Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston’s lively memoir, which I read for my Classics Club list.
Hurston was raised in what was essentially in the wilderness at the time in Eatonville, Florida, the first town in the country, she alleges, founded and run by Black people. She was an energetic and imaginative child, and though her family was poor, she seemed to have an idyllic childhood (if you don’t count being whipped, and she didn’t) until her mother died when she was nine. (Other accounts say four, but she says nine.) Not long thereafter, her father remarried and her stepmother soon ran her and her older brother out of the house. (If, when I read Their Eyes Were Watching God, I had realized she was writing about the founding of Eatonville, I think I would have paid more attention to the information about the town.)
I found it interesting that Hurston had a series of visions as a child and that all of them came true. The first was her mother’s death, the second years of wandering from home to home. Having to go to work at an early age cut into her schooling, but such was her determination to get it that after trying to earn enough at various jobs, she finally just returned to high school, ending up with degrees in anthropology and ethnography from Howard and Barnard Universities.
Hurston relates her life in a lively way with lots of anecdotes, folk stories, and even songs and poetry. Although many of the recollections of her earlier life are very particular, the closer the memoir gets to when she was writing it, the more general it becomes, so we don’t find out much after her first ethnographic studies and novels are completed. Instead, Hurston finishes with a series of discursions on her opinions, which I found less interesting than the story of her childhood and young adulthood.
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I’m looking forward to reading Their Eyes Were Watching God for Literary Wives club. After that I’ll look into her other work, including this.
Oh, gosh, I forgot that we were reading that. It’ll be a reread for me.
Sounds as if her memory might be a bit unreliable? I thought the way she described Eatonville in Their Eyes was a bit odd – it seemed to go from nothing to a thriving successful town without us getting any info as to how that happened, especially in a wider society that she was showing as run by white people for white people. It also seemed to exist in isolation, with little contact with the outside world. I found it didn’t quite ring true, somehow.
I think it might be willfully unreliable. It’s certain that she lied about her age.
She also made it sound as if her stepmother threw her and her brother out almost right away, but I think her father remarried when she was little and she left in her early teens. I don’t have the chronology straight in my head anymore. The biographies on the web said different things about her chronology than she did.
Strange. She seems to have been rather a troubled person, sadly.
I think she wanted people to think she was younger than she was, for one thing. But she didn’t really mentioned years. It was an impression I got from how she told it.
She would still have been young when she was sent from the house to live with relatives.
She sounds like an unreliable narrator of her own life!
I think so, or maybe says things for effect.
You’ve reminded me that I did enjoy some of her early childhood stories but I found the whole vision story odd to say the least. It was like she was saying that she had no choice in how she lived her life, these things/this path was already laid out for her.
I didn’t take it that way, and I also didn’t take it as a given. She said they all came true, but it was in the way of interpretation, and she only actually told about two of them.