From A Beautiful Pageant by David Krasner. Copyright © 2002 by David Krasner. Reprinted with permission of Palgrave Macmillan, NY. (Available for purchase on Amazon.Com.)

The location is not already there before the bridge. . .a location comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge.
                              -Martin Heidegger (1954)[1]

Introduction

I must be the bridge to nowhere / But my true self / And then / I will be useful.
                               -Donna Kate Rushin (1981)[2]

Geography and migration played a key role in the description and formation of the Harlem Renaissance-New Negro era. The Great Migration, which began just prior to World War I and continued well after, had a profound effect both on the cities of the North and the southern, rural communities left behind. Indeed, during the 1910s, nearly half a million African Americans left the rural South for the urban North.[3] Within a decade, more than three-quarters of a million would follow, increasing the black northern population from 1910 to 1930 by 300 percent.[4] Swept up by what Alain Locke called the "wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city center," black people were rejecting the South's history of racial violence and lynching, embracing the mass psychology underlying movement, escaping from poor rural farming, and seeking a better future.[5]

In contrast to the image of the migrating African American is the work of Zora Neale Hurston (ca. 1891-1960). Hurston was a playwright and anthropologist who felt that migration, while affording some positive opportunities, was also violent and costly. She saw the results of the Great Migration as terrifying and spasmodic, unbearably inhumane and devastating to those left behind. For Hurston, rural black people were being forgotten, disappearing amidst the heady enthusiasm of the urban New Negro Movement. Hazel Carby makes the claim that Hurston wanted to represent "rural folk" and their cultural forms as measured "against an urban, mass culture."[6] Analyzing Hurston's play, Color Struck (1925), as both a document of dramatic literature and an anthropological study reveals some of the tragic and devastating implications of the Great Migration.[7] In what follows, I will examine the relationship of African American women and the Great Migration on the one hand, and focus on the author's personal expressions of fragmentation as they relate to the play's protagonist on the other, making use of what Crispin Sartwell calls Hurston's "bits and pieces" of self-identity, which inform her fiction.[8] Significantly, Hurston shifts the locus of the Harlem- New Negro Renaissance from the urban North, with its relatively positive, upbeat outlook, to the impoverished rural South, where she attempts to depict a tragedy of epic proportions.

Rural culture among black southern women was for Hurston what Hazel Carby calls the artistic representation of the folk; that is, "not only a discursive displacement of the historical and cultural transformation of migration, but also is a creation of a folk who are outside history."[9] In Color Struck, Hurston creates a world made up of those who are "outside history," having fallen through the interstices of social recognition. Emma is Hurston's creation taken to the level of symbolic representation: by dint of the fact that she is black, poor, disenfranchised, and rural, she epitomizes the outsider in every way. She is not the "New Negro" fashioned by the doyens of the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, she defies commodification as a cultural artifact made for the amusement of whites and the progressive faction of the black elite. Literary historian Barbara Johnson emphasizes that Hurston both "deplored the appropriation, dilution, and commodification of black culture" typical during the Roaring Twenties-Jazz Age, and constantly tried to define the difference between "a reified 'art'" fixed In the minds of her audience and "a living culture" that is neither unyielding nor simplistically understood.[10] Johnson's point can be extended. Hurston was in revolt against a black northern elitist culture that rejected the values of the black South as well as its people, and she was embarking on a creative process of reclaiming southern, poor, black women from the dustbin of history. Black women of the South had been deemed out of step with the progressive elements of an urbanized, sophisticated, and for the most part masculine New Negro culture. And they were allegedly unfit to represent the "new woman," fully self-sufficient and modern. Hurston's project of anthropological recovery combined with dramatic intensity permeates Color Struck.

