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A review by lori85
Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston
3.0
I have read Their Eyes Were Watching God twice (first on my own, second for a book club) and saw that saccharine Oprah movie starring Halle Berry. Learning about Hurston's life illuminated quite a bit of it, starting with Eatonville, Florida, America's first all-black incorporated township and main setting for Watching God. Dust Tracks on a Road opens with the history of its founding in the 1880s by the black citizens of the Town of Maitland (itself founded only a decade previous by two former Union officers). Hurston grew up there and her father even served as its mayor for a time. Today, Eatonville stages a Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities each winter. (Actually, Zora claims in Dust Tracks that she was born in Eatonville but that that is not true - she is a native of Alabama.)
Zora's mother died when she was thirteen. Her father quickly remarried a real-life Evil Stepmother who more or less kicked his eight children out of the family home and stopped paying Zora's school tuition which resulted in her expulsion. (Years later, Hurston would come close to killing her in a fistfight.) Drifting from one domestic job to another, Zora eventually fell in with a traveling theater company, working as a personal assistant to a young white soprano. When she finally returned to high school she was twenty-six but somehow successfully posed as a sixteen-year-old girl. She would maintain the facade all her life, claiming to have been born in 1901 instead of 1891. She naturally presents herself as a typical teenaged student in Dust Tracks in the Road, even going as far as to brag about her and her female classmates' stealing of college boys for dances.
Zora attended Howard University and then transferred to Barnard College, a women's school where she was the only black student. She was thirty-six when she received her B.A. in Anthropology. Working with Franz Boas of Columbia University, she traveled extensively throughout the American South and Caribbean collecting black folklore and participating in local religious ceremonies. The recollections of her years in the field are vivid and closely tied to her portrayal of rural African-American life in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Among the backwaters of Polk County, Florida she became acquainted with the lively but dangerous world of itinerant laborers and was nearly killed in a saw-mill jook by the jealous lover of one of her male sources. Luckily, Hurston had had the foresight to befriend one Big Sweet, a formidable woman who knew her way around a knife fight, and lived to tell the tale.
Hurston would later attract considerable controversy for her views on segregation and Brown v. the Board of Education. Specifically: she supported the former and denounced the latter. Her reasoning was that living apart had allowed African-Americans to build up their own societies, their own language, and their own music, all of which she loved and which formed the basis of her fiction. Inspired by her research, Hurston was also instrumental in bringing authentic gospel singing to the New York stage. Still, despite their foundation in a deep knowledge and appreciation for African-American culture, Hurston's views in this regard are unfortunate.
Read more.
Zora's mother died when she was thirteen. Her father quickly remarried a real-life Evil Stepmother who more or less kicked his eight children out of the family home and stopped paying Zora's school tuition which resulted in her expulsion. (Years later, Hurston would come close to killing her in a fistfight.) Drifting from one domestic job to another, Zora eventually fell in with a traveling theater company, working as a personal assistant to a young white soprano. When she finally returned to high school she was twenty-six but somehow successfully posed as a sixteen-year-old girl. She would maintain the facade all her life, claiming to have been born in 1901 instead of 1891. She naturally presents herself as a typical teenaged student in Dust Tracks in the Road, even going as far as to brag about her and her female classmates' stealing of college boys for dances.
Zora attended Howard University and then transferred to Barnard College, a women's school where she was the only black student. She was thirty-six when she received her B.A. in Anthropology. Working with Franz Boas of Columbia University, she traveled extensively throughout the American South and Caribbean collecting black folklore and participating in local religious ceremonies. The recollections of her years in the field are vivid and closely tied to her portrayal of rural African-American life in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Among the backwaters of Polk County, Florida she became acquainted with the lively but dangerous world of itinerant laborers and was nearly killed in a saw-mill jook by the jealous lover of one of her male sources. Luckily, Hurston had had the foresight to befriend one Big Sweet, a formidable woman who knew her way around a knife fight, and lived to tell the tale.
Hurston would later attract considerable controversy for her views on segregation and Brown v. the Board of Education. Specifically: she supported the former and denounced the latter. Her reasoning was that living apart had allowed African-Americans to build up their own societies, their own language, and their own music, all of which she loved and which formed the basis of her fiction. Inspired by her research, Hurston was also instrumental in bringing authentic gospel singing to the New York stage. Still, despite their foundation in a deep knowledge and appreciation for African-American culture, Hurston's views in this regard are unfortunate.
Read more.