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David Krasner, "Migration, Fragmentation, and Identity:
Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck and the Geography
of the Harlem Renaissance"
(page 4 of
4)
Voicing Voicelessness
Essentially, Hurston is saying that her becoming a writer is
tantamount to a rock learning to talk. In fact, the rocks will talk through her.
And who are these "dead-seeming, cold rocks" but the tens of thousands
of rural black women, considered less than beasts and denied a voice in
history and letters.
-Susan Wlllis
(1987)[64]
Silence is often something evoked rather than contained. Emma's silence is a
nonverbal expression of the complexity of her social circumstances arising from
lack of, or disengagement with, language itself. Silence is frequently
misunderstood; a character's lack of speech is simply ignored, with the assumption that
there is "nothing" but silence. But onstage, where the body remains even if
words do not, presence is a critical component in the formation of meaning.
Once we recognize Emma's silent presence onstage as significatory, we can
understand her condition.
In the final scene, John returns. Emma lives, as the stage directions explain,
"in a one-room shack in an alley." Hurston describes the interior as containing a
"cheap" rocker and bed. As the curtain rises, a woman-Emma, though we are
not told it is her and the stage is in virtual darkness - "is seen rocking to and fro in
the low rocker." Hurston may have described her as "a woman" in order to endow
her with universal meaning. There is "dead silence except for the sound of the rocker
and an occasional groan from the bed."[65]
Then, the woman rises in response to a "faint
voice" that says "water"; she gives water to the child. She is on her way to the
doctor again when John enters. It is John's entrance that distracts her; he
interferes with her care of the child. He reports that he lived "up North" in
Philadelphia, but his wife died and he now has returned to Emma permanently. John
persists in trying to light the oil lamp, but Emma won't have it, preferring to sit
by herself in the dark. He tries to soften her by recalling their youthful romance.
He finally lights the lamp, only to see the ill child for the first time. He bends
over for a closer look. Emma tries to shield the child from him. The stage
directions are as follows:
He turns in his chair and Emma rushes over to the bed and covers the girl securely, tucking
her long hair under the covers, too-before he arises.
He goes over to the bed and looks down into her face. She is mulatto. Turns to Emma teasingly.
John: Talkin' bout me liking high-yallers—yo husband musta been pretty near
White.[66]
John realizes that the child is feverish. Emma assures him that she has tried to find
the best doctors within her limited means. John urges Emma to seek the doctor. A
worried but defeated Emma says "She'll be all right, Ah reckon, for a while." Then
she says: "John, you love me-you really want me sho'
nuff?"[67] Before going for
the doctor again, she tries to find out exactly why John has returned.
Critics have assumed that Emma's selt-hatred is at the root of her neglect of
the child. However, she never actually neglects the child, but rather pauses
briefly in order to probe John's sincerity. In the next exchange, John declares
his love, and Emma even suggests that they marry the following day. John
agrees, urging her once more: "run after the doctor - we must look after our
girl." As Emma readies herself, John says, looking at the child: "Gee, she's got a
full suit of hair! Glad you didn't let her chop it off."[68] Hurston makes it clear: for
John nothing has changed. He is enamored by the child's long, straight hair,
symbolic of whiteness, femininity, beauty, and everything that in his eyes Emma
is not.[69] But Emma, instead of going for the doctor, returns to her rocker. John
sits next to her. He enjoins her yet again to find a doctor, offering money for the
taxi. At last, Emma agrees.
The doctor arrives shortly after Emma returns, suggesting that Emma
summoned him. Before he arrives, she enters the room, finding John helping the
child. She rushes furiously toward him, threatening to "kill him." John struggles
to free himself of Emma's grip and exclaims before leaving: "So this is the woman
I've been wearing my heart like a rose for twenty years! She so despises her own
skin that she can't believe any one else could love it!"[70] Emma's self-hatred drives
a wedge between them and her delay costs the child her life. On the face of
John and the child appear to be the ones wronged. Emma, it might seem, has
unjustly accused John of unfaithlulness. Yet, during John's twenty years of'
"waiting" he was married, probably to the light-skinned Effie. Despite his
protestations, he hardly wore his "heart like a rose." Instead, he only returned
after twenty years and the death of his wife. More important, his attention to the
child may have suggested to Emma John's lust for "mulattoes," and most like
she would not be entirely wrong in this.
During the play's final moments, the doctor arrives. He asks Emma why she
had not summoned him sooner. She replies that she had. He remarks that she
waited too long, and that this procrastination will prove fatal. "An hour more or
less is mighty important sometimes," he says, adding: "Why didn't you come"?