Much has been written about Hurston's creative writing in relation to her anthropological study, particularly through her association with Franz Boas (1858-1942).[11] In 1925, Hurston entered Columbia University's Barnard College to study anthropology under Boas. According to him, cultures, races, and languages have distinctive individualities, which are expressed in their modes of life, thought, and feeling, and it is the aim of the anthropologist to document and collate the empirical evidence of cultures and races objectively and scientifically. Under Boas's tutelage, Hurston absorbed the concept of anthropology as a body of research following scientific laws that exist in nature and not in the mind of the scholar. Cultures assessed by anthropologists do not arise from subjective assertions, Boas said, but rather reflect "external truth."[12] His brand of anthropology rejected the perspective of race and culture as linkages to a single, grand system of evolutionary sequence. Rather, he thought, anthropology must endeavor to focus on the society in which the subject lives, take inventory of material artifacts, and examine the detailed patterns, symbols, and myths that characterize various "cultures."[13] The Columbia School of anthropology initiated by Boas instituted two significant changes in the discipline that had a direct bearing on Hurston's research and creative output: the emergence of the "fieldworker archetype" and the study of culture as the "focal concept and subject matter."[14] Rather than as a vertical arrangement of "cultures," Boas and his protégées (with Hurston among them) viewed anthropology horizontally, as a commitment to social contingency rather than matters of biology or cultural hierarchy.[15] Field research, contact with the subject, impartiality, and the expression of "laws" defining reoccurring modes of historical events were the principal objectives of Columbia School anthropologists.[16]

Hurston's commitment to Boas's anthropology was ambivalent. On the one hand, she embraced the critical distancing demanded of the fieldworker archetype, which required onsite research, detached objectivity, and gathering empirical evidence. In Mules and Men she confessed that her prior experiences within African American rural culture fit her too closely, "like a tight chemise." This familiarity inhibited her ability to collect folkloric data unclouded by subjective interference. Boasian anthropology enabled her to make use of what she called the "spy-glass of Anthropology" to "stand off and look at my garments."[17] On the other hand, Hurston was an artist who drew from her personal experiences. Southern black rural folklife was grist for her writer's mill, the primary source of her imagination, and the most influential part of her creativity. In both her roles as fieldworker and creative writer, she sought to preserve black Folklore by advancing what anthropologist Lee D. Baker terms her "vindicationist concern for debunking stereotypes while promoting African American culture by using the Boasian idea of culture."[18] However, juggling objective anthropology and subjective creativity caused an internal rift, making her dual identity as academic folklorist and creative artist difficult to reconcile. As biographer Robert E. Hemenway observed, by balancing her energies "between art and science, fiction and anthropology," Hurston "searched for an expressive instrument, an intellectual formula," that might accommodate her twin interests.[19] But the inductive reasoning of Boasian anthropology chafed against the deductive assertions and subjective partiality Hurston needed to instill an emotional content in her art. The ambiguities and tensions between "detached researcher" and "impassioned artist" failed to be resolved.

Color Struck was completed just prior to Hurston's entrance into Barnard.[20] Having not yet come under the Columbia School influence, Hurston was free from the pressures associated with Boas and his demanding impartiality. Hurston wrote the play using her objective knowledge of folklore and her empathetic imagination. As a pre-Boasian text, the play is a vindication of black folk culture and a dynamic drama that is informed by the thoughts and feelings of the author.[21] It combines Hurston's anthropological research and creativity in the invention of the protagonist. Through Hurston's research and aesthetics, Emma becomes a representative of her milieu, drawn from the author's external observations and, to a certain degree, autobiography. Hurston's balancing act of docudrama and melodrama-research and cultural analysis on the one hand, and dramatic art on the other-yields a text that is multifaceted, immersed in anthropological study yet unburdened by the rigorous scientific objectivity Boasian anthropology required. In other words, Hurston had already entered into meta-anthropological research earlier than scholars have indicated, creating a drama that looks through "spyglasses" at the poverty and ennui of southern black women. Yet this drama also imbricates the author's imagination and personal experiences of fragmentation and dislocation.[22]

The play can be summarized this way: Emmaline (called Emma throughout the play) is a dark-skinned African American woman from Jacksonville, Florida. Her lover, John, pursues light-skinned women, thus keeping Emma in a constant state of jealousy. The play is set in an all-black region of rural Florida during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In four scenes, Hurston explores the disintegration of Emma and John's relationship. The first three scenes take place in 1900, the fourth twenty years later. The opening scene occurs in a railway car where John, Emma, and others from various parts of Florida-Jacksonville, Augustine, and Eatonville-are en route to a cakewalking dance contest. Scene two takes place right before the contest, while scene three occurs during the contest itself. The final scene, twenty years later, depicts John's return from the North and his attempt to reconcile his differences with Emma. Emma, however, rejects John's overtures as much too little and too late. Emma embodies the circumstances of rural, southern black women of the time, making a "happy" conclusion based on romantic reconciliation untenable.

