Moses/Dust Tracks on a Road
Weidman, Bette S.
4 October 1985: 535 Told in idioms black & wise MOSES MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN Zora Neale Hurston University of Illinois, $6.95 paper, 351 pp. DOST TRACKS ON A ROAD AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Zora Neale...
...DOST TRACKS ON A ROAD AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Zora Neale Hurston University of Illinois, $22.95, $8.95 paper, 348 pp...
...Hurston gives special importance to this first escape from Egypt by drawing on the rhetorical skills she absorbed from the black sermon tradition...
...She takes the plot of Moses from the Old Testament, developing and changing as the novel form invites...
...Reading Dust Tracks is a healthy corrective, as it offers the origins and the context for Hurston's view of whites...
...We cannot do without their verbal richness, their portrayal of black life in the Southern small town and the backwoods lumber camp, their tributes to human generosity and the joy of love and their sharp criticism of greed and narrowness...
...Miriam's decision to die and her overpowering sense of psychological oppression are rendered realistically in Hurston, while the Book of Numbers simply describes Miriam's punishment and death briefly...
...his gently prodding father-in-law, Jethro...
...Unexpectedly, a third figure entered the story of Hurston's birth, a neighbor white man who heard her birth cries and assisted her mother in the absence of a midwife...
...Bette S. Weidmcm IN a recent lecture at the New York Public Library, Paule Marshall paid tribute to the "Mother Poets," black women of her mother's generation whose storytelling was the best she ever heard: ' 'They took the King's English and made it into an instrument that expressed them...
...She is not writing a modern-day Exodus, but rather putting her novelistic gifts to the service of the original biblical material...
...her mother, Lucy Potts, was the "prettiest and smartest black girl in town," whose mother never forgave her for marrying "dat yaller bastard...
...She follows the order of Moses' life as it unfolds through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, but makes some fascinating contributions that seem more like intuition than invention...
...This part of the book resembles another classic of anthropology, Hortense Powdermaker's Stranger and Friend, in its unusual description of the process of fieldwork, including pitfalls and triumphs...
...Like Marshall's own mother, Zora Neale Hurston was a special talker, a "mouth king...
...She begins this partial autobiography with a description of the politics of black and white Florida at the turn of the century, backed by a sharp account of the dispersal of the Florida Indians...
...Hurston did not worry about plot...
...Realism has a special place in this novel...
...Commonweal: 538...
...it is invoked for character analysis, but not for the story's donnee — the presence of God...
...like Mark Twain, she knew the art of the story is in the telling...
...and, of course, the unremitting Voice...
...The most important chapters of Dust Tracks are those in which she describes the pioneer quality of Eatonville and its most interesting place, the front porch of the general store, and the later research she did in the Polk County, Florida lumber camps, in New Orleans HooDoo, and in the Bahamas...
...It is no wonder that her reputation has been reborn, in part through the efforts of today's black women writers, her literary daughters...
...The scene is Egypt, Midian, and the wilderness before Sinai...
...It is a deadly explosive on the tongues of men, I choose to forget it...
...Moses, Aaron, Pharoah, Miriam, Zipporah, Jethro, act and speak like the human beings Hurston spent her life observing...
...In other chapters, the book is much like Edith Wharton's A Backward Glance...
...Her book satirizes misused power and shows the grit and sacrifice required for political leadership...
...The queenly personality of Zipporah, the twisted energies of Miriam, the confused ambition of Aaron, all contribute sense to the scant biblical offering...
...She succeeds in making her Moses both believable and remote, a Connecticut Yankee with horse sense and humor, faced with a heroic task...
...Returning to Florida, to the Bahamas and Haiti, Hurston collected black folklore and music and wrote a handful of books that make a permanent contribution to American literature: the novels, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jonah's Gourd Vine, and Moses, Man of the Mountain...
...Just as Exodus starts with the predicament of the mid wives, so does Hurston...
...while it dramatizes the backsliding and conflicting ambitions among people, it also illumines Moses' memorable supporters: his first teacher, the non-biblical old stableman, Mentu...
...The story of a life in progress, it pays tribute to the writer's friends and helpers, from Fannie Hurst to Ethel Waters, and succeeds in sharpening our sense of a rich and productive life...
...the outlines of Moses' story are intact...
...Today, in view of terrible destructiveness in the Middle East and Africa, her remarks seem appropriate and sane: "What the world is crying and dying for at this moment is less race consciousness...
...We learn, too, of the work Hurston did to introduce black music to New York, spirituals, blues, and work songs as well as Bahamian song and dance...
...She is also the writer, above all others, who transferred the language of the "Mother poets" to the printed page...
...God's presence is unquestioned...
...Dust Tracks on a Road is further evidence of Hurston's ability to reveal character and scene in language that has, in her words, "plenty of seasoning...
...It was for them an art form...
...his devoted young son-soldier, Joshua...
...The direct contribution of this culture is in its shaping of Hurston's experience of human character and idiom...
...This new edition, particularly, with three chapters restored from the original manuscripts, makes Hurston's view of race clear...
...Moses' initial flight from Egypt after killing the overseer is rendered in one line in Exodus...
...There are no direct references to black Americans, but the whole book acknowledges the impact of the Exodus story on black culture in Africa and the Americas...
...The book's 340 pages are an imaginative investment in the characters of Moses and his contemporaries, developed through plentiful dialogue...
...With "the map of Dixie on [her] tongue," she struggled for her education at Morgan and Howard University, then traveled north to New York, where Franz Boas trained her as an anthropologist...
...Zora was her mother's child: "Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at de sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground...
...The human race would blot itself out entirely if it had any more...
...In Hurston's newly reprinted novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, and in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, contemporary readers are treated to the bold and vigorous English of a woman who learned to speak in the black town of Eatonville, Florida, in the 1890s...
...Her father, John Hurston, from "over the creek" in (Continued on page 538) (Continued from page 536) Notasulga, Alabama, was trying to escape share-cropping poverty...
...The ability to look beyond race, considered a blessing by Hurston, has often been regarded as a curse by black critics who see her as a reactionary...
...The man who grannied me" took a continued interest in Zora and his remembered importance is the first sign that this child would grow up taking her friends where she found them, regardless of race...
...In Hurston's novel, the pillar of fire that leads the Israelites is the biblical pillar...
...the folklore collections, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse...
Vol. 112 • October 1985 • No. 17