Emma replies: "Couldn't see."[71] The doctor offers pills sympathetically and
leaves quietly.
Emma's final words in the play are, "couldn't see." What is it that she failed
to see? There are several possible answers, none of them adequate. Hurston, like
Chekhov, resists easy explanations. With guarded certainty it might be said that
she delayed in responding to the child's turn for the worse because she had to
"see" John's sincerity. Or, perhaps it is also the fact that she "couldn't see" her
own hatred for the child because it reminded her of John's desires, about whom
and which she may have thought angrily about while conceiving it, given John's
skin tone preferences. Or, it may in fact be Hurston's use of melancholia raised to
a symbolic level.
The play closes in silence.[72] Emma is rocking in her chair next to the now
dead child. The audience sits with her in silence. The experience of sitting and
observing her rocking is more theatrically basic than dialogue. There is nothing
verifiable with certainty, and this is how it should be. Explanations reduce
meaning to mere descriptions, and these descriptions often fail to delineate the
unspeakable reality. Emma's story cannot be explained; it is essentially unfinished
and without resolution.
The play's disjointed structure reflects the protagonist. It presents Emma in
fragments because there is no whole "Emma." Crispin Sartwell realizes that in many
of Hurston's literary figures, there is contained a "miscellaneous self, or
nonself," which is "precisely the self that could not be spoken." Sartwell sees this as
an extension of Hurston's autobiographical input into her fictional characters;
Hurston's own sense of self is neither a "racial self," nor is it "culturally
constructed" At the deepest level, he explains, the self Hurston creates "exceeds or
is incomprehensible to any construction," because "it is bits and pieces; the self
Hurston asserts is in a sense not anything in particular."[73] Emma is also bits and
pieces and nothing in particular.
In 1928, just three years following completion of Color Struck., Hurston wrote
"How It Feels to Be Colored Me":
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. . . . In your
hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held. ... A bit
of colored glass more or less would not matter.[74]
This may serve to explain Color Struck. Hurston may have inserted her own
feelings into the creation of Emma. The stage picture ends in the following way:
She seats herself and rocks monotonously and stares out of the door.
A dry sob now and then.
The wind from the open door blows out the lamp and she is seen by the little light
from the window rocking in an even, monotonous gait, and sobbing. [75]
The image of Emma in fragments can be explained as an expression of
Hurston's own experience. The final moment onstage reveals Hurston's talent
for documenting the social conditions of black women in the South, but it also
shows her talent for seamlessly inserting her thoughts and feelings into the
fabric of her fictional characters. Emma's isolation may be both a symbolic
representation of black southern women and a personal experience drawn from the
author's imagination.
The door onstage represents the outside world, with its opportunities of
emigration. "Outside" belongs to the community, realized in cakewalking, mobility,
socialization, and the "renaissance" up North. Inside, Emma sits monotonously
alone, presenting the audience with the spectacle of her uneventful life. Left
alone, she rocks. There is, as Toni Morrison informs us, a "loneliness that can be
rocked." This rocking, says Morrison, is expressed in silence and the body:
"Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship's,
smooths and contains the rocker. It's an inside kind - wrapped tight like skin."[76]
At the end of the play Emma is left with a life like "a bit of colored glass," which,
as Hurston notes, "more or less would not matter." She rocks and waits, like a
Beckett character, for nothing. In the process, the "black woman" is granted
tragic dignity.
Hurston limns Emma as a representation of black women who have slipped
through the cracks of history. Hurston's anthropological act of recovery follows
Boas's precepts of "fieldwork" and "objective study," while simultaneously
fashioning the research into dramatic form. As a fictional yet carefully documented
representation of black women at the time, Emma deserves recognition as a
significant figure within the New Negro-Harlem Renaissance literature. Although
the protagonist stands outside the traditional depictions of Harlem Renaissance
fiction and documentation (which may be why the play has been largely ignored),
she nonetheless reflects the social conditions of a great many caught in similar
circumstances. It is the fact that Emma stands as a creative representation of so
many people now forgotten, and because the protagonist is portrayed as a
profound characterization of voicelessness and fragmentation, that Hurston's play
represents an important document of its era.
