Dust Tracks on a Road

The first sentence, and a warning about memory

The book begins with a comparison to stone: like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Hurston is a trained anthropologist opening an autobiography, and she starts by saying that memory is deposit rather than record. What follows is presented as material she is made of, not as testimony she is giving.

The first chapter is called My Birthplace, and Hurston gives it to Eatonville rather than to Notasulga, Alabama, where she was actually born on 7 January 1891. She preferred Eatonville and named it. She had also taken ten years off her age, having needed to be sixteen to qualify for a free public high-school place, and she kept the younger age for the rest of her life.

So the book's factual record is unreliable in ways that are documented and, in places, funny. Hurston is not confused about where she was born. She is making a claim about which town made her, and a reader who checks the county records has not caught her out so much as walked into her argument about what a birthplace is.

Eatonville, a store porch, and an education

The childhood chapters are set in a town run by Black people, where the mayor, the shopkeeper and the preacher were all Black, and the talk on Joe Clarke's store porch was the best entertainment available. Hurston's point is not that this was idyllic. Her point is that she grew up without the experience of Black life as an exception inside a white town, and that the difference shows in everything she wrote afterwards.

The store porch is also her first training in fieldwork, twenty years before she had a word for it. A child listening to adults compete at storytelling learns that a tale has a correct form, a right moment and an audience that will call out a bad telling. Mules and Men is the same porch written down with a notebook.

Her mother told her to jump at de sun, which meant aim past what is available. The chapter called Wandering covers what happened when Lucy Ann Potts Hurston died and the aiming had to be done without her. Hurston left home at fourteen, worked as a wardrobe girl for a travelling operetta company, and finished school years late at Howard University while working as a manicurist and a maid.

Where the book stops being a story

Chapters twelve to sixteen change form. My People! My People!, Two Women in Particular, Love, Religion and Looking Things Over are arguments with chapter headings, not episodes in a life. Hurston has reached 1942 and the present tense, and she uses the last quarter of the book to say what she thinks about race, about friendship, about God and about her own country.

My People! My People! is the chapter that has caused the most trouble. The phrase is an exasperated expression Hurston had grown up hearing Black people use about other Black people, and she takes it as a subject. She refuses to write about Black Americans as a single body with a single interest. That refusal was exactly what most of the Black literary left objected to, and the reason Richard Wright had attacked her novel five years earlier.

The chapter on Religion is the other one readers stop at. Hurston had grown up the daughter of a Baptist preacher, had studied religious practice in Florida, New Orleans, Jamaica and Haiti, and writes here as someone who takes worship seriously and does not share the faith. What a reader of the restored text gets is a longer, angrier version of both chapters than the 1942 book contained.

What Lippincott cut, and when it came back

The 1942 book was published in the middle of a war, by a Philadelphia house selling to a mainly white readership, and the manuscript was cut accordingly. The Library of America's editors state it plainly: the memoir had been seriously watered down to make it palatable and inoffensive to white audiences, and Hurston was criticised for selling out, with Arna Bontemps making the charge in his review.

The restored text names the missing material in its appendix. A fuller version of My People, My People! comes first, then Seeing the World as It Is, then Inside Light — Being a Salute to Friendship, then Concert. Seeing the World as It Is is the chapter that matters most to the book's reputation: Hurston set American conduct abroad beside American conduct at home, and a publisher in 1942 had no appetite for it.

The repair happened in two stages. Robert Hemenway, Hurston's first biographer, edited a second edition for the University of Illinois Press in 1984 with an introduction and restored material, running to 348 pages against the original 294. The Library of America then established the full restored text in 1995, and Harper Perennial has printed that version since.

The prize and the cutting belong to the same year. Dust Tracks on a Road won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for 1943 in nonfiction, carrying a thousand dollars from the Saturday Review — the largest single payment Hurston ever received. The award was for a contribution to race relations, given to a book that had been edited to avoid saying what she thought about them.