There Is No Me Like My Statue Life and Text in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road

Abstract

Many critics of Hurston’s autobiography have dismissed it as unconventional or connected its unusual form to a political agenda, while none take seriously the author’s struggle with self-expression. The lives and texts that precede Hurston continually interrupt her attempts to reveal herself as a reader and writer. Dust Tracks on a Road, consequently, is a testimony to the fluidity between Hurston’s life, the texts that influenced her, and the texts that comprise her autobiography.

The contention that the Negro imitates from a feeling of inferiority is incorrect. He mimics for the love of it.

—Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), has a critical history that starts with the author’s most devoted scholars denigrating the book. Alice Walker, who brought Hurston back to life in the literary world with her essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” in 1975, believed the autobiography was “the most unfortunate thing Zora ever wrote,” and Hurston’s biographer Robert Hemenway called it “discomfiting” (Walker xvii, Hemenway 283). Scholarship on this text has progressed from the negative remarks of Walker and Hemenway to criticism that looks for subversion, for ways Hurston was challenging racism or resisting the control of her white patrons. Criticism in this vein ranges from the leading questions in Maya Angelou’s foreword (“Is this book a tale or a series of tales meant to appease a white audience?”) to interpretations such as Kathleen Hassall’s, who presents Hurston as a performer and the autobiography as “a set of glimpses into the characters of an inventive, resourceful, spirited, effective warrior—in disguise” (Angelou x, Hassall 160).¹ Also of great concern to critics of Dust Tracks is the extent to which Hurston gives her audience a conventional autobiography about herself. Hurston knew that readers expected a personal account of her life when she wrote her autobiography, for her hesitation when her publisher requested one had to do with the difficulty, she said, of disclosing one’s “inner self ” (Hemenway 278). Accordingly, reviews in 1942 of Dust Tracks speak to the perplexity readers feel regarding its lack of an “inner self.” Phil Strong writes, “This book is more a summary than the autobiography it advertises itself as being,” and W. Edward Farrison similarly comments, “This is not a great autobiography, but it is a worthwhile book” (qtd. in Cronin 167, 170).² These reviews show that from its inception, Dust Tracks confused readers by its label as “autobiography,” particularly in regard to personal testimony.

Critics such as Pierre A. Walker and Philip A. Snyder made significant contributions to criticism on Dust Tracks in the late 1990s when they both published articles on the book influenced by postmodern philosophies.³ Addressing complaints about the absence of Hurston’s “inner self,” Walker writes that such critics assume that there is a “true” self to be found in Dust Tracks that the author invariably masks to the chagrin of readers (389). In post-modern readings, Walker suggests that Hurston’s persona in Dust Tracks can actually be a “true” representation for the very fact that she is fragmented (389). Walker asserts, “It is not that Hurston had neither the will nor the ability to reveal the ‘real Zora,’ but rather that there is no one, single, hidden, inner, real self to reveal” (394). In the same vein, Snyder discusses the title of Hurston’s autobiography for what it suggests about the book itself. He writes that Dust Tracks is a “title that privileges the traces, rather than the substance, of a self ” (174).

Critics who study genre in relation to Dust Tracks also work from the assumption that no true self exists that can be shared with the reader.⁴ Perhaps the most significant of these arguments is Claudine Raynaud’s, who furthers discussion of Hurston’s refusal to write a traditional autobiography by accentuating how the tension between genres undermines convention in the same way that the lack of an “inner self ” defies readers’ expectations (131). Similarly, other scholars interpret Hurston’s unusual blend of genres as a way that she spans discourses and thereby evades categorization and “domination” (Feracho 200, O’Connor 151). While these readings are valuable for the connection they make between the style and content of Dust Tracks, my argument here will work against the notion that Hurston’s autobiography is a tool of resistance. Rather than connect Huston’s remarkable style and lack of self-representation to a subtle political agenda she achieves through subversive techniques, I argue for a serious consideration of the author’s struggle with revealing her “inner self.” Hurston does not try to trick her patrons and white readers as much as she attempts to represent her own plight as a writer who strives to reveal herself while being continually interrupted by the lives and texts that existed before her. As a result, her autobiography is a testimony to the fluidity between her life, the texts that influenced her, and the texts that comprise Dust Tracks on a Road.