Endnotes
1. Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," (1954) in
Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York:
Harper Row, 1971), 154. [Return to text]
2. Donna Kate Rushin, "The Bridge Poem," This Bridge Called My
Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherrie Moraga and
Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table, 1981, 1983), xxii. [Return to text]
3. For studies on the Great Migration see, for instance, Daniel M.
Johnson and Rex R. Campbell, Black Migration In America (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1981); Alferdteen Harrison, ed., Black Exodus:
The Great Migration from the American South (Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 1991); and Joe William Trotter, Jr., ed.. The
Great Migration in Historical Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991). [Return to text]
4. See, James R. Grossman, "A Chance to Make Good, 1900-1929," To
Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans, ed. Robin D. G.
Kelley and Earl Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000),
386. [Return to text]
5. Alain Locke, "Harlem," Survey Graphic 6.6 (March 1925),
629. [Return to text]
6. Hazel Carby, "The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the
Folk: Zora Neale Hurston," in New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching
God, ed. Michael Awkward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 75. [Return to text]
7. Zora Neal Hurston's play Color Struck was completed in
1925, and printed in 1926. It was first published in the inaugural (and
only) edition of Fire! (1926), a journal "Devoted to Younger
Negro Artists," 7-14, edited by Wallace Thurman. In this essay I will
quote from the version in the journal Fire! For brief discussions and
history of the play, see Bernard L. Peterson, Jr., Early Black
American Playwrights and Dramatic Writers (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1990), 115; Judith L. Stephens, "The Harlem Renaissance and the
New Negro Movement," in The Cambridge Companion to American Women
Playwrights, ed. Brenda Murphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 111; Christine R. Cray, "Recovering African American Women
Playwrights," in The Cambridge Companion to American Women
Playwrights, 248; and Leslie Catherine Sanders, The Development
of Black Theater in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1988), 85. [Return to text]
8. Crispin Sartwell, Act Like You Know: African-American
Autobiography and White Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998). [Return to text]
9. Carby, "The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the
Folk," 77. [Return to text]
10. Barbara Johnson, "Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes
Were Watching God," in A World of Difference (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 1987), 159. [Return to text]
11. See, for instance, Deborah A. Gordon, "The Politics of
Ethnographic Authority: Race and Writing in the Ethnography of Margaret
Mead and Zora Neale Hurston," in Modernist Anthropology: From
Fieldwork to Text, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990), 146-62; Graciela Hernandez, "Multiple
Subjectivities and Strategic Positionality: Zora Neale Hurston's
Experimental Ethnographies," in Women Writing Culture, ed. Ruth
Behar and Deborah A. Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996), 148-165; and Gwendolyn Mikell, "The Anthropological Imagination
of Zora Neale Hurslon," Western Journal of Black Studies 7.1
(1983), 27-35. [Return to text]
12. Franz Boas, "The Limitations of the Comparative Method of
Anthropology," Science 4 (1896), 905; reprinted in Boas, Race,
Language, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940,
reprint, 1982), 270-280. [Return to text]
13. See Boas, "What is Anthropology?," in Boas, Anthropology and
Modern Life (1928; reprint. New York: Dover, 1986), 11-17. [Return to text]
14. These two developments epitomized what George W. Stocking, Jr,
termed the 1920s "classical period" of modern anthropology. See
Stocking, "The Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s and the Dualism of
the Anthropological Tradition," in Romantic Motives: Essays on
Anthropological Sensibility, ed. Stocking (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1989), 212. [Return to text]
15. Boasian influence encouraged anthropologists to turn their backs
on the Darwinian-Spenserian view that had dominated the field in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Among his many disciples
were Ella Deloria, Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovits, Ruth Landes,
Robert Lowie, Alfred Louis Kroeber, Margaret Mead, Paul Radin, Edward
Sapir, and Hurston. For an interesting reading of Boas and his
influence, see Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and
the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1999), 32-65. [Return to text]
