'Our Interests are too Varied': Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road

Anyone who has taken an interest in the recent presidential election will certainly enjoy reading Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. While Hurston does not speak directly to the political issues of the present day, she nevertheless engages several topics of interest to modern readers. First among these is her own experience as a black woman coming of age in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Hurston tells, for example, the story of her first year in Washington, D.C., where she travels after growing up in the rural community of Eatonville, Florida. Enrolling in Howard University, Hurston writes that “I shall never forget my first college assembly, sitting there in the chapel of that great university,” adding that her “soul stood on tiptoe and stretched up to take in all that it meant.” Yet for Hurston, the exhilaration of collegiate, urban life was tempered by entering a world where racial politics worked very differently from those of her home town.

In Washington, Hurston took a job working as a manicurist in a black-owned barber shop that catered exclusively to white customers, including several notable politicians with offices on Capitol Hill. She tells how a black man entered the shop one day and boldly asked for a haircut and shave. Fearing that the man would drive off the white customers and ruin the business, the black employees, who desperately needed their jobs, roughly threw the man out on the street. Hurston writes that she and the other employees instinctively protected their own interests, even though it meant “giving sanction to Jim Crow,” or segregation. Her choice, she says, was between paying her rent and rallying on behalf of her race.

Choices like the one Hurston faced that day in Washington are still faced today by many Americans. Although we no longer live under the yoke of Jim Crow, our recent election season has highlighted the racial and economic tensions that still riddle America today. The historic occasion of having a black presidential candidate has put the national spotlight on questions of race with an intensity Americans have not seen since the days of Lyndon Johnson. Very much like Hurston’s story of the barber shop, our current national discussions strive to take into account that “race” is not a monolithic issue, and that economics play an enormous role in how racial tensions find expression in everyday life. This is one of the most important lessons that Hurston learned in her early life, and it affected everything she was to do in future years. While she worked diligently to record and publish black folklore in her work as an anthropologist, she was always on guard against ways of thinking that lumped everyone and everything black into the same category: “Our interests are too varied,” she wrote about attempts to unify all black Americans under a single banner.

These words are as challenging to readers today as they were when Hurston wrote them. In re-visiting them today, readers of her autobiography will have a chance to consider the pressing issues of this presidential season through a unique historical lens that is as witty and engaging as it is unflinching and insightful.

--Gregory Tomso, Assistant Professor of English