Dust Tracks on a Road

Hurston's perspectives on race, racism, and racial identity are somewhat contrarian. Unlike many of her peers who participated in the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston saw little benefit in agitating for social equality. Instead, Hurston argues that African Americans are better seen as individuals who would succeed or fail based on their willingness to work. Hurston also argues that efforts to hold whites accountable for slavery and to convince whites that African Americans are their equals is fatally flawed from conception.

Hurston's perspective on race is rooted in part on her rejection of "African American" as a coherent identity around which African Americans can organize. In "My People! My People!" for example, Hurston highlights class distinctions between working-class African Americans and middle-class African Americans. Hurston also includes in Chapter 9 an anecdote about how she and her fellow co-workers supported a black barber who ejected an African American who attempted to force the man to offer him service in contradiction to the Jim Crow laws that segregated places of business. Hurston's argument here and elsewhere is that self-interest rather than racial solidarity is the basis for identity.

Hurston's contrarian view on African-American identity is also grounded in a particular perspective on the impact of the past on racial relations. While other writers such as Du Bois readily pointed to the United States' oppression of African Americans as a damning history that should be used to shame the country into providing opportunities for African Americans to succeed, Hurston rejects outright any claims on whites for the sins of their forefathers. In the final chapter of the memoir, Hurston includes an imagined dialogue between the modern descendants of slaveowners and the enslaved and concludes that it is a waste of effort for her to spend time "beating on old graves with a club" or to "to pretend that [she is] Old Black Joe and waste [her] time on his problems" (230). Hurston's optimism and focus on the future are in keeping with the prevailing interest in modernity of many during the Harlem Renaissance, but her attitude toward the black past as negligible to the future is not.

Hurston's self-fashioning in Dust Tracks on Road is one that underscores her emphasis on individual effort and the refusal to be bound by the past as crucial ingredients to African-American success. Hurston's earliest formulation of this idea is one that she credits to Lucy Potts Hurston, who "exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at de sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground" (13). When Hurston's aspirations at last brought her to Barnard College, she characterizes her feelings in that moment by paraphrasing Booker T. Washington, who “said once that you must not judge a man by the heights to which he has risen, but by the depths from which he came” (141).

In the concluding chapter of the memoir, Hurston offers a final thought on both her own past and that of African Americans by labeling bitterness about the past as "futility" and "the under-arm odor of wishful weakness" (229). In her own life as much as that of African-American descendants of slaves, the past is significant only as a measure of how far one has come.

Hurston's perspective on African-American identity is ultimately one that rejects the idea of a monolithic racial identity, and it is also one that refuses to hold whites accountable for the ongoing impact of white supremacy.

Another significant influence on Hurston's identity and her perspective on African-American identity is her childhood in Eatonville, Florida. In fact, Hurston opens her autobiography with a chapter on the town, which she describes as "a pure Negro town—charter, mayor, council, town marshal and all […] the first to be incorporated, the first attempt at organized self-government on the part of Negroes in America" (1). The town exercised such a strong influence on Hurston's identity that she writes, "[Y]ou will have to know something about the time and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life" (1).

The Eatonville that Hurston describes is a frontier town created from land taken from Native Americans during the Seminole Wars, provisioned by three whites, and constructed by African Americans who lived in perfect amity with their white neighbors during a time of brutal racial violence elsewhere. The voice in these passages and the story of her birth, presided over by a white man as midwife, is one that Hurston uses to present her story and that of the town as something out of myth. Hurston admits as much when she explains in the account of her own birth that everything she tells the reader is "hear-say" (19) and based on stories she was told as a child.

It is almost beside the point that Hurston was likely born in Alabama. The stories she tells about her life as it unfolds in Eatonville are self-mythologizing ones that counter a vision of the South and the African-American past as shameful and terrifying. Instead, Hurston presents Eatonville as a special place that allowed her to grow unfettered by the assumption of black inferiority and whose lush landscape fed her imagination with vivid imagery that persisted long after she left home.

Hurston's stories about the white man who aided Lucy Potts in giving birth to Hurston are, for example, ones that introduce many of the values (telling the truth, using force when necessary, refusing to be treated with disrespect) Hurston emphasizes in subsequent episodes of her life. The image of an old, white Southerner helping a black child to enter the world and inculcating values of self-respect is one calculated to put white readers at their ease and to emphasize Hurston's belief that African Americans should refuse to assume a bitter stance towards whites.

Although Hurston makes much of the role of this particular white man in her life, her later stories are ones that place the culture and community of Eatonville front and center as she considers the early influences on who she became. Hurston's ear and imagination as a writer were trained by the talk and folktales she heard on the front porch of the former mayor. She says of the porch that:

tales of God, the Devil, animals and natural elements seemed ordinary enough to most people in the village. But many of them stirred up fancies in me. […] Life took on a bigger perimeter by expanding on these things. I picked up glints and gleams out of what I heard and stored it away to turn it to my own uses (52).

The influence of the rich oral culture that circulated in Eatonville is apparent in the language of the memoir itself, which incorporates sayings, descriptions, fables, and tales that Hurston learned as a child in Eatonville.

