Dust Tracks on a Road

"Mama 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. Papa did not feel so hopeful. Let well enough alone. It did not do for Negroes to have too much spirit. He was always threatening to break mine or kill me in the attempt."

Hurston's aspirations and self-belief were unusual since she came of age during a time when women—and African-American women, in particular—were given fewer opportunities. Hurston's ambition likely had its roots in her mother's belief in her children, while John Hurston's caution reflected a common attitude of African Americans, one that feared the real possibility of racial violence against children who exhibited any spark of ambition or defiance of segregationist laws.

"I always wanted to go. I would wander off in the woods all alone, following some inside urge to go places. This alarmed my mother a great deal. She used to say that she believed a woman who was an enemy of hers had sprinkled ‘travel dust’ around the doorstep the day I was born. That was the only explanation she could find. I don't know why it never occurred to her to connect my tendency with my father, who didn't have a thing on his mind but this town and the next one."

Hurston's life was one that included a great deal of travel because of poor circumstances and later, as she became more established, because of a desire to satisfy her curiosity by doing research. This quote established that the desire to be mobile was one that dated back to childhood.

"But no matter whether my probings made me happier or sadder, I kept on probing to know. For instance, I had a stifled longing. I used to climb to the top of one of the huge chinaberry trees which guarded our front gate, and look out over the world. The most interesting thing that I saw was the horizon. Every way I turned, it was there, and the same distance away. Our house then, was in the center of the world. It grew upon me that I ought to walk out to the horizon and see what the end of the world was like."

Hurston's desire as a child to explore the horizon was emblematic of her desire to exceed the boundaries established by her family for her because she was a girl and black. The "stifled" nature of the longing emphasizes how difficult it was for the young Hurston to tolerate these limitations.

"'Snidlits, don't be a nigger,' he would say to me over and over."

Hurston's white benefactor, a man whom she claims helped to deliver her, exercised an early influence on Hurston's character. He advised her to avoid behaviors that would have been associated with racial stereotypes of African Americans such as their supposed servility, lack of pride, and dishonesty. Hurston excuses the use of the slur by pointing out that she understood the man to be attacking this stereotype. Hurston's early friendships with whites who treated her well explain in part her optimism with regards to racial relations.

"In that box were Gulliver's Travels, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Dick Whittington, Greek and Roman Myths, and best of all, Norse Tales. Why did the Norse tales strike so deeply into my soul? I do not know, but they did. I seemed to remember seeing Thor swing his mighty short-handled hammer as he sped across the sky in rumbling thunder, lightning flashing from the tread of his steeds and the wheels of his chariot. The great and good Odin, who went down to the well of knowledge to drink, and was told that the price of a drink from that fountain was an eye. Odin drank deeply, then plucked out one eye without a murmur and handed it to the grizzly keeper, and walked away. That held majesty for me."

Hurston, who already excelled academically as a child, gained even more exposure to literature when two white, Northern women gifted her several items, including a box of books. Hurston's imagination was captured by these stories, which she mapped over the countryside around her. The gift of the books was thus a seminal event that shaped her voice and vision as a writer.

"In a way this early reading gave me great anguish through all my childhood and adolescence. My soul was with the gods and my body in the village. People just would not act like gods. Stew beef, fried fat-back and morning grits were no ambrosia from Valhalla. Raking backyards and carrying out chamber-pots were not the tasks of Thor. I wanted to be away from drabness and to stretch my limbs in some mighty struggle. I was only happy in the woods, and when the ecstatic Florida springtime came strolling from the sea, trance-glorifying the world with its aura."

Despite her love of literature, Hurston frequently found that what was in her books did not align with the reality of her day-to-day life. This early realization highlights a tension that runs throughout the entire memoir, that which exists between the idealized life of the mind and the hard reality of living. Hurston's ability to find solace in the natural world also further underscores the link between her identity and Florida.

"Like clear-cut stereopticon slides, I saw twelve scenes flash before me, each one held until I had seen it well in every detail, and then be replaced by another. There was no continuity as in an average dream. Just disconnected scene after scene with blank spaces in between. I knew that they were all true, a preview of things to come, and my soul writhed in agony and shrunk away. But I knew that there was no shrinking. These things had to be."

Hurston's visions were tragic ones of her becoming an orphan and wandering for a time until she came to a place of rest and comfort. Hurston writes that these visions effectively ended her childhood and made her feel separate from others around her. The episodes in the visions preview the narrative for the first part of Hurston's life, so they may well be a narrative device. In addition, the idea of the writer as prophet or as a person set aside by visions is a longstanding one that may well tap into Hurston's sense of herself as a person destined for something beyond life in the small town of Eatonville, especially given the emphasis on wandering in the visions.