Hurston states in the first lines of her autobiography that she is like a cold rock that has been smoothed, eroded, and effectually shaped by its environment over time. “Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks,” she writes, “I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say” (1). In many ways, this is a conventional start to a bildungsroman. This is the kind of beginning J. D. Salinger will parody less than a decade after Dust Tracks with the creation of his infamous Holden Caulfield. “The first thing you’ll probably want to know,” Holden begins, “is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap” (1). Salinger demonstrates that by the time he and Hurston were writing, such a beginning was not only commonplace but expected. Although Hurston deviates extensively from the bildungsroman form, her use of the convention parodied by Salinger is not ironic. By starting her autobiography with stories other than her own, she reinforces what will become apparent by the end: she tells neither a new story nor lives an original life.

Hurston’s “memories within” thus include stories that she did not experience directly, stories that are not hers but are nevertheless the materials of which she is made. They live in her psyche and become indistinguishable from the memories that are “hers” in the sense that she directly lived them. As Dust Tracks begins Eatonville’s history with the wanderings of three Union soldiers who ended up in South Florida after the Civil War, followed by the respective histories of her parents, Hurston’s memory stretches back more than a quarter of a century before her birth.⁵ Even the story of her birth, though it is about her life and not another person’s, is a retelling of an oral text originally told by her family members.⁶ She begins the chapter on her birth with the evocative phrase, “This is all hear-say,” and continues, “Maybe, some of the details of my birth as told me might be a little inaccurate” (19). Other indications of the story’s oral beginnings appear, such as, “The saying goes like this”; “I did hear that he [Hurston’s father] threatened to cut his throat” when he heard she was a girl; and, “They tell me that an old sow-hog taught me how to walk” (19, 22).By acting as narrator of her birth story, Hurston sorts through the various texts in her memory and rewrites them, constructing a version that inevitably bears the marks of what came before, such as the “sayings” surrounding her birth or the reminder that her father’s reaction to her birth is a rumor and not fact.

While Dust Tracks starts with communal memory that aids Hurston in relaying Eatonville’s history, as well as her parents’ story and that of her own birth, her memory soon expands beyond her community. She begins to deal with larger and larger stories. Slavery is one of these larger stories that Hurston wants to circumvent, but to no avail. In the essay section of the autobiography, she expresses her desire to move past slavery when she writes, “I have no personal memory of those times, nor no responsibility for them” (229). Nevertheless, Hurston finds slavery a useful metaphor for relating a period of suffering in her life. This particular narrative begins, “People can be slave-ships in shoes,” and proceeds to show how slavery exists in non-institutionalized forms (87). Poverty and discontent become her experiences of slavery, for penury keeps her both from attending school and buying books. When she begins working for a white family, the slavery narrative continues as the man of the house sexually harasses her, a situation that recalls the stories of women like Harriet Jacobs who suffered sexual abuse at the hands of their slave masters.⁷ Moreover, slavery transcends race and exists even within families. When she lives with her brother and sister-in-law, she also feels trapped while her brother forces her to perform domestic labor in service of her sister-in-law. Additionally, as Turie Valkeakari points out, the very absence of a literacy narrative disinters the slavery story (197).⁸Whatever Hurston’s motives, the slavery text is present and cannot be expunged from her memory even if she attempts to set it aside. This narrative is a “memory within” that impacts not only the experience of her own life but also her efforts to write about her life.

Hurston’s account of visions also relies on previous texts, though perhaps less begrudgingly than the slave narrative. Her vision story relies particularly on the tradition of the calling narrative in religious literature. In this brief narrative, Hurston skirts punishment for a peccadillo involving a hen by hiding on the porch of an empty house. After she eats a raisin and falls asleep, she has twelve detailed visions of her life, which result in her shouldering a burden of loneliness that sets her apart from the children in her community and similarly affects her adulthood. The only relief she finds from the burden of her visions is through reading and therefore connecting with other writers. When she reads O. O. McIntyre and Kipling, she writes, “I took comfort in knowing that they were fellow pilgrims on my strange road” (43). Likening herself to McIntyre and Kipling, Hurston concludes this narrative with the implication that the visions refer to the onerous lot of the writer, yet the motif of divine calling interrupts her text. Deborah Plant expounds upon the generic religious tactics in this section of Dust Tracks, notably in “the eating of strange fruit, falling asleep, panoramic viewing of events, [and] religiously symbolic numbers” to argue that Hurston places herself in the tradition of “chosen prophet” (6, 9).

