Migration, Fragmentation, and Identity: Zora Neale Hurston’s Color Struck and the Geography of the Harlem Renaissance

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.

1. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” (1954) in Poetry, Language, Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Row, 1971), 154.[↑]
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.[↑]
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).[↑]
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.[↑]
5. Alain Locke, “Harlem,” Survey Graphic 6.6 (March 1925), 629.[↑]
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.[↑]
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.[↑]
8. Crispin Sartwell, Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).[↑]
9. Carby, “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk,” 77.[↑]
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.[↑]
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.[↑]
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.[↑]
13. See Boas, “What is Anthropology?,” in Boas, Anthropology and Modern Life (1928; reprint. New York: Dover, 1986), 11-17.[↑]
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.[↑]
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.[↑]
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.[↑]
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.[↑]
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.[↑]
19. Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 63.[↑]
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.[↑]
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).[↑]
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.[↑]
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.[↑]
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.[↑]
25. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942; reprint, New York: Harper 1995), 184.[↑]
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.[↑]
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.[↑]
28. Ibid., 79.[↑]
29. Ibid., 75.[↑]
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.[↑]
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).[↑]
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).[↑]
33. Alain Locke, “Fire: A Negro Magazine,” The Survey Graphic 58.10-12 (15 August-15 September 1927), 563.[↑]
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.[↑]
35. Anthea Kraut, “Reclaiming the Body: Representations of Black Dance in Three Plays by Zora Neale Hurston.” Theatre Studies 43 (1998), 30.[↑]
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.[↑]
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).[↑]