"There were no discreet nuances of life on Joe Clarke's porch. There was open kindnesses, anger, hate, love, envy and its kinfolks, but all emotions were naked, and nakedly arrived at. It was a case of ‘make it and take it.’ You got what your strengths would bring you. This was not just true of Eatonville. This was the spirit of that whole new part of the state at the time, as it always is where men settle new lands."

One of the early important influences on Hurston as a writer and researcher was the vibrant oral culture of Eatonville. The site where much of this culture was most often displayed was the porch of Mayor Joe Clark's store. Hurston recounts several folk tales and explains in this passage how the interactions on the porch reflected the community's values.

"When I began to make up stories I cannot say. Just from one fancy to another, adding more and more detail until they seemed real. People seldom see themselves changing. So I was making little stories to myself, and have no memory of how I began."

Hurston's earliest creative efforts were stories that she made up for her own entertainment and elaborate play with dolls she made from common objects like corn cobs. Hurston's focus on her storytelling is part of her tracing of her development as a writer, a key focus of the memoir.

"Jacksonville made me know that I was a little colored girl."

Having grown up in Eatonville, an all-black town on relatively peaceful terms with the local white population, Hurston had almost no awareness of the deeply-segregated world outside of Eatonville. Her mother's death and the move to Jacksonville introduced Hurston to racism. The move to this new geographical space after the death of Lucy Hurston was thus one of the significant turning points in Hurston's life.

"So my second vision picture came to be. I had seen myself homeless and uncared for. There was a chill about that picture which used to wake me up shivering. I had always thought I would be in some lone, arctic wasteland with no one under the sound of my voice. I found the cold, the desolate solitude, and earless silences, but I discovered that all that geography was within me. It only needed time to reveal it."

Hurston returns to the idea of wandering and geography in this quote, but in this instance, she talks about geography as a metaphor for her inner life. Nevertheless, this quote emphasizes the connection between her identity and place.

"I had been with her for eighteen months and though neither of us realized it, I had been in school all that time. I had loosened up in every joint and expanded in every direction."

Hurston's time with the acting troupe and Ms. M. proved seminal to her development as a performer and musician. In addition, Hurston learned much about working in harmony with multiracial groups of people, an idea to which she returns throughout the memoir. Finally, Hurston's point in this quote is that despite her lack of formal education, she was able to learn a great deal through experience and self-directed learning.

"It would be dramatic in a Cinderella way if I were to say that the well-dressed students at school snubbed me and shoved me around, but that I studied hard and triumphed over them. I did study hard because I realized that I was three years behind schedule, and then again study[ing] has never been hard to me. Then too, I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on."

In this quote, Hurston emphasizes the influence of reading both popular and literary writing on her development as a writer and thinker. In addition, her refusal to cast herself as a mistreated but plucky Cinderella figure is illustrative of her insistence on being realistic and her sense that her difficult life in no way makes her a tragic figure. Formal education, in this instance, is presented as a haven from the other financial and personal difficulties she faced during this time in her life.

"My soul stood on tiptoe and stretched up to take in all that it meant. So I was careful to do my class-work and be worthy to stand there under the shadow of the hovering spirit of Howard. I felt the ladder under my feet."

Hurston describes in this passage the elation and awe she felt as she participated in her first assembly at Howard University. Her reverence for education and her sense that an education would allow her to escape the difficult circumstances of her early life are communicated through the implied comparison between the ladder and her time at the school.

"It was only that night in bed that I analyzed the whole thing and realized that I was giving sanction to Jim Crow, which theoretically, I was supposed to resist. But here were ten Negro barbers, three porters and two manicurists all stirred up at the threat of our living through loss of patronage. Nobody thought it out at the moment. It was an instinctive thing. That was the first time it was called to my attention that self-interest rides over all sorts of lines."

In this passage, Hurston recalls how ambivalent she felt when she sided with the owner of the shop in ejecting an African-American customer who insisted on his legal right to be served. Hurston's argument here is that racial solidarity is insignificant when it comes to human self-interest. This hard-nosed, pragmatic perspective on agitation for civil rights is relatively conservative, especially when one compares it to the stances of her peers in the Harlem Renaissance.