As Plant argues, the tradition of “chosen prophet” can be traced back to biblical stories like those of Moses’s experience with the burning bush or God’s call to Samuel in the night. It appears consistently in non-biblical sources, such as St. Augustine’s autobiography, who hears the words “pick up and read,” or Jonathan Edwards’s “Personal Narrative,” the man whom H. Richard Niebuhr implies is an “American Augustine” (Augustine 152; Niebuhr xiv). Edwards writes one of the most popular American calling stories as he details an overwhelming feeling of being “swallowed up” in God (68). While these examples of the tradition are serious accounts of calling, the genre also appears in folklore for the sake of entertainment, which Hurston records in one of her own collections. She includes a humorous version of a calling narrative in Mules and Men, in which a preacher mistakes a mule’s cry for God’s voice (21–22). Hurston draws upon this specific genre more willingly than the slave narrative in order to present her vocation as divinely inspired and ordained while she continues to underscore the fluidity between life and text. She cannot write her life without acknowledging the stories that came before her and that consequently aid her in interpreting, relating, and living her life.

If Hurston’s autobiography is the story of “a writer’s life,” as Henry Louis Gates Jr. suggests, and as the story of calling affirms, then many of Hurston’s anecdotes about reading and storytelling should be considered in this light (294). Critics have responded to Gates’s assertion with the corrective that Dust Tracks is not a writer’s life but a reader’s or both; consequently, it is apparent that Hurston never meant for the two to be separated.⁹ As a reader in the most broad sense (that would include the hearing of oral texts), Hurston, her life, as well as her writing, are marked by reading in profound ways. As a young girl, she uses her reading of the Bible to understand life, admitting, “I found out a number of things the old folks would not have told me” (40). When she depicts her early experiences with the folklore that circulates around Joe Clarke’s store, she demonstrates the trouble she has distinguishing between life and text. Young Zora’s experiences with talking animals and threatening, human-like trees are evidence of her propensity for storytelling, but they also communicate ambivalence regarding the distinction between what young Zora believed was true and what was a story. She writes that she moved “from one fancy to another, adding more and more detail until they seemed real” (52–53). Starting with the folklore she hears from men, Hurston makes additions and revisions and ends up talking with birds, trees, and walking on water. These experiences lead to her friendship with Mr. Sweet Smell and Miss Corn-Cob, and when Hurston grows out of this, she writes that “other dreams came to live with me” (58). Her imagination is keen, but she consistently points to a source for her stories. As she explains the “dreams” she has after her bout with Mr. Sweet Smell and Miss Corn-Cob, she writes, “Little things people said or did grew into fantastic stories,” such as the tale about Mr. Pendir transforming into an alligator (58). Hurston traces these stories back to folklore and real life, portraying herself in the act of rewriting. However, the outcome of mixing folklore with life is what she describes as “phantasies … fighting against the facts” (61).

Hurston’s early reading experiences yield similar results. When she writes of her love for the hymn book and memorizing songs, she prefers “the pretty [songs] where the words marched to a throb I could feel” (38). She reports that the “tricks and turns” of the Greek deities “left [her] cold” while her experience with Hans Christian Anderson and Robert Louis Stevenson reads as if she had a personal relationship with them (39). She writes that she “met” them and that “they seemed to know what I wanted to hear and said it in a way that tingled me” (39). She calls them her “friends” (39). Reading material penetrates Hurston’s consciousness, altering how she views reality. It comes as no surprise, then, that young Zora has trouble distinguishing life from the texts she reads. She writes, “In a way this early reading gave me great anguish through all my childhood and adolescence. My soul was with the gods and my body in the village. People just would not act like gods” (41). She comments on how mundane everyday life seemed in comparison to the adventurous people and circumstances she was reading about. The consequence of identifying so much with a text was that it made her discontent with her life, and by admitting, “People just would not act like gods,” Hurston reveals that she began to expect life to mirror the texts she was reading (41).

As the autobiography shifts from Hurston’s childhood to the trials of adolescence, she demonstrates more awareness of her tendency to relate her life to her reading. For example, when she describes her violent encounters with her stepmother, she writes that the woman is a “black Anne Boleyn” who wields an ax (78). In the next sentence, however, she states, “The simile ends there” (78). By noting the “end” of the simile, she erects a boundary between fantasy and fact. In a later section, when Hurston finds herself in a night high school in Baltimore, she is aware of the kind of text she constructs and the options found in prior texts as she constructs it. Regarding her interaction with other students in the high school, she surmises, “It would be dramatic in a Cinderella way if I were to say that the well-dressed students at school snubbed me and shoved me around, but that I studied hard and triumphed over them” (124–25). She continues to explain that she did study hard, but that she bonded well with the other students and was not a target for pranks or cruelty. While she does not choose to portray her experience at the night high school as a dramatic Cinderella story, that text comes to mind as she is writing, reinforcing the great impact of prior texts on her memory.