Beyond its impact on Hurston's imagination and development as a writer, Eatonville sustained Hurston in other ways. Her survival after her family disintegrated with the death of Lucy Potts was ensured in large part because of the generosity of members of this community who took her in and shamed her father for his behavior when appropriate. Hurston's professional life, including her work in anthropology, her short stories, and her novels, show the clear mark of Eatonville and the South on her. One could argue that there would be no Hurston as we know her without Eatonville.

Hurston does represent other settings in the memoir. She writes of her arrival in Jacksonville, Florida, after the death of her mother, and that the city "made [her] know that [she] was a little colored girl" (70). The town's Jim Crow signs and the rigid enforcement of racial segregation were in sharp contrast to the easy way Hurston related to whites at home. Jacksonville is part of the Old South, about which Hurston writes very little. Hurston also includes brief descriptions of Washington, D.C., Boston, Memphis, Alabama, Baltimore, turpentine camps in South Florida, and New York in the memoir, with the bulk of these descriptions devoted to important locales like the campus of Barnard College assuming greater importance than the surrounding city. The lack of detail about these places serves to underscore the personal importance of Eatonville to Hurston's identity.

Finally, Hurston's relationship to place in the memoir is also shaped by her study of anthropology. Hurston's fieldwork in New Orleans, southern Florida, and the Caribbean (especially Haiti and the Bahamas) served as the foundation for her scholarly work. Hurston's account of how she was forced to find local informants and was essentially forced to flee to New Orleans after angering the ex-girlfriend of one of her informants dramatize that her relationship to place changed because of her education, however. She includes some description of these sites, but the mode of description is one that emphasizes her role as outsider or, at most, as participant observer who engages with the community but does so with the aim of turning her anthropological eye on the noteworthy aspects of these cultures.

Although Dust Tracks on a Road is a story about the development of an artist, it is also a story about education and the impact education had on Hurston's opportunities later in life. Hurston's memoir is a working-class one that focuses on the tension between work and education; it is also a memoir that emphasizes the importance of informal education to one's identity.

Hurston's account of her education is that she excelled in school as a girl but found formal education increasingly out of reach after her mother's death and the erosion of her family. It was via school, however, that Hurston received a gift of books that offered her an alternative means of nurturing her imagination. This gift of books—Greek and Norse mythology, as well as works by Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling—fed Hurston's imagination long after the money and clothing were gone. In acknowledging the way that her early literacy enhanced her childhood, Hurston is tapping into a longstanding tradition of African-American autobiography that goes all the way back to the narratives written by ex-slaves such as Frederick Douglas.

Hurston's ability to read was not the only means of education that she encountered, however. Hurston also received a more informal but much older form of education in the form of tales, stories, and explicit moral instruction from members of her community. Hurston learned about the origins of the world and gender relations, for example, by listening in on the folktales and gossip exchanged by the members of her community on the front porch of the town general store. She also listened in as her parents argued over how best to raise African-American children in a hostile world, and ultimately took her mother's side because it afforded her more freedom than the restrictive, fearful vision of childhood her father demanded. Hurston learned to reject servile behaviors associated with African-American behavior at the time as she fished alongside the white benefactor whom she claims helped to deliver her.

The education Hurston received once she left Eatonville was less benign, however, and it frequently was gained only through great effort. Her time at the Jacksonville school she attended after her mother's death was one where she was forced to learn the painful lesson that even education was not free. Her father's refusal or inability to pay her tuition meant that Hurston was regularly scolded by the school's administration because of her missing fees, and Hurston recounts how she was forced to do manual labor once it became apparent that her father would not be able to pay the fees.

Hurston's dismissal from school marks the moment when Hurston became aware of the tension between work and education. Hurston's education from the point at which she left school was scant, and she says of this time, "I was without books to read most of the time, except where I could get hold of them by mere chance," and "this book-reading business was a hold-back and an unrelieved evil" that interfered with her ability to contribute to her upkeep once she became dependent on the charity of neighbors (88). Hurston's education in these years was much more pragmatic: she learned never to tell female employers when their husbands sexually harassed her, learned to ingratiate herself with her co-workers, and learned much about the humanity of whites and race relations when she spent time as an assistant to Ms. M.

Nevertheless, Hurston yearned for the chance to extend her formal education. The problems were getting the money to pay for school and balancing work and her education. Hurston met with success of varying degrees only through the help of friends and teachers who saw some spark in her that convinced them that she could benefit from further education. Hurston's rapture once she managed to gain admittance to college was such that she felt "the ladder at [her] feet" (131).

Like many working-class writers and intellectuals, Hurston found that finally achieving higher education was no guarantee of a continued ascent up the ladder of social mobility. Hurston's account of her life after completing her formal education is one that was marred by privations and work that at times was not what she would have chosen, had she the freedom to do so. In the final chapter of the memoir, Hurston remarks, "When I get old, and my joints and bones tell me about it, I can sit around and write for myself, if for nobody else, and read slowly and carefully the mysticism of the East, and re-read Spinoza with love and care" (231), options that were clearly not open to her as she wrote the volume. Hurston died in 1960 after grave financial struggles and illness, and her unmarked grave was only discovered years later through the efforts of writer Alice Walker.