Dust Tracks on a Road

According to Hurston, “[r]esearch is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and that they dwell within” (143). With this pronouncement, Hurston opens this chapter on her research in the US and the Caribbean.

Although Hurston was proud to have been selected by Boas for a fellowship, she states that her first six months of research in the South were not successful because she was far too formal with her informants. Boas was somewhat harsh in his response but Hurston found his criticism bracing, and she moved on to become successful in her research.

Hurston also recounts her experience with Charlotte Osgood Mason, whom she called “Godmother,” a patron who gave her $200 a month to support her research. Through Mason, Hurston got to know other African-American artistic luminaries of the period, including Langston Hughes. Osgood Mason and the artists with whom she surrounded herself could be merciless critics if they thought the work Hurston was doing lacked authenticity, but Hurston accepted the criticism. Hurston did what she could to satisfy Osgood Mason’s curiosity because Mason, despite her great wealth, “was altogether in sympathy with” the poorest African Americans because she believed them to be “utterly sincere in living” (145).

One of the realities Hurston confronted during her field studies was that she was, at times, in danger. Hurston recounts how she nearly became the victim in a knife fight after a woman accused Hurston of stealing her boyfriend, a Polk County, Florida guitar player from whom Hurston collected songs. Hurston was saved only because she befriended and received protection from a much-feared local woman who had a knife of her own. Hurston reproduces examples of the blues and folk songs she collected and includes descriptions of the rough people she encountered in the saw mills and turpentine camps of south Florida.

Hurston left Florida after her near-death experience and headed to New Orleans to study hoodoo, a folk religion practiced by some natives of New Orleans. Hurston describes being initiated by several “doctors” and how terrified she was at times by these experiences. After a brief trip back to Florida, Hurston decided to go to Nassau in the Bahamas to collect songs. Hurston collected folk songs, dances, and work songs, got to know an important Bahamian legislator who tweaked the British power structure, and lived through the deadly hurricane of 1929.

Hurston returned to New York in 1932 and commenced popularizing this Bahamian material with a traveling group of performers. Hurston writes that her goal in performing was to “show what beauty and appeal there was in genuine Negro material, as against the Broadway concept” (158). Hurston believes that her performances played an important role in the popularization of Bahamian music.

Another research project Hurston conducted was a series of interviews with Cudjo Lewis (Kossola), who was among the last groups of Africans to arrive in slavery to the United States in 1859 aboard the Clothilde. Lewis was a member of the West African Takkoi tribe. He and his people were enslaved by the Kingdom of Dahomey during a war explicitly designed to capture the tribe for trade to Europeans. After all these years, Kossola still yearned to let his family (likely killed along with many others during the raid) know he was alive.

Hurston remarks that this story of Africans enslaving other Africans for profit destroyed her belief in the myth that “the white people had gone to Africa and waved a red handkerchief at the Africans and lured them aboard” and into slavery (165). Hurston also learned from her informant that royal prisoners were always killed rather than sold into slavery, a fact that countered African-American stories of having been descended from royalty. Such stories confirmed for Hurston “the universal nature of greed and glory” (165).

Hurston’s research allowed her to see and take what she believes to be the first picture of a zombie, publish multiple works, and share the material collected in scholarly journals and radio programs. She also concluded that the religions she encountered were just as valid as any other that “satisfies the individual urge” (169) and believes that westerners will eventually discover that there is likely some scientific value in the materials used in the rites she researched.

Hurston first conceived of writing a book in 1929, and in 1934, Jonah’s Gourd Vine was the result. Hurston was reluctant to write a book because she was not interested in writing about “the Race Problem” (171) just because she was African American and a writer.

In the years before publication of the novel, Hurston put together a concert group to present authentic performances of African-American spirituals, work songs, and dance to counter the more formal concert style that was then more popular. Her efforts were a success and she claims credit for having popularized West Indian music and dance through her group as well.

Hurston struggled financially in the 1930s because the Great Depression made funding for research hard to come by. Nevertheless, she published several works, including “The Gilded Six Bits” (1933) and Mules and Men (not published until 1935). Encouraged by the publisher of the short story, Hurston queried publisher Bertram Lippincott about her book and then began writing the book in a rented room.

