Color Struck - A Play;Including the Introductory Essay 'A Brief History of the Harlem Renaissance'

by Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston's tragic 1926 play Color Struck is a thought-provoking commentary on colorism within the Black community.

Set in Florida in 1900, Colour Struck begins on a Jim Crow train carriage. Barely making the train, Emma and John's journey commences with an argument. Emma saw John speaking to a lighter-skinned Black woman, Effie, and was immediately jealous, assuming he was flirting. Throughout the play Emma continues to display animosity towards those with lighter skin, which often results in calamity.

Exploring themes of colorism, self-destruction, and hatred, Zora Neale Hurston's 1926 tragedy comments on intra-racial racism and warns of the adverse effects of harbouring hatred. Color Struck was first published in Fire!! magazine and won second prize in the Opportunity magazine's contest for best play. Now republished in a new edition, Hurston's play is not one to be missed by those with an interest in Harlem Renaissance literature.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Short Stories, Historical Fiction, School, Classics, African American

40 pages, Paperback

Published September 27, 2022

About the author

Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.

In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.

Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern tableau with one performance on Broadway.

People awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Hurston to travel to Haiti and conduct research on conjure in 1937. Her significant work ably broke into the secret societies and exposed their use of drugs to create the Vodun trance, also a subject of study for fellow dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, then at the University of Chicago.

In 1954, the Pittsburgh Courier assigned Hurston, unable to sell her fiction, to cover the small-town murder trial of Ruby McCollum, the prosperous black wife of the local lottery racketeer, who had killed a racist white doctor. Hurston also contributed to Woman in the Suwanee County Jail , a book by journalist and civil rights advocate William Bradford Huie.

Reviews

[Leah]

enjoyed the play, loved the stage directions, confused by the jacket copy that seems to completely miss the point as far as I can tell? publisher IS british

[Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for a class I’m teaching: Introduction to African American Literature. We are currently in the Harlem Renaissance era. This was a short little play about colorism and it’s traumatic effects. Emma and John are a young couple in love, only Emma cannot seem to understand why John loves her when she is so dark. She is easily jealous of lighter-skinned women and ends things with John due to her overwhelming jealousy of Effie, a lighter skinned woman she thinks (falsely) that John admires.

20 years pass and John shows up at Emma’s door begging to marry her. He never forgot her and she never forgot him. The problem is, Emma is still so full of self-loathing she can’t see the truth of John’s affections.

A sad ending. A sad tale.

[Raghad · Rating 3 out of 5]

The play is fairly simple and quite short. But Hurston does an effective job at capturing black identity and the nature of black spaces. She uses spelling to convey the conventions and phonetics of AAVE, signaling that unlike Grimké, Hurston wrote this play for a black audience who would easily understand and relate to the characters. Hurston centers her messaging on colorism around the conflict between Emma and John. Emma is repeatedly jealous when John interacts with half-white or mixed women, even if he is simply being polite. She expresses a profound anxiety that light-skin women receive everything they want in society, including the men and the jobs. By the end, we see Emma’s anxiety materialize into real, violent fear that John is a white man coming to kill her child. John tells her that she is so ashamed of her dark skin that she cannot believe that anyone would ever actually love her. We learn Emma is actually blind by the end and it forces the reader to consider how deeply pervasive Emma’s self-imposed colorism was to have made her so skeptical of John, even if she knew him by heart. Her colorism prevents her from actually going to seek any non-white doctor, and instead, fails to reach out to the white doctor in time to save her child. The play is deeply tragic but it speaks to the audience in a deep sense, as if the reader is assumed to know (or to have actually gone through) the direct experience that Hurston portrays.

[ThePurpleElephant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whew! Ms. Emma couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Her self-hatred kept her alone and miserable.

To think so low of herself that she put light skinned women on an imaginary pedestal yet, despised them enough to let the envy in her heart cause the death of her own daughter (allegedly)

John recognized crazy immediately and got the hell on lol

[Chloë Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. good lil exploration of the impact of colorism and how pervasive it is in the period but simultaneously frustrating. one of hurstons better plays. good shit all around.

[Lonnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was good, but i liked lennox avenue better.

[Tatyana Vogt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay, so I ended up getting the physical copy of this and I really enjoyed all of the information and history before the play and the process of analyzing the play and trying to thing through different conversations that it was putting forth. It focuses on colorism in the time and how it breeds hatred within a community, focusing more on one characters self-destructive behaviors due to her own insecurities. I sort of wish there were different examples of this throughout and that the ending was a little longer.. or something?

It was short and sweet and got me thinking, so it was successful in that. But I feel like the play itself was missing something. I Dunno..

[Kylie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful, thoughtful, and tragic Color Struck is a beautifully told story bringing up the issue of colorism within the Black community. Despite the descriptive stage directions, this play may be difficult to envision without a strong knowledge of the cakewalk or, as I had, a very helpful historical introduction.

[Elizabeth Day · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is obvious from this play that Zora Neale Hurston is a wonderful writer. She includes some of the most beautiful stage directions I’ve ever read. This is a heartbreaking story about the destruction of colorism. It is equal parts riveting and dull, thus the three star rating, but I would love to read something by Ms. Hurston again, because she is clearly wonderful.
(PG rating)

[Rae the Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t really know how to rate plays since they aren’t a medium I read often but I enjoyed the last scene a lot. It was such an interesting exploration of race in the society of the time and the impact that colorism can have on one’s self esteem.