Hurston does not make the choice to incorporate the Cinderella story in this particular section of her autobiography, but her concession that the classic tale comes to mind invites comparisons to the Cinderella story in other parts of Dust Tracks, even if she does not intentionally allude to it. These elements emerge in the rags-to-riches trajectory in this book, which includes scenes where Hurston goes from reading Milton in a junkyard to employment with Franz Boas, who commissions her to travel south and abroad to collect folklore. Other elements include the presence of the wicked stepmother likened to Anne Boleyn as well as the role of a godmother in her story, Charlotte Osgood Mason. She also acknowledges, in her chapter on love, the role of prior texts when interpreting one’s life. She admits, “I have read many books where the heroine was in love for a long time without knowing it. I have talked with people and they have told me the same thing. So maybe that is the way it ought to be. That is not the way it is with me at all” (203). In this matter-of-fact passage, Hurston again shows how people are prone to read books and expect their lives to reflect them in some way. She shows how she felt about this when, as a young girl, she realized that “people would not act like gods” (41). Admitting that her love life does not line up with books, Hurston pushes against the tendency to equate one’s life with a text. Although she portrays her younger self as doing just this, as she ages and speaks from a point of experience, she begins to draw distinctions between text and life while recognizing the inevitability of rewriting previous texts.

Hurston rejects both the Cinderella story and the presentation of love in novels, but her writing is nevertheless interrupted by them, evidenced by their very appearance in the autobiography. Furthermore, the love stories closest to her, those of her parents or the Eatonville community, influence the rendition of her tragic relationship with P.M.P. Although P.M.P’s contempt for her career is an issue that does not appear earlier in Dust Tracks nor “The Eatonville Anthology,” the dynamics of marital discord and jealousy figure prominently in her parents’ marriage and in the story about Daisy Taylor (“Dust Tracks” 10–11, “Eatonville” 67–69). The emotional, violent, and sometimes comical stories of jealousy that were a part of Hurston’s childhood impact her relationship with P.M.P, as well as her recounting of it for her autobiography.

When the autobiography shifts again from the author’s trials of adolescence to the topic-driven essays that comprise over a third of Dust Tracks, Hurston relates how the instability of a story affects her life. She has two evocative realizations that propel her to consider the fluidity of life and text, one regarding slavery and the other, Christianity. On a research trip to Mobile, Alabama, Hurston meets Cudjo Lewis, the last American man alive who had experienced slavery, having arrived on the last slave ship. In her conversation with Lewis, she learns that black people had sold each other into slavery, a revelation that shocks her and consequently revises the previous stories she had internalized regarding the presence of blacks in America. She succinctly announces, “That did away with the folklore I had been brought up on” (165).¹⁰ Hurston’s second realization brings into question the veracity of Christianity. In her chapter on religion, she recounts services in her father’s church, glibly reciting doctrines, rituals, tenets of faith, and the attributes of conversion stories. Although she has questions and doubts as a child, she nevertheless says of this part of her life, “Everything was known and settled” (215). At some point, the questions lie dormant within her and resurface when she attends college and begins to read more widely. “I saw the same thing with different details, happen in all the other great religions,” she remarks, “and seeing these things, I went to thinking and questing again. I have achieved a certain peace within myself, but perhaps the seeking after the inner heart of truth will never cease in me” (223).

Like the realization she has regarding Cudjo Lewis’s tale of slavery, Hurston’s version of truth is unsettled by the existence of other stories. Although she describes the reappearance of her questions and doubts about religion as a “struggle,” her comment that “seeking after the inner heart of truth will never cease in me” indicates that the continuous revision and retelling of stories, and by extension, truth, is actually very positive. She relates it to “questing,” to having an adventure. The stories that comprise Dust Tracks and consequently influence Hurston’s life certainly follow an adventurous trajectory. She begins by appropriating and retelling the Eatonville story, which relies on communal memory, and progresses to the revision of some of the most powerful and influential narratives in African-American experience: the story of slavery and the story of Christ. The unsettling of these stories, the replacing of one truth for another, and the continual questing after truth shed light on Hurston’s understanding of personal identity. Because her life itself is a text, it not only takes its cues from stories, but her life and “inner self ” are always being revised and unsettled.

