggests a white or half-white male presence. Because she is not married, Emma may have been raped by a white or near-white man, or she may have deliberately sought out a white heritage for her offspring in order to save her child from the “curse” of dark skin. The entrance of the white doctor, the only white character in the play, is stunning and alarming. Earlier, when John suggests that Emma go and find a “colored” doctor, reasoning that “There must be some good colored ones around here now,” Emma responds with disgust, “I wouldn't let one of ‘em tend my cat if I had one!” (101) The appearance of the white doctor again illustrates the disdain Emma has for everything Black, herself included. Ironically, even though she trusts white doctors more than she trusts Black ones, the white doctor is ultimately unable to save her daughter. The presence of the white doctor utterly destroys the illusion of a homogeneous, all-Black world. From the absent white presence in the Jim Crow car in the first scene, to the authority assumed by the white doctor, even though he is unable to save Emma's daughter, Hurston brings the formerly invisible yet substantial white oppression into the view of the audience. According to Sandra Richards, “[the previous] frivolity is happening within a circumscribed space of racism. Implicit behind the laughter is a painful reality that these characters have chosen to ignore temporarily.”⁵² Confined to a racist environment, the tragic ending of Color Struck, far from being a stylistic incongruity, has lurked from the beginning in the midst of the characters' laughter.

Raised in a Southern rural all-Black community, Hurston was deeply rooted in the folk culture that was being celebrated in the Harlem Renaissance. Unlike other literary figures from a mostly middle-class background, who served and praised the folk from an elevated and detached position, Hurston spoke from the depth of her heart. She came from the folk. For most of her contemporaries, Hurston represented the folk. Undoubtedly, when she wrote Color Struck, she was speaking for Emma and her people. They could be striving to live up to the bourgeois standard, but they still retained their customs and traditions, despised or, at best, pitied by the very people they tried to emulate. By using a dark-skinned heroine, Hurston defied the bourgeois sensibility and also the convention of the tragic mulatto. The characterization of Emma works against the usual depictions of dark-skinned women. Instead of being a desexualized “mammie,” Emma is flirtatious, sexy, and, to John at least, physically attractive. She is capable of all human emotions: love, hate, tenderness, passion and jealousy. The impact of the internalized color consciousness is so devastating that Emma is unable to trust John with her own light-skinned daughter, and this mistrust eventually causes her daughter's death. With the death of this child, Hurston dramatized the ferocity of institutionalized colorism. Likewise, through Color Struck, Hurston addressed the contradictions between the efforts of the aspiring Black genteel class to gain recognition within the dominant society and the implicit self-hatred manifested in the media and the public attitude toward assimilation. The play implicitly attacks the “politics of respectability” advocated by middle-class Black women, as an effort to integrate at the risk of losing respect for whatever is Black. The obvious class differences between these elite bourgeois women, or “Club women”—so named for their involvement in social or religious “clubs” designed to organize Black communities and to seek the acceptance and assimilation of Black people by the dominant society—and those they meant to convert werereflected in the differences between John, who is light-skinned, and Emma, after an interval of twenty years. Emma's view of herself: “Ah aint got a whole lot lak you. Nobody don't git rich in no white-folks' kitchen, nor in de washtub. You know Ah aint no school-teacher an' nothin' lak dat” (100), sets her economically and socially apart from John and the educated middle class. The movement of the “politics of respectability” sought to uplift the lower class to meet the standards of the dominant society, but its advocates overlooked the price the poor and the uneducated had to pay to achieve this form of “racial uplift.” They were instructed by the educated to abandon their old values and to conform to those of the dominant culture, and that was easily interpreted to mean that whatever was black was improper and unwanted.⁵³ The price could be as high as, in the case of Emma's family, one's happiness and even one's life.