Hurston was dependent on small amounts of money from relatives and friends. She supplemented this money with earnings paid by the Seminole Chamber of Commerce for cultural performances. Hurston received a much needed $200 advance for Jonah's Gourd Vine on the night her landlady evicted her from her lodgings. Hurston writes that receiving the advance for the novel was one of the highlights of her life, beating out being hired by Paramount Studios, which occurred when she was a more established writer.

Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) in Haiti over seven weeks of focused work. She wishes she could write it over and confesses, “I regret all of my books” (175). She says that new writers would never write books if they started out knowing everything they later learn. Writers must write, however. It is a compulsion “from somewhere in Space” (175), and “[t]here is no agony like bearing a story untold” (176). At the moment of composition, Hurston is in California working on films because a determined friend insisted she come.

All her life, Hurston has heard the exclamation “My people! My people”—a cry “forced out by pity, scorn, and hopeless resignation” by “well-mannered Negroes” who are embarrassed by other African Americans behaving crudely or talking loudly in public (177). These respectable African Americans have embraced mores they associate with “the white standard of living” (177-78). Respectable African Americans fear being judged by whites on the basis of African Americans who do not hold to these same standards, but they do nothing to confront their more rugged peers because they know doing so will make them the butt of merciless jokes and ridicule by these self-same people.

Hurston writes that in addition to “My people! My people,” there other traditional concepts surrounding race: “Race Pride”— “Race Prejudice”— “Race Man”— “Race Solidarity”— “Race Consciousness”—“Race”(179). Even as a child, Hurston was puzzled by the contradictions inherent in these concepts: “As soon as I could think I saw that there is no such thing as race solidarity in America with any group” (179). African-Americans’ individual interests are simply too varied, and both affluent and working-class African Americans admit as much.

Hurston remembers typical speeches from her childhood, ones in which the speaker would, to great applause, argue that African Americans had advanced so much since slavery, that they were “the most beautiful race on earth” and “the bravest”(180) but that whites had taken credit for black ingenuity and stood in the way of African Americans claiming their place at the pinnacle of humanity.

In day-to-day life, these same people would tell stories that cast African Americans as the inept and mischievous Brer Monkey, a folk figure who was continually fouling up things in his efforts to ape whites by attempting to do things beyond his capability. In Hurston's own home, her father believed African Americans had no real use for college, while her mother believed in that one should “dare all” (185). Notwithstanding claims that African Americans were beautiful, Hurston found “the Negro, and always the blackest Negro, being made the butt of jokes, particularly black women” (184). This kind of talk confused Hurston, who wondered why people with lighter skin had higher status than people with darker skin.

Hurston finally began to understand these seeming contradictions somewhat better after seeing the respected African-American men of her town arm themselves and go out to fight one night when they mistakenly thought whites were beating one of their own. It turned out that the whites were beating another white man for publishing a story that disgraced two white families. Hurston learned that “the men who spoke of members of their race as monkeys gone out to die for one” (188). They would make fun of each other and themselves, but in their hearts, they aspired to be the people described in the speeches Hurston heard as a child.

Once Hurston reached high school, she was even more puzzled by middling Africans Americans who were neither of the lowest nor the highest class:

I was thrown off my stride by finding that while they considered themselves Race Champions, they wanted nothing to do with anything frankly Negroid. They drew color lines within the race. The Spirituals, the Blues, any definitely Negroid thing was just not done (189).

They detested Booker T. Washington for suggesting that African Americans had to start with training rather than academic education due to their history. Hurston rejected these attitudes because she believed they were rooted in insecurity, and the people who held them lacked the actual resources to function as equals with “the best in America” (190).

Based on these early experiences, Hurston concluded that “the Negro Race was not one band of heavenly love” (190). She did not make her peace with the contradictions. Instead, she realized that she could simply see African Americans as individuals rather than a monolithic group. Based on that realization, she rejects efforts to glamorize her ancestry by claiming descent from Native Americans or famous white Americans to make up for perceived inferiority because of her African-American ancestry. She sees neither “honor nor shame” (191) in her racially-diverse ancestry since it means that her grandmother was simply unable to outrun some white man. Hurston also rejects the idea that racial segregation is God-given. There will always be racial intermixing of people unless “in a moment of discouragement [God] turned the job over to Adolf Hitler” (193).

In the end, African Americans are individuals like everyone else. They will succeed or fail on their own merits. “There is no The Negro here,” writes Hurston, since “[o]ur lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different” (192).