Beyond the Dialogue

Zora Neale Hurston’s 1926 play “Color Struck” tells the story of a couple in the “Jim Crow” South on their way to a cakewalk competition.

Because this story is formatted as a play, the text is primarily organized through dialogue. Without much narration, aside from stage directions and how the characters speak their lines, the audience does not receive much information about the thoughts and feelings of the characters, which makes understanding their choices and behaviors a difficult feat. What makes understanding the characters even more difficult is the great amount of outer dialogue compared to the small amount of inner dialogue. Not only is there no third-party narrator to tell the reader more about the characters, the characters themselves do not express their inner thoughts much at all. Therefore, understanding character choices requires carefully reading the text and using past dialogue to infer the reasoning of future decisions. For example, Emma says that she is upset with John interacting with Effie and other girls as she says, “I just can’t go in there and see all them girls – Effie hanging after you –“ (Hurston 11). This quote from earlier in the play is useful in explaining why Emma charges after John at the end of the book. In that scene, all Emma says is “I knowed it! A half white skin” (Hurston 14) and then goes on to hit him. These two sentences taken alone are incredibly vague, so past dialogue, such as the aforementioned one, is needed to explain the current scene. Emma’s history of jealous behavior regarding John’s interactions with light-skinned girls is the information that is needed to explain Emma’s actions when little context or description is given by an omniscient narrator.

This ambiguity in the starting point of the arguments between John and Emma is similar to those displayed in the argument between Ann and her husband in Tobias Wolff’s “Say Yes.” In both stories, as the arguments begun by the girls progress, their male counterparts begin to lose sight of the original argument. In Wolff’s story, Ann’s husband attempts to put an end to the argument as soon as possible as he is quite confused by the argument being pushed by Ann. Just like Ann’s husband, John in Hurston’s story continually looks to suppress Emma’s arguments, feeling as if there is really no need for arguments at all, as he has no sense of guilt for his actions. Both stories can be described broadly as having a couple arguing about a grievance brought up by the woman, and the man being oblivious to the reasons as to his significant other is upset.