At a time when the “race problem” was the most popular theme for writers, and when solidarity among Blacks was enthusiastically demanded, it took honesty and courage to criticize internalized racism so harshly. Even today, few people have addressed the question as openly in their literary works as Hurston. In her novels Quicksand and Passing Nella Larsen attempted to subvert the “popular and traditional genteel image of the near-white female,” but her criticism of color consciousness comes from the point of view of light-skinned women who have been suffocated by “upper class Black gentility” and exploited by whites as “exotic primitives.”⁵⁴ In the end, Larsen's heroines are still presented as tragic, and the miseries of their dark-skinned counterparts are overshadowed by their own tragedies. Few other plays have shown the effect of the internal color complex in such a grim and harsh light as Color Struck. It can be seen as the forerunner of plays that question the self-affirmation of a Black identity or the definition of beauty in the Black community, such as Adrienne Kennedy's Funny House of a Negro (1964), Elaine Jackson's Paper Dolls (1983), and George Wolfe's The Colored Museum (1986). To date, the play has not been given the attention and evaluation it deserves. Devoting greater attention to the structure, content, and background of Color Struck not only helps us understand Hurston's work and life more thoroughly but also repudiates the charge against Hurston of nonchalance towards racism. Furthermore, such an effort shows Hurston to be a ground-breaking dramatist who intentionally combined aesthetics and social protest, courageously raised issues once silenced, and openly challenged the status quo from inside the Harlem Renaissance, a movement to which she made a profound contribution.

Notes

1. I am grateful for Professor Sandra Richards' comments and her class, African American Women Playwrights, which initiated my interest in Zora Neale Hurston and Color Struck. Any omissions or errors are, of course, my own.

2. Lillie P. Howard, “Zora Neale Hurston,” in Afro-American Writers from the Harlem Renaissance to 1940, vol. 51 of Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. Trudier Harris (Detroit, Mich.: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1987), 133. Many other biographical works on Hurston listed the year of her birth as 1901. According to Howard, Hurston “kept the exact year of her birth such a secret that it was only until recently that a conclusive date, 1891, was uncovered” (134).

3. Lately, there has been also an effort to re-evaluate Hurston's ethnographic works in the American South, and to re-interpret her fictions as ethnography. For example, Kamala Visweswaran resurrects Hurston's ethnography as one of the forerunners of feminist ethnography in Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

4. Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 60.

5. Ibid., 47.

6. Warren J. Carson, “Hurston as Dramatist: The Florida Connection,” in Zora in Florida, eds. Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel (Orlando, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 1991), 121. Carson may have exaggerated the role of Color Struck in Hurston's life. Her short story Spunk alone could have brought her to the Opportunity Award Dinner and made her immediately famous. It was, in fact, Spunk that drew novelists Annie Nathan Meyer's and Fannie Hurst's attention to Hurston's genius. Meyer, one of the founders of Barnard College, then obtained a scholarship for Hurston at Barnard; Hurst employed Hurston for more than a year. See Hemenway, 20-1. Sandra L. Richards in “Writing the Absent Potential: Drama, Performance, and the Canon of African-American Literature,” in Performativity and Performance, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Andrew Parker (New York: Routledge, 1995), also discusses Color Struck. Richards's article concentrates on the “absent potential,” that is, the potential meanings and readings that can be embodied and signified simply by the actual presence of the actors on stage, and uses Color Struck and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom to demonstrate her point. In her new book, Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston, Lynda Marion Hill devotes a short section to Color Struck. She uses this play as a means to study Hurston's participation in the “authenticity debate.” See Lynda Marion Hill, “Authenticity and the Convergence of Color, ‘Race,' and Class,” in Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1996), 103-13.

7. Hemenway, 60.

8. This gender-informed use of camouflage can be likened to historian Darlene Clark Hine's explanation of African American women's “culture of dissemblance.” Hine claims “[B]lack women adopted a ‘culture of dissemblance'—a self-imposed secrecy and invisibility—in order to shield themselves emotionally and physically.” (In Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, The Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880-1920 [Cambridge: Howard University Press, 1993], 193-94). Although Hine is talking about African American women's fear of rape, I believe that the idea of a “culture of dissemblance” may be seen as a survival tactic adopted by people who face oppression in different ways.

