Dust Tracks on a Road

Hurston opens this chapter with a disclaimer that what she has to say about love is very particular to her and that the reader should expect very few details since “[l]adies do not kiss and tell any more than gentlemen do”(202). Hurston generally falls in love decisively, despite the common story of people being in love for a time without recognizing it as such. When she was a girl, Hurston would fall in love with older boys and men, which meant that she was always overlooked by her love interests. Her affairs in high school were innocent, short-lived ones.

Hurston’s first real love began when she was a freshman in college. Her boyfriend (likely Herbert Sheen) played piano and could sing and dance. The two married when Hurston finished her degree at Barnard, but the relationship seemed to cool after that, and Hurston was disappointed that her feelings did not seem to reflect the intensity she had expected. Hurston, motivated in part by the hope that the marriage would die of its own accord, accepted funding from Charlotte Osgood Mason to do fieldwork. She turned out to be right, and the two divorced.

Hurston’s next major relationship was with a man she identifies as “P.M.P.” (205)—likely Albert Price III, her second husband. Price was handsome, but the thing Hurston most loved about him was his sharp intellect, which rivaled her own. Hurston and Price were infatuated with each other, and each believed the other was so far out of his or her league that they were constantly jealous of possible romantic competitors.

Price was insistent on taking a traditional masculine role and wanted Hurston to stop working so he could take care of her. Hurston’s work was too important to her to abandon, and she could never understand why Price saw some competition between her work and her love for him. The two came to blows once as they quarreled about a casual kiss Hurston got from a male acquaintance. The two made up afterward, but the jealousy was an ongoing issue.

Exhausted by the intensity of the relationship, Hurston decided to leave him to do fieldwork in the South, but she was back six weeks later and still in the same painful bind. Added to the pressure to leave her work was Hurston’s sense that their relationship was also holding Price back from fulfilling his professional potential. Hurston won a Guggenheim Fellowship and left for Jamaica, and she later “tried to embalm all the tenderness of [ her] passion for him in Their Eyes Were Watching God’’’ (211).

When Hurston finally re-connected with Price two years later, she discovered how similar their feelings about each other had been and that without her presence in his life, Price had floundered professionally and gained a little weight. He had struggled with his depression over the separation. Hurston found this bit of imperfection attractive, and the two reunited. Hurston opts not to disclose more of her relationship with Price.

Hurston then moves on to discussing less important encounters she has with men. She is, for example, astonished by how frequently men proposition her because they see her as passionate and eager for love. Hurston also has no problem being friends with a man once a romance is over, but the men’s egos are such that she generally must pretend to be devastated by the loss of a man to avoid being made the enemy.

Hurston also notes that when she is in the first throes of love, she is very passionate at that moment. When her interest wanes, she hates it when the man in question demands that she show the same passion she felt in that passing first moment. Hurston suspects that most people refuse to acknowledge that what they call love is just the ghost of a fleeting moment that can never be recaptured. Hurston remarks that there really is no reason to take what she says about love as authoritative. According to an African-American folk saying, “[l]ove is a funny thing; Love is a blossom; / If you want your finger bit, poke it at a possum”(214).

Despite being a minister’s daughter, Hurston has always had her doubts about God and faith. As a child, she was fascinated by the language, music, and “high drama” (218) of the black church, especially the ecstatic tales of conversion by people who got saved during revivals. Hurston had the typical questions of children about God (she wondered why he made babies without teeth when it was so inconvenient, for example), but she learned early on that such questioning would bring sharp disapproval or worse. As she grew older, she simply went through the motions of faith and had to do so frequently, since she was a minister’s daughter.

When Hurston began college, she was exposed to the history of religion. She was amazed by important historical figures such as St. Paul and Constantine the Great. In the case of Constantine, however, she noticed that his army played a large role in converting most of Europe. Constantine simply “took up with force where Paul left off with persuasion” (223). Hurston saw the same pattern in all the great world religions and speculated about what that process would look like in more modern times.

Hurston imagines a modern faith with Father Divine (a charismatic African-American preacher who amassed millions of followers in the 1930s) as God and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, his wife, and other important political figures of the day as his followers.

As an adult, Hurston has more knowledge about the history of religion but still has doubts. Nevertheless, she has come to some conclusions. She has concluded that the “unreachable […] unknowable always seem divine–hence, religion" (225). People believe in an all-powerful and all-knowing divinity because the idea that humanity is entirely responsible for everything is too frightening.

If indeed God does have “a plan of the Universe worked out to the smallest detail” (225), Hurston believes that plan to be unknowable, and that praying for the world to be other than it is therefore a sign of “weakness, and an attempt to evade that plan” (226). Organized religions are “collections of words around a wish,” but Hurston does not feel compelled to get in the way of whatever comfort, joy, or beauty religious people derive from their faith (226).

Hurston believes in the conservation of matter. As a material being, she proclaims, “I know that I should still be part and parcel of the world” (226) after death. “The wide belt of the universe has no need for finger-rings” (226), so Hurston sees no need at all to separate herself from others by wedding herself exclusively to one faith. She closes the chapter by stating that she is “one with the infinite and needs no other assurance” (226).

Hurston wraps up the volume with some reflections on her life so far. She writes, “I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the pesky mountain […] in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands”(227). Despite ups and downs in her life, she indulges in no bitterness because to do so would be a sign of weakness. She also refuses to allow her successes to blind her to her own flaws, as well as those of her race and country.

Hurston’s experiences have also taught her that there is no such thing as justice in this world. Those who have power rule and write the stories, and we have little respect for the conquered. This truth means that justice will never rule the world, as much as we might wish it.

Because of this attitude, Hurston believes that blaming whites in the past and present for slavery and its aftermath is a useless exercise. Even today, one just has to look at the reliance of powerful nations on their colonies to understand that the powerful continue to exploit the less powerful. The Civil War did not end this state of affairs. Hurston tells a story with a punchline that explains her aspirations: for African Americans not to be held back, and to have the same chances as everyone else.

In her own life, Hurston finds that “work is the nearest thing to happiness” (231) she has. Hurston neither drinks nor uses drugs. When she gets old, she will read back through the great Western philosophers over coffee, and only when she is very old will she have her drink.

Hurston has known friendship, hatred, and love. She also rejects racism. Of her own race, she comments that it includes the “same virtues and vices” (231) as any other race. She treats people well and hopes they will do the same for her, even those in power. Hurston hopes people in power will remember “those who walk in the dust” (232) and that those who lack power will do the same. Perhaps, she writes in closing, humanity will manage to create a good world in the end.