Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography Book

Oh the magic and mystery that was Zora Neale Hurston. An indescribable childhood, deplorable kindred, a love life that was itself a puzzle. (In fact she does admit that her true love story with her second husband was somehow interwoven into her novel: "I tried to embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him in Their Eyes Were Watching God).

The first sentence of this memoir is a lyrical ambush:

Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.

Zora Neale Hurston was a highly acclaimed writer, publishing four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, and more than fifty short pieces between the Harlem Renaissance and the end of the Korean War. She was seen as a dominant writer who brought the consciousness of the black woman to literature. Her use of dialect and vernacular was her framework. Her work was so important to the next generation of women writers that Alice Walker made it her literary quest to find her: "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston."

What is interesting is that at times, like the title of Walker's article, you do find yourself searching for Hurston throughout her memoir.

She was born in Alabama but considered Eatonville, Florida her home. Though she grew up in the Jim Crow south, she was surrounded by people who looked like her because Eatonville was a small black incorporated town. Hurston didn't want to touch the topic of race, didn't believe in dwelling on it, even excuses the white man who helped with her birth when he referenced the n-word. There is a chapter in her book devoted to the racial oppression of her time and aside from that, race is only seen through subtleties in conversation, like this one with her grandmother who had "seen slavery:"

Git down offa dat gate post! You li'l sow, you!...Setting up dere looking dem white folks right in de face! They's gowine to lynch you, yet...Youse too brazen to live long.

She was a woman who didn't believe in race or class. To her, they were easy generalizations and she chose individualism instead. According to her, "Negroes were neither better nor worse than any other race." She didn't believe in prayer: "Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness." Didn't believe in organized creed: "Seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish." And yet she believed in the rituals of Hoodoo:

In New Orleans, I delved into Hoodoo, or sympathetic magic... I learned the routines for making and breaking marriages; driving off and punishing enemies; influencing the minds of judges and juries in favor of clients; killing by remote control and other things...In another ceremony, I had to sit at the crossroads at midnight in complete darkness and meet the Devil and make a compact...

There is inert gloom and placid darkness to be found in the memoir. Picture a person on a dark, cold night, smoking a cigarette next to a campfire, telling you a story so enticing, you want to hear the end even while parts of it gives you goosebumps. At times you don't know what to expect from this story, like in the beginning for instance, when Hurston tells you: "I stood in a world of vanished communion with my kind." Was she saying something indirectly? And then: "I had knowledge before its time. I knew my fate. I knew that I would be an orphan and homeless...I would stand beside a dark pool of water and see a huge fish move slowly away at a time when I would be somehow in the depth of despair."

All one can do is wonder about these passages because even with the graceful storytelling and vibrant language, much is mysterious. Some chapters feel like essays, some like avoidance. At times Hurston gets close only to disappear into narrative. Even when she gets to the 1929 Hurricane in New Orleans, she gives a few sentences of vagueness.

You still wonder, beneath it all, who was Hurston?

It makes you want to pick up a biography wherein you see her from another's eyes (probably the one written by Valerie Boyd ) and perhaps answer some questions that even she couldn't have answered:

1.With all her success, why did she only get royalties of $943.75?
2.Why did she disappear into obscurity?
3.How was it, that she receives two Guggenheims, is hired as a story consultant at Paramount, later works as a librarian, but ends up working as a maid even while her work receives awards?
4. How does she go from saying, "Negroes were neither better nor worse than any other race," to publishing an article entitled, "What White Publishers Won't Print?"