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    Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography
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    Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography
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    Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography
    Ebook245 pages4 hours

    Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography

    By Zora Neale Hurston

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    About this ebook

    A candid, funny, bold and poignant autobiography from one of literature's most cherished voices. Dust Tracks on a Road is the enthralling account of Zora Neale Hurston's rise from an impoverished childhood in the rural South to celebrated artist of the Harlem Renaissance. 

    Penguin Random House Canada is proud to bring you classic works of literature in e-book form, with the highest quality production values. Find more today and rediscover books you never knew you loved.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMcClelland & Stewart
    Release dateFeb 12, 2019
    ISBN9780735253636
    Author

    Zora Neale Hurston

    Zora Neale Hurston wrote four novels (Jonah’s Gourd Vine; Their Eyes Were Watching God; Moses, Man of the Mountains; and Seraph on the Suwanee) and was still working on her fifth novel, The Life of Herod the Great, when she died; three books of folklore (Mules and Men and the posthumously published Go Gator and Muddy the Water and Every Tongue Got to Confess); a work of anthropological research (Tell My Horse); an autobiography (Dust Tracks on a Road); an international bestselling ethnographic work (Barracoon); and over fifty short stories, essays, and plays. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, grew up in Eatonville, Florida, and lived her last years in Fort Pierce, Florida.

    Read more from Zora Neale Hurston

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    Reviews for Dust Tracks on a Road

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Her father was the mayor and also a minister. Her mother, a school teacher died while Zora was young and her father quickly remarried. Zora and her stepmother didn’t get along so Zora found herself cast off and very independent from her mid teen years.

      She had a series of dream visions foretelling her future. At many points in her life, she was able to confirm what was occurring by one of these foretellings.

      She began her career as an anthropologist, collecting black folk tales and songs from the south.

      Fiercely independent, with an absolute gift for laugh out loud funny, but often acerbic words: (“My grandmother glared at me like open-faced hell and snorted: I vominates a lying tongue.”)

      This memoir was written in 1942 when she was at the top of her game as a writer, and a leader in the Harlem Renaissance.

      Besides the memoir, there are three of her essays, including her thoughts on being a ‘race man’. I cannot but wonder if some of these thoughts led to her eventual obscurity in a time when blacks were eager to claim their rightful place after centuries of being treated as lesser.

      “Light came to me when I realized that I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole. God made them duck by duck and that was the only way I could see them. I learned that skins were no measure of what was inside people. So none of the Race cliché meant anything anymore. I began to laugh at both white and black who claimed special blessings on the basis of race. Therefore I saw no curse in being black, nor no extra flavor by being white."

      Highly recommended. I will be reading more by Zora Neale Hurston.
    • 5/5
      This pioneer was lost (really lost, in an unmarked grave) and then found by Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple. Writer, anthropologist, domestic worker, and sharp observer of relations between the races and genders in the '30s - 50's, she is best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston was also inclined to strong narratives about heterosexual relationships, as influenced by her non-affectionate mother, who died when she was only nine; a bitter physical war with her stepmother; and her two ex-husbands. Also included in this memoir are three essays that define her stance on "race men" - she did not believe that any race should ever be judged as a single entity, but only as individuals. Hurston was also a non-believer, putting her at great odds with her community of Eatonville, FL, the only incorporated all-Black town in the country. Her stirring writings on "My People! My People!" will be puzzling to modern readers, who will be surprised at her seeming lack of interest in social justice and in reparations. Fore and afterwords by Maya Angelou and Henry Gates Jr provide context but do not make excuses for Hurston's courting of wealthy white patrons. Hurston is a folk writer in two senses of the word - she writes beautifully and understands "common" folk and speaks so evocatively in the vernacular of working class and poor people. Her loss of literati favor and her eventual obscurity are painful to discover, as surely it was for Hurston, perhaps due to falling out of favor with the white editors who helped her get started, and to her disagreements with other Black writers such as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. This is as strong a coming-of-age story as has ever been told.

      Quotes: “My grandmother glared at me like open-faced hell and snorted: I vominates a lying tongue.”

      “There is an age when children are fit company for spirits. Before they have absorbed too many of earthly things to be able to fly with the unseen things that soar.”