"My joining The Stylus influenced my later moves. On account of a short story which I wrote for The Stylus, Charles S. Johnson, who was just then founding Opportunity Magazine, wrote to me for material. He explained that he was writing to all of the Negro colleges with the idea of introducing new writers and new material to the public. I sent on Drenched in Light and he published it. Later, he published my second story Spunk. He wrote me a kind letter and said something about New York. So, beginning to feel the urge to write, I wanted to be in New York."

The other significant impact of Hurston's education at Howard University was that it brought her into contact with influential figures associated with the birth of the Harlem Renaissance and convinced her to join with many other African Americans during this period by migrating to New York City. In this passage, Hurston explains her motivations for going to New York.

"I had the same feeling at Barnard that I did at Howard, only more so. I felt that I was highly privileged and determined to make the most of it. I did not resolve to be a grind, however, to show the white folks that I had brains. I took it for granted that they knew that. Else, why was I at Barnard? Not everyone who cries, ‘Lord! Lord!’ can enter those sacred iron gates."

Hurston's attitude toward race in this passage is one that assumes equality with whites, an attitude that directly counters the white supremacist ideas of the day and the responses of some African Americans, who insisted that the antidote to such attitudes was to be exemplary. Here and elsewhere, Hurston rejects this idea.

"Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein."

Hurston's definition of research in this passage establishes a connection between her early life as an insatiably curious child and her later work as an anthropologist. This definition also shows how idealized her notion of academic endeavors such as the field work she undertook in the South was, prior to engaging in actual research. Her subsequent stories about the alternately frightening and humorous reality of research undercut this idealism.

"The humble Negroes of America are great song-makers, but the Bahaman is greater. He is more prolific and his tunes are better. Nothing is too big, or little, to be ‘put in sing.’ They only need discovery. They are much more original than the Calypso singers of Trinidad, as will be found the moment you put it to the proof."

Hurston's field research in the South and the Caribbean gave her a unique perspective on diasporic African cultures. In this passage, she compares African-American folk music to that of some of the cultures she encountered during her research and her efforts to popularize this music once she returned to the United States. The voice in this passage is based on an authority that Hurston gained through her intellectual endeavors and offers some insight into her perspective on African-American culture as just one of many cultures of people of African descent.

"[F]rom what I had read and heard, Negroes were supposed to write about the Race Problem. I was and am thoroughly sick of the subject. My interest lies in what makes a man or a woman do such-and-so, regardless of his color. It seemed to me that the human beings I met reacted pretty much the same to the same stimuli. Different idioms, yes. Circumstances and conditions having power to influence, yes. Inherent difference, no. But I said to myself that that was not what was expected of me, so I was afraid to tell a story the way I wanted, or rather the way the story told itself to me. So I went on that way for three years."

Like many African-American writers during this period, Hurston felt pressure to write protest literature or literature that focused explicitly on the problem of racism in the United States. In this passage, Hurston describes how this pressure delayed her ability to write Jonah's Gourd Vine. Hurston's sense that focusing on love and personal relationships was not "political" enough was prescient: one of the major critiques of her work by her peers and later writers such as Richard Wright was that it failed to advance the struggle for civil rights.

" I wrote ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ in Haiti. It was dammed up in me, and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks. I wish that I could write it again. In fact, I regret all of my books. It is one of the tragedies of life that one cannot have all the wisdom one is ever to possess in the beginning. […] Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you."

Hurston is most known for Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel about the slow development of Janie Starks, an African-American woman who gains increasing control over her own life and own story through a series of relationships and travel. Hurston's inclusion of this detail, along with her discussion of her attitude toward writing as a compulsion, offers insight into her vision of the writer's life.

"I maintain that I have been a Negro three times—a Negro baby, a Negro girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear-cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!"

Hurston's contrarian perspective on racial identity in this passage emphasizes the idea that individual character and other aspects of identity, such as gender, exercise a greater influence on outcomes than race.

"I have a strong suspicion, but I can't be sure, that much that passes for constant love is a golded-up moment walking in its sleep. Some people know that it is the walk of the dead, but in desperation and desolation, they have staked everything on life after death and the resurrection, so they haunt the graveyard. They build an altar on the tomb and wait there like faithful Mary for the stone to roll away. So the moment has authority over all of their lives. They pray constantly for the miracle of the moment to burst its bonds and spread out over time."

Hurston's attitude toward love and gender reflects her pragmatic, realistic perspective on romance. This passage comes after a series of anecdotes about Hurston's own troubled love life and her refusal to accept in full the expectations placed on women by the gender norms of the day.