Dust Tracks on a Road

Hurston, Zora N. "Dust Tracks on a Road." The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Ed. David L. Lewis. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994. 142-55. Print.

Two things caught my attention in this excerpt. The first is the extreme parallel between Zora and Helga Crane, from Quicksand. Both moved to New York in a sudden, almost impulsive act and arrived with almost no money. The fact that this happening appears twice in literature from the Harlem Renaissance (that I’ve read, anyway) leads me to believe that it was a commonplace thing to do. Even if it is a bit foolhardy, it feels like the people who believed in Harlem really, truly believed in Harlem – no if’s and’s or but’s about it. And, of course, this says a lot about the social milieu of the time. That people were willing to uproot themselves and travel to Harlem with barely a dollar in their pocket is a statement in and of itself; that it happened over and over again is an even stronger statement. The amount of hope that the Renaissance emitted must have been enormous; what else could have attracted people so fully?

The second thing that caught my attention was the reference to Du Bois’ assertion that the Racial Mountain prevented writers from expanding their creativity to topics outside of the race problem. Zora is obviously well aware of this, but for reasons other than the ones put forth by Du Bois. Du Bois seemed to support the idea that Harlem Renaissance writers wrote about the race problem (I could be wrong about this – his article about it could very easily have been written in jest), whereas Hurston wanted to branch out from the topic into themes of her own. Her claim that there are no inherent differences between the races brought back the story of the black doctor in The Fire in the Flint who attempted to live as if race was not an issue. I admire the conscious thick-headedness as a means of overcoming discrimination (and I’m being honest; that sentence came off as sarcastic, but it wasn’t). I appreciate Zora’s philosophy on life, and now that I’m discussing it I wonder what she would have thought of her works appearing in a compilation of literature from The Harlem Renaissance.