Dust Tracks on a Road audiobook

I fell in love with Zora Neale Hurston - anthropologist, writer, filmmaker, heretic - in the autumn of 2021. As an author and public speaker, Zora was not above taking our religious institutions to task.“You cannot have knowledge and worship at the same time. Mystery is the essence of divinity… It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish. I feel no need for such.”Did I mention she was a heretic?“I do not pretend to read God’s mind. If he has a plan of the Universe worked out to the smallest detail, it would be folly for me to presume to get down on my knees and attempt to revise it. That, to me, seems the highest form of sacrilege… Prayer seems to me a cry of weakness, and an attempt to avoid, by trickery, the rules of the game as laid down.”Politically, she favored diplomacy over military intervention…“We [the United States] consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideas about a country of their own.”…and philosophically, she challenged our stereotypes and embraced our shared humanity. “…I feel that I have lived. I have the joy and pain of strong friendships. I have served and been served. I have made enemies of which I am not ashamed. I have been faithless, and then I have been faithful and steadfast until the blood ran down into my shoes. I have loved unselfishly with all the ardor of a strong heart, and I have hated with all the power of my soul. What waits for me in the future? I do not know. I cannot even imagine, and I am glad for that. But already I have touched the four corners of the horizon, for from hard searching it seems to me that tears and laughter, love and hate, make up the sum of life.”In spite of all she contributed and accomplished, Zora Neale Hurston spent her final years working as a housemaid. She died in poverty and relative obscurity on 28 January, 1960. Dearest Zora, our differences not withstanding (as in black/white, conservative/liberal, theist/atheist, living/deceased) I am so looking forward to spending more time with you.

"I had been lonely; I had been bare and bony of comfort and love... Now, I was to take up my pilgrim's stick and go outside again. Maybe it would be different now...I took a firm grip on the only weapon I had- hope, and set my feet. Maybe everything would be all right from now on. Maybe. I put on my shoes and I started." -Zora Neale HurstonIn her memoir, Dust Tracks On A Road, Zora tells her origin story. She came from humble beginnings in Eatonville, FL, the first incorporated Black town. The daughter of John and Lucy, Zora was a creative and sassy child, much to the chagrin of her father and maternal grandmother. Zora's mother however encouraged her storytelling and pushed her to set her sights high. Dust Tracks chronicles Zora's journeys as a young girl to middle aged woman on how she became the writer and anthropologist that she was. The book is quite inspiring if you think of how her life could have been, she could have stayed working as domestic all her life, but folks encouraged her to go back to school. After receiving her education she transitioned into doing research where she experiences some wild events such as: 1. almost getting "cut to death", 2. dangerous Hoodoo initiation practices, and 3. photographing a zombie. Many of these events sound scary and some were even funny, especially the time when she fought her stepmother. There were places where I wanted more - especially the chapter on her books, which I found too short. However, I did find it interesting that she said that she "regrets all of my books". The last few chapters, seemed a little out of place to me. They seemed more like essays as opposed to memoir.There are four more chapters in the Appendix which read like early versions of chapters in the main text. There are some interesting sections in there as well. I got a good laugh reading the "My People My People" chapter, especially on her description of the variations of Black complexions and her views on James Weldon Johnson. Dust Tracks was published in 1942, when Zora was 51 years old. She would live 18 more years, which of course makes me wonder what happened during the rest of her life. I'm hoping to learn more about it when I read Valerie Boyd's Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston.

Really interesting and I love the way this is written!

“I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.”This audiobook performed by Bahni Turpin was great. Zora is a fantastic storyteller, the kind that grips your attention from the first word to the last and it was a wonderful to be immersed in her words as Turpin narrated of her life, from her beginnings as a precocious child in Eatonville, Florida to her work towards funding her way to school and the adventures she had in the process, to then school and later her work as an anthropologist and researcher, and as an artist and novelist.

Zora just gave me life #yesssssssssssssssssss65% Done: Writing on paper, that Booker T Washington was trash makes Zora the dopest of the dope. Fight me.