      “Rome, the eternal city, meant two different things to my parents. To Mama, it meant you must build it today so it could last through eternity. To Papa, it meant that you could plan to lay some bricks today and you have the rest of eternity to finish it. With all time, why hurry? God had made more time than anything else, anyway. Why act so stingy about it?”

      “You cannot have knowledge and worship at the same time. Mystery is the essence of the divine. Gods must keep their distance from men.”

      “I was careful to do my classwork. I felt the ladder under my feet.”

      “It is one of the tragedies of life that one cannot have all the wisdom one is ever to possess in the beginning. “

      “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.”

      “Niagara Falls was just like watching the ocean jump off Pike’s Peak.”
    • 5/5
      Even without a tutored read, I can wholeheartedly recommend Dust Tracks on a Road. Hurston is a phenomenal writer. I love the way she uses local and contemporaneous dialect seamlessly in her higher brow and lower brow stories within the autobiography.

      Having read the introduction, I did feel like I could spot a few places where she was keeping distance from the reader. I also wished to learn more about the Harlem Renaissance than she includes (which I may try to do later). But I liked this regardless. Of particular note, in my opinion, are the chapters where she talks about her writing process (fascinating) and the story of her mother's death (wrenching).
    • 4/5
      Entertaining autobiography of an American roots writer.
      Review of the Audible Audio edition (2016) narrated by Bahni Turpin (was the Audible Daily Deal on February 19, 2019).

      This was an entertaining overview of American roots writer Zora Neale Hurston's (1891-1960) life and career as written from her own point of view in 1942. It doesn't provide a complete biographical arc. Although the audiobook shares a cover image with 2010's Perennial Modern Classics Deluxe edition it does not include the Maya Angelou foreword, the Valerie Boyd biographical note, and the P.S. bonus materials sections. Some of that extra material would have been useful for context as the latter part of the autobiography becomes more of a series of essays on religion and slavery. This is followed up with the final 6th of the audiobook (about 2 hours of the total 11. 4 hours) being a series of appendices with further essay material (some of which repeats stories that already appear in the biography proper). So some confusion does result in understanding why the book is structured the way it is and how much it has now been rearranged by latter day editors.

      Still, it is enormously entertaining for the most part and was enhanced by actress Bahni Turpin's vocal performance. Hurston interjects various digressions of anecdotes and folk tales into her through story which provides considerable opportunity for Turpin to perform everything from Boston Irish accents to Fire & Brimstone pulpit speeches. I have only otherwise read Hurston's classic "Their Eyes Were Watching God" and likely some of her other works are now hard to find, but I think they would make for similarly enjoyable Americana roots reading in the present day. I had not known previously that Hurston was a student of anthropologist Franz Boas for instance or about her gathering of information on Hoodoo rituals and practices in Louisiana and those of Voodoo in Haiti.
    • 4/5
      Zora's autobiography was most enjoyable for its language full of inventive metaphor. Particularly towards the end she gets up on her soap box a bit too much for my taste.
    • 5/5
      This was wonderful. ZNH tells her own story very engagingly, with plenty of reflections on race, self-determination, American culture, religion, friendship, publishing, the works. She's acerbic in her observations; I kept on writing them down. At the time she wrote the autobiography, she was at the height of her success; a few years later she was out of the public eye, and she ended her life in poverty and obscurity, which is a terrible shame. Well, no one should die alone and impoverished, though.

      Here are her words on poverty:

      There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.

      and on justice:

      I too yearn for universal justice, but how to bring it about is another thing. It is such a complicated thing, for justice, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. There is universal agreement of the principle, but the application brings on the fight.

      But there were lighthearted moments, too, like this, from her childhood, which I shared on Livejournal:

      I used to take a seat on top of the gate post and watch the world go by. One way to Orlando ran past my house, so the carriages and cars would pass before me. The movement made me glad to see it. Often the white travelers would hail me, but more often I hailed them, and asked, "Don't you want me to go a piece of the way with you?"

      They always did. I know now that I must have caused a great deal of amusement among them, but my self-assurance must have carried the point, for I was always invited to come along. I'd ride up the road for perhaps a half mile, then walk back.

      I recommend it, especially if you're interested in ZNH's writing. It's both entertaining and thought provoking.