‘To Stretch My Limbs in Some Mighty Struggle’

Reviewing Zora Neale Hurston’s Classic Memoir ‘Dust Tracks on a Road’

We mostly know about novelist and fokelorist Zora Neale Hurston today because novelist Alice Walker found her forgotten grave under a Florida bramble in 1975 and told the world about it. Walker inagurated a renaissance in Hurston’s neglected legacy that hasn’t dimmed since.

“More people have read Hurston’s works since 1975 than did between that date and the publication of her first novel, in 1934,” writes Henry Louis Gates Jr. But how did this brilliant talent get going in the first place? How did she come to write that first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, in 1934 or the others since then, including her most enduring, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937 (reviewed here)?

There are several biographies that fill out the picture. None capture the magic of her own memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road. Written in 1941, revised in 1942, and published that same November, Dust Tracks pulls readers into Hurston’s earliest years in Eatonville, Florida, and lets them follow her trail through the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.

Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

The Missing Decade

Eatonville, a town built “all out of colored people” as Hurston says. Near Orlando, Florida, it was the first city in the nation founded, incorporated, and governed entirely by African Americans. Its mention also forms the first inkling readers will experience a less than straightforward account of her life.

Her parents met and married in Notasulga, Alabama. As she tells it, the couple had only three children when they moved to Eatonville.

“When my mother joined papa a year after he had settled in Eatonville, she brought some quilts, her feather bed and bedstead,” says Hurston. “Two burlap bags were stuffed with Spanish moss for the two older children to sleep on. The youngest child was taken into the bed with them.” She doesn’t provide dates, but as the fifth of eight children Zora would have come along later, around the turn of the century.

But no: Only two of the family’s eight children were actually born in Eatonville. When she was first “spreading my lungs,” it wasn’t in Orange County, as she said, but back in Notasulga. And the date? It was January 7, 1891, a full decade before she let on.

Why the lie? Hurston began fudging her age long before she enshrined it in her memoir, maintaining the fiction her whole life for reasons that go back to the tumultuous events of those childhood years. Hurston’s parents, John Hurston and Lucy Potts, had a contentious but loving relationship. Without a doubt, Mom was the anchor of the home. Tragically, she died when Zora was just thirteen.

Formative Reading

Mom was once a teacher and prized education, and Zora showed tremendous promise at a young age. In the fifth grade she so impressed two white women visiting her school from Minnesota that they tried to mentor her and encourage her reading.

The pair gave her a collection of fairy tales, and a copy of Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson, and an Episcopal hymn book bound in white leather she began memorizing immediately. After they returned home, the women sent along a box crammed with hand-me-downs and more books.

“In that box was Gulliver’s Travels, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Dick Whittington, Greek and Roman Myths, and best of all, Norse Tales,” she recalled. She loved the story of Odin plucking out his own eye.

Hurston read whatever she could get her hands on: Hans Christian Anderson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, the Bible, even medical manuals. Later, she recalled discovering Milton:

In a pile of rubbish I found a copy of Milton’s complete works. The back was gone and the book was yellowed. But it was all there. So I read Paradise Lost and luxuriated in Milton's syllables and rhythms without ever having heard that Milton was one of the greatest poets of the world. I read it because I liked it.

“In a way this early reading gave me great anguish through all my childhood and adolescence,” she said. “I wanted to be away from drabness and to stretch my limbs in some mighty struggle.”

That mighty struggle was coming.

Wandering Years

After Hurston’s mother died, the family fell apart. Dad couldn’t manage the kids, and Zora was sent off to Jacksonville where her brother Bob and Sarah were enrolled in high school. “I was under age,” she said, “but the school had agreed to take me in under the circumstances.”

Sarah quit school early to help her father, especially with the littlest sibling Everett. But, a restless man, he quickly and disastrously remarried, fracturing whatever unity the family still had after their mother’s passing. The kids went to live on their own or with friends and other family members. Zora was in and out of the picture.

When her father couldn’t keep up her tuition, Hurston could only manage abortive attempts at school. Over the next few years, she found work as a domestic servant with greater or lesser degrees of success and returned home for an apocalyptic fight with her stepmother that precipitated a divorce.

“She probably did the best she could, according to her lights,” said Hurston with something approaching pity but still far short of it. “It was just tragic that her light was so poor.”

Her father was a wrecked man at that point. “The bounce was gone,” she said. He died about five years later in a car accident. Hurston doesn’t mention it in the book. By then she’d finally made her way back to school—the source of that missing decade. With her schooling having been so heavily interrupted after her mother’s death, Zora was then twenty-six; the only way she could attend high school was to claim she was ten years younger than she was. So, in 1917, she claimed she was born in 1901, not 1891.

She graduated a year later and found her way to Washington, D.C., to attend Howard, “the capstone of Negro education in the world,” paying her way as a manicurist. Howard, however, proved only a way station and soon she was on her way to New York, Barnard College, and fame.

Hurston around 1920. Photo by Carl Van Vechten.

Public, Still Private

Hurston now begins sharing the events for which she would come to be known: writing prize-winning stories and plays, studying under Franz Boas at Columbia and venturing into folklore studies (“research is just formalized curiosity”), and organizing concerts of black spirituals. All this set the stage for the books she would publish in her most productive decade; the mighty struggle began to bear fruit at last.

In the 1930s, while the Great Depression raged, Hurston published three novels: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). She also published two books of folklore: Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938)—not to mention a short stories and dozens significant essays, now collected by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West in You Don’t Know Us Negroes (2022).

Hurston was utterly destitute when Lippincott offered $200 for Jonah's Gourd Vine in the fall of 1933. She received the offer by Western Union but hadn’t opened the message until she was at a store trying on a pair of shoes. “I tore out of that place with one old shoe and one new shoe on,” she said. “Lippincott had asked for an answer by wire and they got it! Terms accepted.”

But, as much as Hurston shares, she leaves out—a reminder that every memoir is an act of self-presentation. She’s vague on her marriages and romances. And her intense friendship with writer Langston Hughes? She never mentions it, though the pair collaborated on several projects. The relationship ended in ruin, as documented in Yuval Taylor’s Zora and Langston (2019). She found it easier to pretend it never happened.

Hurston and Hughes.

Since Dust Tracks ends in 1942, it naturally excludes her final two and somewhat disappointing decades. She died impoverished and forgotten in 1960. Outside of Dust Tracks, she published just one more book; Lippincott rejected several proposals from her, but Scribner finally published her novel Seraph on the Suwanee in 1948.

What we do get in the fifty years covered by her memoir—though supposedly only forty—remains truly remarkable and told with equal parts verve, art, mischief, and humor. It’s not the whole story, but it’s a good one.

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Dust Tracks on a Road was the eighth book in my classic memoir goal for 2024. Here’s what I’ve reviewed so far and what’s in store for the rest of the year:

• January: Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

• February: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

• March: Richard Wright, Black Boy

• April: Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

• May: Tété-Michel Kpomassie, Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland

• June: John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

• July: Stephen King, On Writing

• August: Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

• September: Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

• October: John Stuart Mill, Autobiography

• November: C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

• December: Beryl Markham, West with the Night

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Before you go, check out my review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, which also delves into Hurston’s life story.

A Woman on Her Own, Joyously and Fiercely Independent