Dust Tracks on A Road
Hurston’s Autobiography With A Rare Inscription
Hurston , Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. An Autobiography. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1942.
8vo.; tan cloth; extremities lightly bumped; spine slightly frayed; green pictorial dust-jacket, heavy edgewear. In a quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of Hurston’s penultimate publication. A presentation copy, inscribed: To Irene [Kuhur], who plays first trombone in God’s best band—With admiration, Zora Neale Hurston.
Dust Tracks on a Road is Hurston’s “official” autobiography, though critics have concluded that Mules and Men (1935) reveals more of her life and temperament than this novel does. Beginning with her birth in Eatonville, the first incorporated Negro town in America, Dust Tracks spans the approximate forty-one years of her life to reflect on her relationship with religion, culture, philosophy, and humor. One of the most illuminating moments, which reveals Hurston’s genuine benevolence, appears in the last pages of the book. She tenderly closes:
So I give you all my right hand of fellowship and love, and hope for the same from you. In my eyesight, you lose nothing by not looking just like me. I will remember you all in my good thoughts, and I ask you kindly to do the same for me. Not only just me. You, who play the zig-zag lightning of power over the world, with the grumbling thunder in your wake, think kindly of those who walk in the dust. And you, who walk in humble places, think kindly too, of others. There has been no proof in the world so far that you would be less arrogant if you held the lever of power in your hands. Let us all be kissing-friends. Consider that with tolerance and patience, we godly demons may breed a noble world in a few hundred generations or so. Maybe all of us who do not have the good fortune to meet, or meet again, in this world, will meet at a barbecue.
An autobiography of great significance from a fundamental Harlem Renaissance writer.
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