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

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) ¹

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. ²

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!” ³

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. ⁴

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!” ⁵ 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.” ⁶ 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. ⁷ 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).” ⁸ 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. ⁹

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.” ¹⁰ 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.” ¹¹ Mobility, however, was seldom an option available to African American women at the time.

Black women avoided northward travel for a number of reasons. ¹² 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.” ¹³ 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.” ¹⁴ 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.” ¹⁵ 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.” ¹⁶ 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.” ¹⁷ 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. ¹⁸

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! ¹⁹

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.

1. Toni Morrison, “Afterword,” The Bluest Eye (New York: Plum, 1994), 210.[↑]
2. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 177.[↑]
3. Ibid[↑]
4. Hurston, Color Struck, 7.[↑]
5. 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).[↑]
6. Hurston, Color Struck, 7.[↑]
7. Hill, Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston, 109.[↑]
8. Hurston, Color Struck, 8.[↑]
9. Ibid.[↑]
10. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 146.[↑]
11. Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migration of the Subject (London: Routledge, 1994), 47.[↑]
12. 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.[↑]
13. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 32.[↑]
14. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 200, 202.[↑]
15. 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.[↑]
16. Edward Said, “Minds in Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile,” Harper’s Magazine 269 (September 1984), 51.[↑]
17. Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 13.[↑]
18. Hurston, Color Struck, 9.[↑]
19. Ibid,, 10. [↑]