While it won second prize in the drama division of the 1925 Opportunity Magazine contest for best play, Color Struck has, with few exceptions, received scant critical attention. Critic Pearlie Mae Fisher Peters summarily dismisses the play, calling the protagonist a "clinging-vine woman obsessed with the dynamics of intra-racial color prejudice."[23] Other studies have emphasized the play's "colorism."[24] Colorism within the African American community makes use of the degree of blackness or whiteness to assign privileges. There is considerable evidence to support this claim. Hurston wrote in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road,, that "the blackest Negro" is often "the butt of all jokes, particularly black women."[25] Certainly colorism is part of the play; both Emma's self- effacement and racial prejudice add to her tragedy.[26] Emma's inferiority complex creates a twin condition, one that both internalizes a self-depreciating identity and externalizes it by focusing on the color prejudice of others. There is more in the play, however, than a study of color bias and self-pity; there is a statement about regionalism and the dislocation of character.

Cultural historians Sandra L. Richards, Anthea Kraut, and Michael North provide an analysis of Color Struck that examines regionalism and the significance of identity. In her reading of Color Struck, Richards makes the point that "because the body onstage, through its carriage, gesture, and spatial relationships to other bodies, resonates with social history, the viewing experience is considerably different."[27] She rightly points out that Hurston intended to place the black body in visible proximity to other bodies onstage, and In so doing establish the "potential interlocking" of characters, which depends not so much on "the written structuring elements" but instead on the "dynamic triangulation between these formal elements, performers, and spectators."[28] The visual presence of Emma becomes a performatlve strategy, creating a potential for receptivity that must be considered together with the written text.

Richards is also right to weigh the importance of historical circumstances and locale. She notes that the opening scene in the Jim Crow railway car, which because of segregation shows an all-black cast of characters, is a stage picture that black audiences at the time would no doubt immediately recognize. She calls attention also to the presence of whites in the audience, since Hurston, she says "wanted to speak to white Americans, too"; Richards suggests that the opening scene of the play, with its characters carrying on rambunctiously, fell victim to "primitivism." The presentation of rowdiness, says Richards, served as a "site of the irrational," creating "negative signifiers on the scale of civilization," and revealing "examples of the primitive who unself-consciously provide salvation models for white sophisticates, chafing at the stultifying materialism and positivism of American culture."[29]

Little evidence is adduced, however, to substantiate the claim that the play was written for white audiences.[30] The evidence, in fact, suggests that the play was specifically written for a black audience. To begin with, the play was originally published in Fire!, a radical black journal intended primarily for African Americans.[31] While the journal was certainly made available to whites, it was specifically a work by writers and artists who rejected stereotypes and discussed African themes, jazz, the blues, and black folk culture, which would be familiar to blacks but anathema to whites. The journal also represented an alternative to middle-class "New Negro" audiences, particularly those of Locke's book, The New Negro (1925), and Du Bois's magazine, Crisis, where tastes were inclined toward urbanity and alleged assimilationism.[32] Locke himself dubbed the short-lived (one issue) Fire! "left-wing literary modernism" containing a "charging brigade of literary revolt, especially against the bulwarks of Puritanism."[33]

Furthermore, an African American company may have produced the play for a black audience in Hurston's lifetime. Hurston's letter to Annie Nathan Meyer (10 November 1929) provides some evidence, though it is hardly conclusive. Hurston wrote, "The Negro Art Theatre of Harlem is fairly launching now and the first program will include my 'Color Struck.'"[34] The publication in Fire! and the potential production suggests, in this instance, that Hurston neither curried white favor nor sought to publish in white journals. Finally, the play's ambiance lies wholly within black culture, invested in what Anthea Kraut astutely terms a "circumscribed, southern black space."[35] The play's cakewalking contest, for instance, a plot device dominating the first three scenes, is exclusively of an African American milieu.

