Dust Tracks on a Road

An Autobiography

By: Zora Neale Hurston

Narrated by: Bahni Turpin

“Warm, witty, imaginative.... This is a rich and winning book.”—The New Yorker

Dust Tracks on a Road is the bold, poignant, and funny autobiography of novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of American literature’s most compelling and influential authors. Hurston’s powerful novels of the South—including Jonah’s Gourd Vine and, most famously, Their Eyes Were Watching God—continue to enthrall readers with their lyrical grace, sharp detail, and captivating emotionality. First published in 1942, Dust Tracks on a Road is Hurston’s personal story, told in her own words. The Perennial Modern Classics Deluxe edition includes an all-new forward by Maya Angelou, an extended biography by Valerie Boyd, and a special section featuring the contemporary reviews that greeted the book’s original publication.

“I feel that I have lived”

Zora Neale Hurston begins her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) with a historical overview of her hometown, Eatonville, Florida, the first officially sanctioned all-black town in America, including details on the conflict between the USA and the Cherokee and Seminoles and the runaway black slaves they adopted into their tribes. She then describes the backgrounds, personalities, courtship, marriage, and children of her parents; recounts her childhood (the most interesting chapters in the book for me), including her questioning, creative, and wandering mind and love of stories (which led her to chafe at the standard “pigeon hole way of life”); her vivid visions of future turning points in her life; the breakup of her family with the death of her mother; her education; her professional career (as ethnologist and writer); her love life and friendships; and her thoughts on race and religion and America, etc.

The book ends well, but the audiobook—finely read by Bahni Turpin—adds an Appendix featuring a series of essays and short pieces, many of which repeat anecdotes, parables, ideas, and turns of phrase that she uses in her autobiography, such that I began feeling a chafing redundancy. After the Appendix comes a Chronology by Henry Louis Gates that ends with the sad fact that Zora Neal Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave in 1960, and that Alice Walker discovered and marked her grave in 1973, launching a Hurston revival.

Hurston’s writing, as in her splendid Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), is savory and rich, refined and earthy, witty and concise, including colorful utterances by her family and friends, as when her father became enraged when she asked for a horse for Christmas: “It’s a sin and a shame. Let me tell you something right now my young lady. You ain’t white. Ridin’ a horse. Always trying to wear the big hat.” She can write a lyrical sensual poetry in prose, too: “I was only happy in the woods and when the ecstatic Florida springtime came strolling from the sea, transglorifying the world with its aura. Then I hid out in the tall wild oats that waved like a green tea veil. I nibbled sweet oat stalks and listened to the wind soughing and sighing through the crowns of the lofty pines.” And an earthy pithy writing: “This was the very corn I wanted to grind” (i.e., an excuse to physically fight her stepmother). And great similes: “Strange things must have looked out of my eyes like Lazarus after his resurrection.”

And she writes great lines about--

Feeling different:
“If the village was singing a chorus, I must’ve missed the tune.”

Prayer:
“Prayer seems to me a crying of weakness and an attempt to avoid by trickery the rules of the game as laid down… I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life as it is does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it.”

Religion:
“Mystery is the essence of divinity.”

Love:
“Much that passes for constant love is a golded up moment walking in its sleep. Some people know that it is the walk of the dead, but in desperation and desolation they have staked everything on life after death and the resurrection. So they haunt the graveyard. They build an altar on the tomb and wait there like faithful Mary for the stone to roll away. So the moment has authority over all of their lives. They pray constantly for the miracle of the moment to burst it’s bonds and spread out over time.”

Patriotism:
“I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.”

Poverty:
“There is something about poverty that smells like death… People can be slave ships in shoes.”

Hurston would disapprove of the current movement for reparations for slavery. She says that although slavery and reconstruction were “sad” and that America would be better off without them, they are in the past, and she is a forward-looking person who does not want to go around beating on the coffins of our unpleasant past and does not want to confront descendants of slaveowners to blame them for the actions of their ancestors.

She also argues that there is no such thing as race and that she does not like constructions like “race consciousness” or “race pride” or “race problems,” and that after all everybody is an individual and is not determined by the color of his or her skin and that there are good and bad people among the members of every skin color. In this, she does not acknowledge the stacked deck with which black people must play the game of life in America or the racist environment in which they must try to survive in the USA. And when viewed from the current context of Black Lives Matter and the police shooting of unarmed black men, she seems a little disingenuous and out of date when saying that everyone has a chance to do what they want to do if they work hard.

At the same time, in great detail she lists multiple criteria you can use if you want to determine what a black person is, and I would imagine that some of them must seem stereotypical and offensive to Black people. E.g., if the person likes making up words that sound good in context, if the person likes imitating others, if the person cannot agree with their friend, if the person likes acting dramatically, etc., then the person is a “Negro.” I think she only partly has her tongue in cheek as she undercuts her claims elsewhere that there’s no such thing as race, especially when you take into account her compelling account of organizing “natural Negro songs with action” in which she says she wanted to present and promote the “real music of my people.”

I did like the book a lot, though not so much as Their Eyes Were Watching God. But fans of that book or of Hurston should read her autobiography.

Engaging and Thought Provoking

Amazing narrator that brings everything to life. Along the way learned many things. Now have deep respect and gratitude for what early pioneers went through. we

Definitely recommend this one.

interesting

This book helped me with a better understanding of black culture. I was particularly interested in the difference between spirituals performed as they really are and how composers have changed the idiom.

great narrator

always wanted to read her books. this one is her biography. she hung out with some literary wits

Very nice!

Loved her story. She was way before her time in words, spirit, life and death.