16. Boas, "Anthropology," Lecture Delivered at Columbia University,
18 December 1907, quoted in A Franz Boas Reader, ed. George W.
Stocking, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 269. [Return to text]
17. Hurston, Mules and Men(1935), quoted in Love Myself
When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, ed. Alice Walker
(New York: Feminist Press. 1979), 82. [Return to text]
18. Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the
Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998), 162. For discussions of Hurston's relationship to Boasian
anthropology, see also Mary Katherine Wainwright, "The Aesthetics of
Community: The Insular Black Community as Theme and Focus in Hurston's
Their Eyes Were Watching God in The Harlem Renaissance:
Reevaluations, ed. Amritjit et al. (New York: Garland, 1989),
233-43; bell hooks, "Saving Black Folk Culture," in Yearnings: race,
gender, and cultural politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 136;
and Alice Gambrell, Women Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference:
Transatlantic Culture, 1919-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 115. [Return to text]
19. Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 63. [Return to text]
20. The first draft of Color Struck was submitted to
Opportunity Magazine and was awarded second prize (along with
honorable mention for her play, Spears) at the Opportunity
Award Banquet on 1 May 1925. Hurston received a Barnard scholarship
during the summer and began to attend classes in the fall of 1925, at
least five months after writing the play. [Return to text]
21. Benigno Sánchez-Eppler has suggested a similar observation,
noting that during the mid-1920s, "just before her enrollment in
Columbia and after her exposure to higher education at Howard
University, Hurston had spent a relatively short but productive period
in contact with the full roster of artists, intellectuals, and patrons
of the Harlem Renaissance." Hurston drew on "her acquaintance with
Southern black folklore for writing stories and for storytelling in
social gatherings" ("Telling Anthropology: Zora Neale Hurston and
Gilberto Freyre Disciplined in Their Field-Home-Work," American
Literary History 4.3 [Fall 1992], 472). [Return to text]
22. For an interesting discussion of Hurston's work in literature
and anthropology, see Sieglinde Lemke, "Blurring Generic Boundaries.
Zora Neale Hurston: A Writer Fiction and Anthropology," Real:
Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 12 (1996),
163-77. [Return to text]
23. Pearlie Mae Fisher Peters, The Assertive Woman in Zora Neal
Hurston's Fiction, Folklore, and Drama (New York: Garland, 1998),
26. For other negative critiques, see Warren J. Carson, "Hurston as
Dramatist: The Florida Connection," in Zora in Florida, ed. Steve
Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidal (Orlando: University of Central Florida
Press, 1991), 123-124, and Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 47. [Return to text]
24. See, for instance, H. Lin Classon, "Re-evaluating Color
Struck: Zora Neale Hurston and the Issue of Colorism," Theatre
Studies 42 (1997), 5-18; Lynda Marion Hill, Social Rituals and
the Verbal Act Zora Neale Hurston (Washington, D. C.: Howard
University Press, 1996), 108; and Deborah G. Plant, Every Tub Most
Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston
(Urbana: University Chicago Press, 1995), 158. [Return to text]
25. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942; reprint,
New York: Harper 1995), 184. [Return to text]
26. For a discussion of the relationship between "Mammyism" and the
Hottentot Venus in the play, see Jasmin L. Lambert, "Resisting the
'Hottentot' Body: Themes of Sexuality and Femininity in Select Plays by
Female Playwrights from the Harlem Renaissance," Ph.D. (dissertation,
Bowling Green State University 1998, 148-72. [Return to text]
27. Sandra L. Richards, "Writing the Absent Potential: Drama,
Performance, and the Canon of African-American Literature," in
Performativity and Performance ed. Andrew Parker and Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick (New York: Routledge, 1995), 77. [Return to text]
28. Ibid., 79. [Return to text]
29. Ibid., 75. [Return to text]
30. Under the influence of white patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, many
African American artists, musicians, and writers were encouraged to
indulge in what Mason called their "innate primitivism." However, it was
not until 1927 that Hurston formally met Mason, at which time she
offered to subsidize Hurston's research trip to Eatonville. See Lillie
P. Howard, Zora Neale Hurston (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 22-25. [Return to text]
31. In their study of African American journals, Propaganda &
Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of African-American Magazine in the
Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1979), Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Mayberry Johnson contend that the
editor of Fire!, Wallace Thurman, "was primarily interested in
aspects of black life generally considered disreputable by the more
proper Afro-Americans" (80). [Return to text]
32. Langston Hughes observed that Fire! "would burn up a lot
of old, dead, conventional Negro-white ideas of the past, épater le
bourgeoisie into a realization of the existence of the younger Negro
writers and artists" (Hughes, "In tile Twenties, Saturday Review of
Literature 22 [22 June 1940], 13). [Return to text]
33. Alain Locke, "Fire: A Negro Magazine," The Survey Graphic
58.10-12 (15 August-15 September 1927), 563. [Return to text]
34. Hurston, "Letter to Annie Nathan Meyer," 10 November 1925, pg. 2,
from the American Jewish Archives, Hurston-Meyer Correspondence file. My
gratitude to Anthea Kraut for discovering this letter and sending it to
me. Barbara Speisman "From 'Spears' to The Great Day: Zora Neale
Hurston's Vision of a Real Negro Theater," Southern Quarterly