The cakewalk was a high-stepping dance that emerged through a combination of black vernacular culture, minstrelsy, and the cultural exchange of black and white.[36] Yet in Color Struck the dance is completely devoid of a white presence; in fact, throughout the play the subject of white people hardly arises. A white doctor does appear at the end, but his presence is brief and insignificant. Michael North raises the significant point that in Color Struck the cakewalk "is a black rural ritual that has no reference to anything outside itself." Thus, says North, by removing the "white frame around the cakewalk" the play "recommends its own sublime indifference to white opinion as a way of redeeming black folk culture from its popularized and vulgarized white versions."[37] For Hurston, the cakewalk is no longer a dance Influenced by or connected to whites, but a self-enclosed community ritual. In Color Struck, Hurston draws from her experience of growing up in an all-black rural region of Eatonville, Florida. She creates a world of black southern folklore through her protagonist, Emma, who is rejected both by mainstream society and by her own community.

My People!

Implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing. And twenty years later I was still wondering about how one learns that. Who told her? Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale?
                               -Toni Morrison (1994)[38]

The friction between emerging urban "New Negroes" of the Harlem Renaissance and rural, working-class southern African Americans provides a useful point of entry for the opening scene of Color Struck; but rather than beginning with the play itself, it will prove more illuminating if we first turn our attention to Hurston's 1942 autobiographical study, Dust Tracks on a Road. In this work, she revisits the class divisions within middle-class African America that appears in a similar way in the opening of the play. First, Dust Tracks:

My People! My people! From the earliest rocking of my cradle days, I have heard this cry go up from Negro lips. It is forced outward by pity, scorn and hopeless resignation. It is called forth by the observations of one class of Negro on the doings of another branch of the brother in black.[39]

The term "My People" brackets certain African Americans who experience the prevailing class-division. Hurston draws an example:

For instance, well-mannered Negroes groan out like that [My people!] when they board a train or a bus and find other Negroes on there with their shoes off, stuffing themselves with fried fish, bananas and peanuts, and throwing the garbage on the floor. Maybe they are not only eating and drinking. The offenders may be "loud talking" the place, and holding back nothing of their private lives, in a voice that embraces the entire coach. The well-dressed Negro shrinks back in his seat at that, shakes his head and sighs, "My people! My people!"[40]

In the opening of Color Struck, actors represented "loud-talking Negroes while the audience was likely to be "well-mannered" middle-class African Americans. This observer-and-observed dynamic appears 17 years later in Dust Tracks. The play's stage directions state:

Before the curtain goes up these is the sound of a locomotive whistle and a stopping engine, loud laughter; many people speaking at once, good-natured shrieks, strumming of a stringed instrument, etc. The ascending curtain discovers a happy lot of Negroes boarding the train dressed in gaudy, twdry [sic] best of 1900. They are mostly in couples - each couple bearing a covered-over market basket which the men hastily deposit in the racks as they scramble for seats. There is a little friendly pushing and shoving. One pair just miss a seat three times, much to the enjoyment of the crowd. The women are showily dressed in the manner of the time, and quite conscious of their finery. A few seats remain unoccupied.[41]

The play's opening is conceived with the spectator in mind. The black audience Hurston may have had in mind might have reacted to the "loud-talking" characters on the railcar with the refrain, "My People! My People!"[42] In addition, the place - a railway car - has numerous significatory ramifications. The car sets the stage for movement, which implies freedom and mobility. Being able to move freely is important in African American culture, particularly in the South, where freedom to travel during slavery was nonexistent. Yet movement was, as we shall soon see, not an option open to everyone at the turn of the century.

In the opening scene, Emma's rival in the cakewalking contest and for John's affections, Effie, a "mulatto girl," enters the car looking for a seat. She is "greeted" immediately by the men seated in the car. One says "Howdy do. Miss Effie, you'se lookin' jes lak a rose."[43] Effie spurns his advances. This opening contains a frequently overlooked theme, one that will continually resurface: John's attraction to Effie. Critic Lynda Marion Hill asserts that the conflict in the play "escalates as Emma convinces herself that John is 'carryin' on with the light-skinned Effie." For Hill, Emma is jealous as well as fearful that Effie will steal John away because she is more friendly, attractive, light-skinned, and a better cakewalker.[44] Yet John encourages Effie, suggesting either a prior affair or John's philandering nature. John's behavior is hardly innocent: his words and the speed with which he embraces Effie at the dance indicate involvement and desire on a deeper level than surface observations imply.

