of the most memorable scenes of the period, she
arrived at the awards dinner on May 1 wearing “a
long, richly colored scarf draped across her shoul-
ders... strode into the room—jammed with writ-
ers and arts patrons, black and white—... flung
the colorful scarf around her neck with a dramatic
flourish and bellowed a reminder of the title of her
winning play: ‘Colooooooor Struuckkk!’” Biogra-
pher Valerie Boyd suggests that with this “exultant
entrance,” Hurston “literally stopped the party for
a moment, just as she had intended” and that “[i]n
this way, Zora Neale Hurston made it known that
a bright and powerful presence had arrived” (Boyd,
97–98). The popularity of Hurston’s play was not
limited to the Opportunityawards. It also had great
appeal to newly formed theater groups such as the
NEGROARTTHEATRE OFHARLEM. In November
1925, Hurston wrote to tell Annie Nathan Meyer,
the woman who supported her application to
BARNARD COLLEGE, that the group was “fairly
launched now and the first program will include
my ‘Color Struck’ ” and that she hoped Meyer
would “find time to come” (Kaplan, 69). Hurston’s
favorite portion of the play was the opening scene
on the railway car. In an August 1929 letter to
LANGSTONHUGHES, she asked, enthusiastically,
“Dont you think that was the best part of the play?
Do you think it could be made a good skit sepa-
rated from the rest?” (Kaplan, 147).
David Levering Lewis characterizes the play as
a work of “searing, complex irony” (Lewis, 195),
but others have disagreed. Biographer Robert
Hemenway suggests that the play “is an apprentice
work,” “not an effective drama,” and that the
“only memorable scene is a cakewalk” (Hemenway,
47). While Hurston’s own preference for the lively
opening scene may reinforce Hemenway’s perspec-
tive, the play does tackle the deadly issue of self-
loathing. It also explores, quite strategically, the
notion of racial performance both through the
cakewalk as a form of accepted public racial enter-
tainment and through the socially constructed
roles of single-race and mixed-race individuals.
Bibliography
Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora
Neale Hurston.New York: Scribner, 2003.
Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biog-
raphy.Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
Kaplan, Carla. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters.New
York: Doubleday, 2002.
Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue.New
York: Knopf, 1981.Colson, William N.(unknown)
A writer and MESSENGEReditor who contributed
book reviews to the magazine that A. PHILIPRAN-
DOLPHand CHANDLEROWENestablished in NEW
YORKCITYin 1917.Columbia University
The Ivy League university in NEWYORKCITYthat
was an all-male undergraduate school until 1983.
Its sister school was BARNARDCOLLEGE, the insti-
tution where ZORANEALEHURSTONpursued her
studies before branching out into anthropology
coursework with Franz Boas, an eminent Columbia
University anthropology professor, in the 1920s.
LANGSTONHUGHESenrolled at Columbia in
1921 but left after his first year. ROMAREBEARDEN
studied at Columbia in 1943 and GWENDOLYN
BENNETTstudied here for two years before going
on to PRATTINSTITUTE.MARIONVERACUTH-
BERT, a Kent Fellowship recipient, earned her mas-
ter’s degree and Ph.D. at Columbia in 1931 and
1942, respectively.Comedy, American StyleJessie Fauset
(1933)
The last of JESSIEFAUSET’s four novels and a work
based on her short story “DOUBLE TROUBLE,”
which was published in the August 1923 issue of
THE CRISIS. Published by the New York–based
company of Frederick A. Stokes, the publisher who
produced three of her other works, the novel
maintains Fauset’s interest in black gentility, caste
prejudice, and women’s identity. The novel’s focus
on the anxieties and aspirations of the black mid-
dle class led some critics to underestimate its
pointed critique of caste prejudice, conceptions of
self, and the damaging social motivations that
could affect African-American families.
Fauset’s novel is fashioned in the form of a
play in several acts. In chapters with titles such as
“The Plot,” “The Characters,” “Curtain,” and oth-88 Colson, William N.