Dust Tracks on a Road – Zora Neale Hurston (1942)

With thanks to Virago for the review copy

The new Zora Neale Hurston editions from Virago are utterly beautiful, stunning cover designs, that made me actually ‘oooh’ when I opened the envelope. I read Their Eyes were Watching God a few years ago, a fantastic depression era set novel, it’s the story of Janie and her great love for Tea-Cake. Dust Tracks on a Road is the autobiography of the woman who wrote that great modern classic, beautifully written, it is an extraordinarily intimate and revealing portrait with hundreds of quotable passages. There is such wisdom and inspiration in this book, better than that, I found I really liked Zora from the first page.

“I am not tragically coloured. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

Recounting her rise from a Southern childhood lived in poverty, to when she was taking her place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston is never less than entertaining and honest.

“I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.”

Born in Florida in the 1890s, she was the fifth of eight children. Reliving her childhood memories here, little Zora comes across as a bright, inquisitive child with lots of spirit. She fell foul of her father – a baptist preacher – early on, he favoured the boys and her sister Sarah, her mother frequently having to get between them. It’s clear that her upbringing was central to creating the woman she became. She writes wonderfully about the town of Eatonville where she grew up, describing the people and what it was like to grow up there, it’s a vivid picture of a unique black community, the first all-black town in America.  

Zora was only in her teens when her mother died, and life started to change. When her father re-marries, Zora’s stepmother is a woman keen to establish herself in her new home, she bullies her way into position, leaving Zora no choice but to leave. Zora travels, she works where she can, doing what she has to, including working for and travelling with an actress and her theatrical group – often meeting people who help and support her, recognising her great potential.

“I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.”

Her dream is to continue her education, to go to college. It was the philanthropy of others that helped her on her way, and she put it to good use.

She studies anthropology – travelling around the US to research folklore and anthropology. Later chapters of the book read more like essays, and in these essays, Hurston discusses the lives of black people in America, religion and love. The chapter entitled ‘My People! My People’ is particularly powerful, in this chapter she discusses her race, and the experiences of black Americans in the period before the war. She is thoroughly thought provoking and wise, she has an acute understanding of people and society.

“It seems to me to be true that heavens are placed in the sky because it is the unreachable. The unreachable and therefore the unknowable always seems divine–hence, religion. People need religion because the great masses fear life and its consequences. Its responsibilities weigh heavy. Feeling a weakness in the face of great forces, men seek an alliance with omnipotence to bolster up their feeling of weakness, even though the omnipotence they rely upon is a creature of their own minds. It gives them a feeling of security.”

I loved Zora Neale Hurston’s spirit, her intelligence and her way of looking at all sorts of things. Strangely perhaps she discusses her writing quite lightly, it is of less focus than other things in the book, though it’s clear it was important to her. Zora Neale Hurston lived until 1960, and it is sad to remember she died in relative obscurity, her place of rest an unmarked grave until the 1970s.

I am now looking forward to reading Jacob’s Gourd Vine (1934), Zora Neale Hurston’s first novel, the story of John Buddy Pearson, who discovers a talent for preaching. A novel which is also apparently highly autobiographical, based on the life of her father.