When we first see Emma and John, they are late in boarding the railcar John explains the reasons for their lateness, claiming that Emma "says I wuz smiling at Effie on the street car and she had to get off and wait for another one." Emma replies furiously: "You wuz grinning at her and she was grinning back just like a ole cheesy cat!" John denies this, but Emma Insists: "You wuz. I seen you looking jes lake a possum." She adds: "Jes the same every time you sees a yaller face, you takes a chance. (They sit down in peeved silence for a minute)."[45] In this exchange, the question of who is telling the truth is not obvious; for the most part, critics have accepted John's words. The next dialogue from John is to Effie.

John: (looking behind him). Hellow, Effie, where's Sam?
Effie: Deed, I don't know.
John: Y'all on a bust?
Emma: None ah yo'bizness, you got enough tuh mind yo' own self. Turn 'round!

Emma has warned John not to talk to Effie, yet John almost immediately turns to Effie and asks why her dance partner, Sam, is missing. This is not innocent banter; rather, John is obsessed with Effie. His approach is bold. He ignores completely Emma's plea to avoid her. Emma thus has every reason to fear John's betrayal. It is John who initiates conversation with Effie, not the other way around.

After John and Emma strut the cakewalk through the aisle of the train, Effie takes her solo turn. John comments:

John: (applauding loudly) If dat Effie can't step nobody can.
Emma: Course you'd say so cause it's her. Everything she do is pretty to you.[46]

John is applauding loudly, despite Emma's protest against his flirtation. At the very least, he should show restraint and a little sensitivity toward Emma. His relationship to Emma is tenuous at best and appears likely to be severed at any moment. John is, in fact, less than subtle; though he does what he can to caress Emma and assure her of his love, his gestures smack of "hedging his bets." Applauding loudly for one woman and caressing another is slim evidence of loyalty; Emma has every reason to be jealous.

The second scene takes place outside the dance hall just before the cakewalking contest. Emma is now so enraged that she refuses to join in the cakewalk. Since Emma refuses, John takes on another partner, who happens to be the light-skinned mulatto Effie. John and Effie win the contest and bring honor to their town-and just as Emma predicted, John leaves with Effie for parts north. The haste of his embrace of and elopement with Effie suggests that Emma was correct all along.

In the final scene of Color Struck, John has returned twenty years later from the North. John's departure was not only a betrayal; it also symbolized his new- found mobility. Despite urban poverty and overcrowding, northern cities produced hope. His unfaithfulness, as the play suggests, had consequences beyond romance. Emma must live with the understanding that not only is her ex-lover now enjoying life with her rival, but also enjoys the possibilities opened by a new life in the North.

For black women travel was risky business and few cared to take their chances. A black woman traveling alone was a tempting target for any predator. Moving through unfamiliar terrain presented dangers. In Dust Track on the Road Hurston makes us aware of this; in her own anthropological search for what she called the "knowledge of things," her life "was in danger several times." As she says, if "I had not learned how to take care of myself in these circumstances, I could have been maimed or killed on most any day of the several years of my research work."[47] Hurston's research was based on the desire to reveal the life of rural black women trapped in stultifying conditions. Rather than focusing on those who escaped, Hurston turns her attention to those left behind. In Color Struck, Emma is left to fend for herself. Emma's tragedy resides in the fact that she lacked what critic and cultural historian Carole Boyce Davies calls black women's agency, which is based on "migration, mobility, movement, departure, return, re-departure and transformation."[48] Mobility, however, was seldom an option available to African American women at the time.

Black women avoided northward travel for a number of reasons.[49] Not only did women traveling alone face numerous dangers; there was also little opportunity of work. For women, work was far from guaranteed, even during industrialization. Factories were often closed to black women, and European and Asian immigrants competed with African Americans for domestic labor. Moreover, black women had little or no assurance of hotel residency. Forced sometimes to sleep outside in wooded areas or alleyways increased the potential for rape and robbery. Added to this was minimal and sometimes nonexistent legal protection. Unfamiliarity with the surroundings also complicated the search for a safe haven. Travel for men represented privilege, freedom, and a chance to start fresh and make over mistakes. By contrast, women travelers were, as anthropologist James Clifford puts it, "forced to conform, masquerade, or rebel discreetly within a set of normatively male definitions and experiences."[50] Women faced more frequent bias and danger, forcing them to sometimes "act tough" in the form of masculine norms of behavior. Often belligerent behavior was used to establish a protective aura. Given the pioneering spirit of American life that began to flourish in the nineteenth century, a man traveling alone was not unusual; but a woman alone was often met with either disdain or sexual advances.

