Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston

First published: 1942

Type of work: Autobiography

Principal personages

• Zora Neale Hurston, the narrator
• John Hurston, her father, a carpenter and preacher
• Lucy Ann (Potts) Hurston, her mother
• Charlotte Louise Mason (Mrs. R. Osgood Mason), her patron and benefactor
• Franz Boas, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University
• Fannie Hurst, a novelist and one of Zora’s employers
• Ethel Waters, a singer and actor

The Work:

The first eleven chapters of Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road are roughly chronological. Zora is born in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black town to be incorporated in the United States and where her father serves three terms as mayor. As one of eight children, she grows up in an eight-room house in Eatonville with a five-acre garden and ample opportunities for childhood play. One day in school, when two wealthy white women are visiting, Zora reads flawlessly and is rewarded with boxes of books to read—particularly tales of Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology—thereby advancing her education and stimulating her ability to imagine new worlds.

Zora’s mother also encourages her to excel and to maintain a spunky spirit. Accordingly, when Zora’s mother dies young, the child suffers grief and remorse, believing that the first phase of her life has ended; she is sent away to school in Jacksonville. When her father quickly remarries—this time to a much younger woman—Zora clashes frequently with her stepmother, whom she regards as an interloper. Eager to live independently, Zora finds employment as a maid, first briefly for a family and then for one year with a singer from Boston who works in a traveling theatrical troupe. These job experiences provide her with greater maturity and self-confidence.

Settling in Baltimore, Zora resumes her education in the high school department of Morgan College, where she excels sufficiently to earn admission to prestigious Howard University in Washington, D.C. Although Zora is unable to keep up with tuition payments after two years, she encounters several influential faculty members who encourage her to publish short stories, which propel her to a scholarship at Barnard College in New York and employment as a secretary to Fannie Hurst. While at Barnard, she becomes a protégé of Franz Boas, who arranges a fellowship that enables Zora to study African American folklore in the South. Her subsequent fieldwork is funded largely by Charlotte Louise Mason, a wealthy white patron with a Park Avenue apartment. This research—in Polk County, Florida; New Orleans; the Bahamas; Mobile, Alabama; British West Indies; Jamaica; Haiti; and elsewhere—results in several successful works, including Mules and Men (1935), a pioneering study of African American folklore, and two novels that incorporate these folk traditions, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

The five concluding chapters are thematic essays on various topics: “My People! My People!,” which addresses the diversity of African Americans; an appreciation of Fannie Hurst and Ethel Waters as inspirational figures; a meditation on love, including a passionate affair with a man identified only as P.M.P.; her mixed feelings about religion; and a retrospective summation of her life to date.

In 1995, the Library of America published a more complete version of Dust Tracks on a Road containing chapters that were rejected by the book’s original publisher in 1942. They include a revised version of “My People! My People!” that is harsher in its view of African Americans; “Seeing the World as It Is,” which contains critical comments about American democracy and Anglo-Saxons; “The Inside Light—Being a Salute to Friendship,” in which Hurston credits the friends in her life while also admitting her personal shortcomings; and “Concert,” which describes her role in producing an innovative performance in New York in 1932 of West Indian music and dance.

The factual unreliability of Hurston’s autobiography is apparent from the very first page. Although Hurston claims to have been born in Eatonville, Florida, census records attest that she was born some 400 miles away in Notasulga, Alabama. Hurston maintains that her mother married at age fourteen and died when Zora was only nine, but the dates on the family Bible show her mother’s age as fourteen when wed and Zora’s age as thirteen at the time of her mother’s death. Hurston writes that her brothers and sisters were dispersed to other families after the death of their mother and that her father’s second marriage collapsed, but census records indicate otherwise. Moreover, many seemingly significant events in Hurston’s life—including her continuing closeness to her older brother Bob and his family in Memphis, her work as an editor with the Federal Writers’ Project, and even her marriage to Albert Price III—are left out of the autobiography.

Even with its factual errors and omissions, Dust Tracks on a Road is a remarkable self-portrait of one of America’s best-known black female writers. Without dwelling much on issues of race, Hurston constructs a compelling narrative that (although not literally rags to riches) demonstrates how she is able to overcome poverty, family discord, and personal adversity to become a successful writer, anthropologist, and cultural observer. Presumably written largely for an educated, white audience in the urban north, Dust Tracks on a Road presents a vivid and detailed portrait of the black rural south, where Hurston was born and raised and where she conducted most of her fieldwork. In the tradition of the bildungsroman, the book illustrates her maturation from child to adult and the many journeys (both literal and spiritual) along the way.

Bibliography

Boi, Paola. “Zora Neale Hurston’s Autobiographie Fictive: Dark Tracks on the Canon of a Female Writer.” In The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, edited by Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Weighing the book’s imaginary elements against its reality, Boi concludes that it is closer to narrative fiction than factual autobiography.

Bordelon, Pam. “New Tracks on Dust Tracks: Toward a Reassessment of the Life of Zora Neale Hurston.” African American Review 31, no. 1 (Spring, 1997): 5-21. Based on archival documents and an interview with one of Hurston’s nieces, this carefully researched article provides new biographical information that contradicts some of the alleged facts in Dust Tracks on a Road.

Domina, Lynn. “’Protection in My Mouf’: Self, Voice, and Community in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road and Mules and Men.” African American Review 31, no. 2 (Summer, 1997): 197-209. When read together, these two books by Hurston—one classified as autobiography, the other classified as folklore—provide a more complete picture of the author’s life.

Hassall, Kathleen. “Text and Personality in Disguise and in the Open: Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road.” In Zora in Florida, edited by Steven Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel. Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991. Argues that Hurston’s inventiveness and resourcefulness led her to disguise aspects of her life deliberately in her autobiography.

Robey, Judith. “Generic Strategies in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road.” Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 4 (Winter, 1990): 667-682. Maintains that Hurston intentionally shifts literary genres—from myth to picaresque to essay—to maintain her independence and authority.

Rodríguez, Barbara. “On the Gatepost: Literal and Metaphorical Journeys in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road.” In Women, America, and Movement: Narratives of Relocation, edited by Susan L. Roberson. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. The structure of Hurston’s autobiography reflects her, according to Rodríguez. The first half is primarily metaphorical, using folklore and local legends to suggest Hurston’s life story; the second half is more literal, using specific events to document and construct her personal identity.

Snyder, Phillip A. “Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks: Autobiography and Artist Novel.” In Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, edited by Gloria L. Cronin. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Because Dust Tracks on a Road combines elements of both traditional autobiography and fictional bildungsroman, it allows for multiple interpretations of Hurston’s life.

Valkeakari, Tuire. “’Luxuriat[ing] in Milton’s Syllables’: Writer as Reader in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road.” In Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present, edited by Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Hurston’s autobiography reveals much about the books she read and how they affected her career as a scholar and writer.

West, M. Genevieve. Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Chapter 5 assesses the pressures and factors that led to Hurston’s unconventional autobiography and the reviews—both praiseworthy and critical—that appeared at the time.