While Hurston engages in a performance through the writing of her autobiography, she represents it as the inevitable by-product of a reader’s/writer’s life: it is a genuine performance, a rendition of her life that is as truthful as it can be given the circumstances. She may have said along with Shakespeare “All the world’s a stage,” as her most memorable metaphor for self-identification likens a person’s life and inner self to a product that sits on display and whose authenticity is in question. She writes that “people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, ‘What if there is no me like my statue?’” (26). The image suggests that the statues are based on unoriginal types, as people construct them based on the “kind of person” they want to be. This implies the existence of a model statue, as if individuals shop through statues and choose the most suitable one, much in the same way that Hurston considers the Cinderella story as an option for relating her experience among the students in her Baltimore high school, or that love stories surface in her memory when she thinks about her own romantic exploits. Previous texts interrupt her not only in the writing of her life but in the living of it as well, for everyone must choose a statue, and Hurston, being the reader and writer she is, sorts through a multitude of texts that influence the model statues available to her.

Furthermore, the metaphor of the statue contains a significant question: “What if there is no me like my statue?” (26). Hurston is actually considering two issues. The most obvious interpretation of this question can be clarified by rephrasing it: “I’ve created a version of myself, but it isn’t my inner self,” or, more specific to Hurston, “my autobiography isn’t me.” This dilemma speaks to the reason Hurston hesitated to write her autobiography in the first place. She knew that she would write herself, and at the end, realize that she has failed, that her “inner self ” is nowhere to be found. The deeper question, however, regarding the statue is whether there is a “me” at all. In all her representations of the interaction between life and text, Hurston communicates that her “inner self,” or what she would call “me” has no essence, but is comprised of various materials, as she states at the beginning—the origins of Eatonville, her parent’s history, the story of slavery—and other stories like Cinderella or the rags-to-riches narrative. But these materials too have no essence; as her interview with Cudjo Lewis reveals, even memories thought to have been based on historical fact or profound, life-altering traditions such as Christianity are subject to change and revision. For Hurston, nothing is stagnant, not even the cold rocks that are seemingly dead.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese reads the statue passage as Hurston speaking of herself, as she comes to the conclusion that “Hurston’s narrator is her statue— the amused observer she wished to become” (173). Like so many other critics, Fox-Genovese reads Hurston merely as a trickster with very little interest in exploring the limits and boundaries of both autobiographical form and self-expression. In Dust Tracks, Hurston is not an “amused observer”; neither is she a performer solely for the sake of subverting or tricking her white patrons and audience. To take seriously the difficulty she foresaw in revealing one’s “inner self ” is to see the autobiography as an exploration of what an “inner self ” signifies, and the conclusions reached in Dust Tracks demonstrate that a person’s life is indeed something of a caricature—a complicated pastiche that reflects the people and stories with which one has associated. Hurston brings her playfulness and her love for both stories and storytelling to Dust Tracks on a Road, and depicts her identity as a conglomeration of seemingly countless materials, an idea that recalls an essay she published in 1928 titled “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” She describes herself as “a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall,” and then lists a slew of various objects in that brown bag, many of which appear to have no connection to each other (“How It Feels” 829).

To reject the value of Hurston’s autobiography, like her first critics Walker and Hemenway, is unfortunate because they tend to see Hurston’s hesitation or departure from convention as reason enough to dismiss the book rather than an opportunity to struggle through the difficulty and burden of self-expression along with the author. Similarly, to read Dust Tracks as a reticent, politically subversive document, like the bulk of critics who follow Walker and Hemenway, is to impose an external agenda upon the work that is satisfied with nothing less than the voice of a rebellious, minority female who has been provoked to anger. Such readings risk making the same mistake as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright when they faulted Hurston with caricature and criticized her for not writing in a more social, political, or artistic vein (Hemenway 334). Readers might benefit here from heeding Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s enjoinment in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” wherein she discusses the problem of certain women being written about but not being able to speak (104). Literary critics need to let the subaltern speak, even if what she says is “discomfiting,” “unfortunate,” or flies in the face of what one expects or wants to hear.