According to Houston A. Baker, Jr., African American literature is marked by "transience." Baker maintains that the railway juncture, with its implication of movement, way station, migration, and the blues, represents "the liminal trickster on the move." Black literature is symbolized by a lineage that is "nomadic," the crossing signs of a railway station signifying "change, motion, transience, process."[51] Yet Hurston's Emma is the very opposite of change; while she desired the results accompanying movement, she was denied access to if. Hazel Carby says succinctly that migration for black women "often meant being left behind: 'Bye-Bye Baby' and 'Sorry I can't take you' were the common refrains of male blues."[52] Hurston's Emma lives amidst uncertainty, tearful that John may leave at any moment-and indeed, that is what happens.

Hurston's Emma turns against the big city, with all its emphasis on efficiency and productivity, its culture of expediency and novelty. Instead, she looks toward the provincial, inner world of her rural black community for spiritual sustenance. Yet her own community, as portrayed in the play, rejects Emma as well. Emma, as a woman of color, uneducated yet knowledgeable to her limits, holds on to what is most tangible: home. However, because of her dark skin, she remains an outcast in both the black and white worlds; even "home" becomes unsatisfying. Emma's darker hue and the social conditions that are imposed on "blackness" make her subject to exclusion both externally and Internally.

As a refugee of sorts, Emma exists in what Edward Said calls the "perilous territory of not-belonging," a territory where "people are banished."[53] Throughout the play, Hurston's protagonist exemplifies displacement and dislocation. Emmas diasporic condition is one of homelessness, fragmentation, and non-identity. Hurston has created a female character existing in social limbo. Emma's dilemma resides in instability, of knowing and not-knowing, dwelling and not-dwelling, presence and absence. Emma's classification as black, female, poor, powerless, and disenfranchised leads to dislocation. If her reaction seems extreme, it is owing to the extremes of her condition.

It is for this reason that her actions seem irrational. In her study of the geography of modern drama, Una Chaudhuri raises the point that homelessness and displacement "constitute the insistent and pervasive challenges to home," which transform "the apparently simple figure into a powerful irreality, something on the order of a fantasy, fable, myth, or impossible dream."[54] In Color Struck, not only does homelessness lead to a condition of extreme anguish, it creates instability and a detachment from others.

Emma's alienation is apparent in every scene. In scene one, Emma and John are on the Jim Crow railroad car headed to Eatonville and the cakewalk contest. Despite his flirtations with Effie, John is frustrated by Emma's accusations of betrayal; Emma replies, in essence, that she can only love a man if he is faithful. Her love is, moreover, expressed in her jealousy, but jealousy is all that she can claim. Jealously, at least, reflects a feeling of "ownership"; given a world that limits her possession of "things," jealousy is an emotional possession, providing a fixed point in life:

Emma: (sadly) Then you don't want my love, John, cause I can't help mahself from being jealous. I loves you so hard, John, and jealous love is the only kind I got.
(John kisses her very feelingly)
Emma: Just for myself alone is the only way I knows how to love.[55]

The "self alone," cut off from place and movement, expresses an autonomy that is nothing more than a prison house of flesh. In such a condition, self-assertion often becomes a matter of boisterous public display. For example, in scene two, John again flirts with Effie and Emma admonishes him. When he tries to hush her up, she replies with bravura:

Ah-Ah aint gonna bite mah tongue! If she don't like it she can lump it. Mah back is broad - (John tries to cover her mouth with his hand). She calls herself a big cigar, but I kin smoke her![56]

This sassy reply or put-down in a public space is part of Emma's assertion of self-worth in a world that offers her little. When faced with betrayal, Emma lashes out satirically. Her irrepressible rage is always just below the surface, triggered by the slightest inducement. Yet beneath her rage lies a deeper, more poignant signification.

Melancholia and Fragmentation

Why do they see a colored woman only as a gross collection of desires, all uncontrolled, reaching out for their Apollos and the Quasimodos with avid indiscrimination?
                               -Marita O. Bonner (1925)[57]

The unpredictability that from the outset dwells in the relationship between Emma and John results from John's disloyalty and Emma's displaced condition. Emma's effort to keep John from leaving takes the form of reaching out, yet her intimacy risks ridicule and rejection. Her fears extend throughout her everyday life; every prospect of social engagement becomes a potentially dangerous emotional encounter. At the end or the scene two, John and Emma are called to the dance floor as the representatives of Jacksonville, but Emma refuses. She is now alone.

