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FOUR: Zapping the Editor, Or, How to Tell Censors to Kiss Off without Really Trying: Zora Neale Hurston’s Fights with Authority Figures in Dust Tracks on a Road
- University of Georgia Press
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Four . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Zapping the Editor, Or, How to Tell Censors to Kiss Off without Really Trying Zora Neale Hurston’s Fights with Authority Figures in Dust Tracks on a Road A Zora Neale Hurston published Dust Tracks on a Road in 1942. The publication was more a directive than a desire. Bertram Lippincott had used his publishing prerogative in requesting that Hurston fall in line with the prevailing “colored person tells all” syndrome that was flooding the American markets at this time. The people at Lippincott obviously knew about the Langston Hughes autobiography that had been published in 1940, and the autobiographical nature of Native Son certainly suggested that there was widespread public interest in the 1940s versions of “up from the slavery of racism and poverty,” or the inability to make that trip. While the Negro, as Hughes might have said, was “no longer in vogue” in Harlem, he or she was decidedly coming in vogue again in the publishing world of the 1940s. As Robert Hemenway has pointed out, Hurston was not only uncomfortable with the autobiographical form, but she found it hard to retain a consistent voice in the manuscript, and she took an uncharacteristically long time, a year, to complete the revisions on the work. “I did not want to write it at all,” she said, “because it 52 . . . Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road is too hard to reveal one’s inner self” (Hemenway, 278). Even Alice Walker, mostly sympathetic to Hurston in everything else, has called the autobiography “the most unfortunate thing Zora ever wrote,” primarily because “after the first several chapters, it rings false.”1 So Hurston conformed without conforming; she completed a work that defies chronology, drops into essayistic digressions, and offers generalized opinions as frequently as it traces a particular life. Scholars have pointed to its contradictions, its refusal to adhere to its own professed structure, and its general blot upon the reputation of an otherwise respectable author. Pushed into completing a manuscript that she might not otherwise have completed or might have completed at a much later date Zora Neale Hurston could not straightforwardly show her resentment to that coercion, for she was too dependent upon the financial kindnesses of others (she had been particularly strapped financially in the couple of years before she started work on the manuscript). Nor could she wholly retain her own voice, for as Claudine Raynaud has meticulously pointed out, several editorial emendations occurred between Hurston’s original manuscript and the final published version of Dust Tracks. This was especially true of Hurston’s opinions of European and U.S. imperialism, her representations of black sexuality especially black male sexuality and her depictions of her own subjection to sexism and racism. Raynaud makes clear that “a comparison of manuscript and published versions of Dust Tracks retraces the process of Hurston’s gradual submission to the control of the white publishing world” (34–64). On stage and dancing, but without the proper shoes or dress, Hurston decided to change the dance and to show the people who had ordered the performance that she was still her own individual self in spite of their shaping her current reality. In the narrative, therefore, in incidents that were ostensibly drawn from her own life, Hurston could voice her displeasure by refusing to adhere to the expected difference as an individual colored person, by violating form and, most important, by creating a series of events and characters who may very [3.238.79.169] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:53 GMT) Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road . . . 53 well serve as substitutes for the abstract authority that made her sit down at her typewriter and collect the bits and pieces of her life into something of a coherent whole. Hurston exhibits her displeasure in the narrative in a series of events in which she executes physical or psychological violence upon substitutes for authorial coercion. But first, she thwarted expectations. Lippincott undoubtedly expected a colored version of the up-by-the-bootstraps myth. Hurston, a black woman, had carved out an individual, distinctive face in bas relief against the masses of blacks who were still trapped in poverty and ignorance. Hurston resists that expectation by writing herself into mythic origins and a mythical birth. She’s distinctive, all right, but not distinctively, stereotypically black. She’s distinctive in the best of white male heroic traditions, and her origins reflect those that one might find in Joseph Campbell...