9. Hemenway, 47; Carson, 123-26.

10. Hemenway, 19.

11. Kathy A. Perkins, introduction to Color Struck, in Black Female Playwrights, ed. Kathy A. Perkins (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1989), 77-8.

12. Hemenway, 127.

13. Carson and Hemenway find the juxtaposition of the two apparently incompatible theatrical forms dissatisfactory. Both agree that the “only memorable scene is the cake walk.” See Hemenway, 47; Carson, 125.

14. Zora Neale Hurston, Color Struck, in Perkins, 93. Hereafter, only text citations of page numbers will be given for references to the play.

15. Hill, 109-10.

16. Robert Hayden, preface to The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (1925; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1969), xii.

17. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in Selections from The Crisis, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson, 1983), 2:448. First published in The Crisis 32, no. 6 (October 1926): 296

18. Vèvè A. Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marasa Consciousness,” in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, ed. Hortense J. Spillers (London: Routledge, 1991), 43.

19. Montgomery Gregory, “A Chronology of the Negro Theatre,” in Plays of Negro Life, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1927), 417.

20. Hemenway, 44-45.

21. Ibid., 47. Emphasis added.

22. See Carson, 127.

23. Daryl C. Dance, “Zora Neale Hurston,” in American Women Writers: Bibliographical Essays, eds. Maurice Duke, Jackson R. Bryer, and M. Thomas Inge (London: Greenwood, 1983), 343.

24. By pointing a finger at intraracial prejudice, I do not mean to dismiss interracial racism, nor do I attempt to blame the victim. It is important to keep in mind that colorism has developed alongside and because of racism.

25. For a comprehensive discussion of Black color consciousness, see Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, The Color Complex (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992).

26. Because sexist practices teach women to please men and to judge themselves by how others see them, it is undeniable that colorism exerts a stronger pressure on African American women. For a discussion of the double bind of sexism and colorism, see Margo Okazawa-Rey, Tracy Robinson, and Janie Victoria Ward, “Black Women and the Politics of Skin Color and Hair,” Women's Studies Quarterly 14, nos. 1,2 (spring/summer 1986): 13-14.

27. Vashti Crutcher Lewis, “Nella Larsen's Use of the Near-White Female in Quicksand and Passing,” Perspectives of Black Popular Culture, ed. Harry B. Shaw (Bowling Green, Oh.: Bowling Green State University Press, 1990), 37.

28. Heba Jannath, “America's Changing Color Line,” in Negro Anthology 1931-1933, ed. Nancy Cunard (New York: Negro University Press, 1969).

29. Opportunity 3, no. 34 (October 1925), 291.

30. One of the first literary works featuring a mulatto with light skin and straight hair was William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853). Other early works featuring light-skinned Black women include Frances E. White Harper's Iola Leroy (1865), Nella Larsen's Quick Sand (1928) and Passing (1929), and Jessie Fauset's Plumb Bun (1929). For a discussion of mulattoes in films, see Donald Bogle's Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Viking Press, 1973). According to Bogle, “The third figure of the black pantheon and the one that proved itself a moviemaker's darlin is the tragic mulatto” (9). He also states, sarcastically, that the mulatto's tragedy lies not in that she can or wants to pass as white but that “she wants to be white” (60). In the theatre history of the dominant (Euro-American) culture, there are many dramatizations of this desire, notably Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1959) in which Zoe, the Octoroon, commits suicide because of that drop of Black blood.

31. Du Bois, “In Black,” in Selections from The Crisis, 1: 278. First published in The Crisis 20, no. 6 (October 1920): 263-66.