Emma: (She stands and clenches her fists) Ah, mah God! He's in there with her- 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. (She muffles a cry and sinks limp upon her seat.)[58]

The final line reminds us of Emma's condition, that she is nothing more than cobblestones for others to walk on. Her desperation is not mere self-indulgence, but something more relevant: melancholia.

Melancholia as a dramatic conceit has significant value. It has an honored history in Western aesthetics and philosophical traditions. When, as literary historian Juliana Schiesari points out, "women fall into the depths of sorrow," they "are all too easily dismissed with the banal and unprestigious term 'depression.'" Cultural expressions of melancholia, or loss, are not given the same "representational value as those of men within the Western canon of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis."[59] Properly understood, melancholia provides a clear understanding of the protagonist, placing Emma within a complex emotional matrix of social conceptualization. From the point where John leaves her, Emma says little. Paucity of speech is highly unusual in melodrama, where the tendency is toward effusive dialogue. In Color Struck, melancholia could all too easily lead to verbal excess resulting in satiation. Hurston avoids this, with the consequences that her technique becomes theatrically rich and somewhat unique. In strong contrast to the melodramatic overflow of words in Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel (discussed in the previous chapter), Hurston rejects verbal cascades and grand speeches, opting instead for silence, evasiveness, and indirection. Both Grimké and Hurston experiment with different dramatic forms to emphasize their points.

Hurston's employment of dashes, ellipses, and circumlocution in the text are indices of what both literary historians Saidiya V. Hartman and Claudia Tate call "textual enigmas." These markings embody black women's discourse. Hartman asserts that the dashes and elisions are "literal and figurative cuts in the narrative," displaying "the searing wounds of the violated and muted body" acting out its remembrances without the linguistic and symbolic tools to articulate its history of injury.[60] The violated body in Color Struck is represented as a fragmented soul, separated from community and respect. Claudia Tate argues along similar lines, maintaining that the ellipses are "enigmatic illocutions" indicative of a "surplus" of unattainable desires.[61] Emma's halting words, inarticulate responses, and enigmatic behavior require dashes and ellipses in their textual representation. They are emblematic of the body acting out a speechless articulation of desire and pain. The "melancholy moment,"[62] a term coined by psychoanalyst and cultural historian Julia Kristeva, reveals a condition frequently misinterpreted as mere self-effacing "rage" typifying exaggerated jealously and little else. This view of mere rage and exaggerated jealousy, however, misses the main point of the play.

Emma's anguish transcends language because her world is too fragmented for conceptualization. Words as signifiers of felt experiences are, in this case inadequate. The structural relationship between the signifier (language) and the thing signified (event) falls apart in the face of multiple and contradictory meanings. The play reveals this complexity in strong theatrical terms. For example at the end of the third scene, John and Effie have won the cakewalking contest. While the dancing inside is joyful, Emma stands outside, alone, listening to the announcer declare John and Effie the winners. A man approaches Emma, and says, "You're from Jacksonville, ain't you?" Then there are the following stage directions: "He whirls her around and around." "Ain't you happy?," he says; "Whoopee!" The final stage direction notes that he releases her, and "she buries her face in the moss."[63] John, dancing inside, will soon leave with Effie for parts north, abandoning Emma.

The striking juxtaposition of the lively dance inside and Emma being thrust to the ground with her face in the moss outside is Hurston's visual projection of a powerful content. Emma's silence during the moment of her greatest humiliation is Hurston's way of making the action carry meaning within the unfolding theatrical process. The audience must see Emma alone and face down while the black community in the background dances with joy; only through the visual, not the verbal, can we grasp the tragic dimension of Emma's existence. Emma, cut off from lover and culture, is diminished in value. Hurston's folk tragedy depends on a background of folk life (dance and celebration) displayed against the foreground of isolation. The author has juxtaposed a world fragmented between two opposing images. The image of Emma thrown to the moss epitomizes her being thrown from house, home, and community. Lying there in silence, she bespeaks a tragedy beyond words.

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]