I read somewhere a quote from Alice Walker that Zora Neale Hurston has a tendency to be exasperating. I think applied to Dust Tracks on a Road that may be putting the matter lightly.Allegedly, the book is a memoir. Hurston is coy about this at its start; she says that after the success of her previous books her publisher asked her -- nearly had to force her -- to put onto paper the narrative of her own life. I would say what we ended up with is rather more the narrative of the life Hurston would've liked to have had: People who've investigated her biography have revealed that she was born ten years earlier than she claimed and that she almost certainly was not born in Eatonville, Florida, the first all-black American municipality in which she obviously takes so much pride. It's true that every autobiography is a sort of self-fashioning and requires us to read between the lines. But Hurston's autobiography pushes our suspension of disbelief to its limits, while she herself writes about all the liars she's encountered over the course of her research and travels. Anyway, like Walker said: Exasperating.That said, however, the story is quite a romp. The youthful events Hurston describes may or may not have actually happened, but either way they're deliciously written and run the gamut from the poignant to the hilarious. The later chapters, which turn from recounting the past to reflecting on contemporary social issues, particularly the present and future of the so-called "Race question," keep the coy and joyful tone intact. I defy you to find a more energetic criticism of ethnic nationalism than "Seeing the World as It Is," one of the chapters/essays at the end of the book. I've seen other critics remark that the book's chapters don't gel, and while it's true that Dust Tracks is more a collection of essays than a novel or memoir, I wouldn't say that makes the book any less entertaining. After all, what keeps you reading isn't so much the suspense of what's to happen as the force of Hurston's personality. And what a personality!A must-read for anybody interested in Hurston. Recommended for anybody else. Four stars.

I have a serious girl crush on Zora Neale Hurston! Her personality was a thing of beauty. I think I smiled 90% of the time while reading this book!! I wish I could have met her, gone to a book signing or something, but she left me with some hope at the end of this book. “Maybe all of us who do not have the good fortune to meet, or meet again, in this world, will meet at a barbecue.”

Zora Neale Hurston approaches this moving memoir like a master storyteller, with wonderfully lyrical prose that reminded me a lot of her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Loved it.

What is there to say that hasn't already been said? She was a visionary. She is still relevant. Her work is still changing lives.

This autobiography is a collection of memories and short stories. Zora Neal Hurston uses her life as a backdrop to let a loose plot unfold. Her talent as a storyteller shines through and is the star of the book. She paints vivid pictures, and the pace is just right. Hurston tells us what she wants us to hear and leaves out quite a bit, but I didn’t really want more. She told me the one thing I wanted to know which was what was going on in her mind when she wrote Her Eyes Were Watching God. In my opinion, that book is a Harlem Renaissance masterpiece. If I was left wanting anything, it was more about her process in writing it.I’m going to let everyone else debate about Hurston’s politics, plagiarism or whatever. This book is intriguing, interesting and entertaining. I'm going with 5 stars all the way.

4.5 for now (since I've got a stack of books to post about):Let's just say I enjoyed this book (and the author) so much that I just bought two more of her novels, Jonah's Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain, a biography (which I got today -- Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston), and preordered Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance by this author, which comes out in January. I love her writing style, but as I said, more later. I can highly recommend it, though, for sure.

It is very much situated in Hurston’s internal life which is vivid and magical. It is definitely a writer’s story. We get a distinct picture of the genesis of Hurston as a writer from a young child playing mostly by herself and inventing stories to an introverted youth who spent as much time as possible with her face in a book to an anthropologist who traveled to the American South and to the West Indies collecting the stories of others. Hurston is first and foremost a story teller but one driven by lush descriptions and imaginary narratives. Most of the action in this book is all in Hurston’s head. She was someone who truly lived the life of the mind.Much of the book leaves you feeling as if she had no real intimacy with anyone besides herself. This couldn’t possibly be the case but her personal relationships remain mostly private. Towards the end of the book, we get a quick peak at Hurston the lover in an eleven paged chapter entitled Love. Despite the cursory nature of this section, Hurston does make eloquent and beautiful observations, but she keeps most things to herself. She writes: “What I do know, I have no intention of putting but so much in the public ears.”As a whole I really enjoyed this book but I feel, like all texts, it must be viewed in the context in which it was written- I don’t doubt Hurston’s commitment to individuality or her understanding of race markers as socially constructed but the highlighting of all the white people who helped her along the way seems bizarrely self-conscious as Maya Angelou has noted. I have to wonder if these parts were emphasized in order to mollify a white audience.Not surprisingly- there are no thoughts on reparations here, a point Hurston emphasizes several times throughout the book and again in the appendix. She is so firmly couched in individualism that she commits herself to the causes of no group even as she eloquently details the hypocrisy of foreign policy in Seeing the World As It Is. My People! My People! seems to contradict her passionate belief in individualism as she ends with several generalizations on black folks- many of which made me cringe. What could have been an indictment of essentialism instead reinforces stereotypes. I could have definitely skipped this essay and been happy but the insightful and prescient nature of Seeing the World As It Is and Religion more than make up for the rest of the appendix. Religion made all the hairs stand up on my neck as it describes so precisely what is continuing to happen today with our current political climate. It would have made an excellent addition to Jesus Camp for sure.