36.3 (Spring 1998), 34-36, claims that "the Negro Art Theater of Harlem
opened with [Hurston's] play, Color Struck" (36). However,
Speisman fails to supply evidence to support this claim. Other than
Hurston's letter, no other evidence exists, to my knowledge, to
substantiate that an actual performance, or performances, took
place. [Return to text]
35. Anthea Kraut, "Reclaiming the Body: Representations of Black
Dance in Three Plays by Zora Neale Hurston." Theatre Studies 43
(1998), 30. [Return to text]
36. For a social history of the cakewalk, see David Krasner,
"Rewriting the Body: Aida Overton Walker and the Social Formation of
Cakewalking," Theatre Survey 37.2 (November 1996). 67-92. [Return to text]
37. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and
Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994), 176, 177. Along similar lines, Nina Miller, Making Love
Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York's Literary Tradition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), writes that the play's
setting "is vintage Hurston: an all-black, Eatonville-like society,
within which white racism counts for very little, but the foibles of
black folk are on prominent display" (167). [Return to text]
38. Toni Morrison, "Afterword," The Bluest Eye (New York:
Plum, 1994), 210. [Return to text]
39. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 177. [Return to text]
40. Ibid. [Return to text]
41. Hurston, Color Struck, 7. [Return to text]
42. John Lowe raises the point that this presentation of rural blacks
in most of Hurston's literary output may have caused critical dismissal
of her work up until the 1970s (Lowe, "Hurston, Humor, and the Harlem
Renaissance," in Harlem Renaissance Re-examined), ed. Victor
Kramer [New York: AMS Press, 1987], 305-31). [Return to text]
43. Hurston, Color Struck, 7. [Return to text]
44. Hill, Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale
Hurston, 109. [Return to text]
45. Hurston, Color Struck, 8. [Return to text]
46. Ibid. [Return to text]
47. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 146. [Return to text]
48. Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity:
Migration of the Subject (London: Routledge, 1994), 47. [Return to text]
49. For illuminating discussions of women and migration narratives,
see Farah Jasmine Griffin, "Who Set You Flowin'?": The
African-American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995), and Sandra Gunning, "Nance Prince and the Politics of
Mobility, Home and Diasporic (Mis)Identification," American Quarterly
53.1 (March 2001), 32-69. [Return to text]
50. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late
Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997),
32. [Return to text]
51. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American
Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), 200, 202. [Return to text]
52. Hazel Carby, "'It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime': The Sexual Politics
of Women's Blues," in Unequal Sisters: A Multi-Cultural Reader in
U.S. Women's History, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (New
York: Routledge, 1994), 334. [Return to text]
53. Edward Said, "Minds in Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile,"
Harper's Magazine 269 (September 1984), 51. [Return to text]
54. Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern
Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 13. [Return to text]
55. Hurston, Color Struck, 9. [Return to text]
56. Ibid,, 10. [Return to text]
57. Marita O. Bonner, "On Being Young-A Woman-and Colored," Crisis
31.2 (December 1925), 64. [Return to text]
58. Hurston, Color Struck, 11. [Return to text]
59. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism,
Psychoanalysis and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 3-4, 13. Schiesari
observes that the term melancholia is a Latin transliteration of the
Greek word meaning "black bile" or "atra bilis" a bodily fluid
whose excess is responsible for the condition of melancholia. According
to Aristotle, the melancholic temperament affected all "great men"
(6). [Return to text]
60. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery,
and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 108. [Return to text]
61. Claudia Tate,
Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 13. [Return to text]
62. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia,
tr. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989),
128. [Return to text]
63. Hurston, Color Struck, 12. [Return to text]
64. Susan Willis, Specifying: Black Women Writing the American
Experience (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 36. [Return to text]
65. Hurston, Color Struck, 12. [Return to text]
66. Ibid., 13. [Return to text]
67. Ibid. [Return to text]
68. Ibid. [Return to text]
69. For a study of African American women's relationship to beauty,
hair, and especially the history of Madam C. J. Walker, the
entrepreneurial business leader who developed an empire of beauty
products (ca. 1905 to 1919), see Noliwe M. Rooks, Hair Raising,
Beauty, Culture, and African American Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1996). [Return to text]
70. Hurston, Color Struck, 14. [Return to text]
71. Ibid. [Return to text]
72. For discussions on silence, see Peter Hitchcock, Dialogics
of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),
and Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Silence: The Phenomenon and Its
Ontological Significance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1980). [Return to text]
73. Sartwell, Act Like You Know, 156, 158. [Return to text]
74. Hurston, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," quoted in I Love
Myself When I Am Laughing: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, 155. [Return to text]
75. Hurston, Color Struck, 14. [Return to text]
76. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Signet, 1991), 336. [Return to text]
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