32. Donald Bogle, Brown Sugar (New York: Harmony Books, 1980), 38. The phenomenal Josephine Baker was first turned down after she auditioned for Shuffle Along because she was too dark. She then put on the lightest face powder available and was hired only as a dresser. Eventually she became popular after her accidental appearance in the show, but she continued to appear as a comic pickaninny character. Ironically, Baker's ultimate success resulted from her recognition of her unfavorable stance as a brown woman, who can “never get attention on her looks alone, being neither “the white [nor] black ideal of beauty or appeal.” She understood this disadvantage and was determined to make use of her “effervescence.” Later, in 1925, she showed up on the Parisian stage almost naked, dazzled post-war Europe, and became a star overnight (Bogle, 43-51).

33. See Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies, and Bucks, 9, 113-14. Also Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, The Color Complex (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 146. These texts and Bogle's Brown Sugar offer useful discussions of near white Black actresses in the movie industry

34. Two exceptions are Hill's book and Richards' article. See note 7.

35. At the time when Color Struck was written, the generally hostile sentiment of Black audiences towards self-critical elements in Black plays was readily apparent. For examples, see the editorial in Crisis 27 (June 1924) and the correspondence in Opportunity 3, no. 28 (April 1925). There remains a fear of talking about intraracial prejudice openly for fear that the dominant culture may use it as an excuse to blame the victim or to dismiss its own racism. For example, Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has been attacked by some in the African American community because the play, instead of exclusively attacking racism in the larger society, touches upon sexism and domestic violence inside the community.

36. Ann Allen Shockley, “Afro-American Women Writers: The New Negro Movement 1924-1933,” in Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, ed. Lisa Rado (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 127.

37. Ralph D. Story, “Gender and Ambition: Zora Neale Hurston in the Harlem Renaissance,” in The Black Scholar 20 (summer/fall 1989): 27.

38. Chidi Ikonne, From Du Bois to Van Vechten: The Early New Negro Literature, 1903-1926 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981), 183, quoted in Story, 25.

39. Lynda Hill states that Hurston “seems to prefer darker skinned performers, rather than ‘mulattoes,’ to appear in her concerts and musical revues” (112).

40. Alice Walker, dedication to I Love Myself When I Am Laughing … And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive, ed. Alice Walker (New York: The Feminist Press, 1979), 2.

41. Erlene Stetson, “Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Woman's Story,” Regionalism And the Female Imagination 4, no. 1 (1979): 30-36, quoted in Dance, 339.

42. In The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. points out that “signifyin(g) … depends on the success of the signifier at invoking an absent meaning ambiguously ‘present’ in a carefully wrought statement” (86).

43. Hurston, “How It Feels to be Colored Me,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, 155.

44. Hemenway, 17.

45. Though the contention between Hurston and Langston Hughes during the writing of Mule Bone may have resulted from more complicated causes, that a younger woman was involved in the triangular partnership has not been completely ruled out. For a thorough discussion of the controversy of Mule Bone, see Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life and the Complete Story of the Mule Bone Controversy. eds. George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991).

46. Hemenway, 21. Hurston was quick to point out the contrast between their skin tones. She stated that Hurst “knows exactly what goes with her very white skin, black hair and sloe eyes, and she wears it.” Dust Tracks On a Road (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), 176.

47. See Hemenway 9. See also Mary Helen Washington, introduction to I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, 7. There are three different accounts concerning Hurston's complexion. Fannie Hurst described Hurston as “light yellow;” another reference claimed that she was “black as coal;” yet another said “she was reddish light brown.” Washington concludes that the last description is the closest to photographs of Hurston and reports of other eyewitnesses (24).

48. Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing, 153.

49. Hemenway, 6.

50. W. E. B. DuBois to Zora Neale Hurston, 23 June 1926, The World of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Quotation Sourcebook, ed. Meyer Weinberg (London: Greenwood, 1992), 80.

51. Richards, 83. See note 7.

52. Ibid., 74-75.

53. For a thorough discussion of “the politics of respectability,” see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “The Politics of Respectability,” in The Righteous Discontent: The Woman's Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Howard University Press, 1933).

54. Lewis, 36. For a further discussion of Nella Larsen, see Cheryl A. Wall, “Nella Larsen: Passing for What?” in Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995).