into Hoodoo, or sympathetic magic.... I learned
the routines for making and breaking marriages;
driving off and punishing enemies; influencing
the minds of judges and juries in favor of clients;
killing by remote control and other things” (191).
In Chapter 11, “Books and Things,” Hurston dis-
cusses the different genres she attempted to pub-
lish and the financial challenges she faced as she
attempted to bring her work to fruition. After not-
ing that she had written her award-winning novel
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) in Haiti,
Hurston wrote, “It was dammed up in me, and I
wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks. I
wish that I could write it again. In fact, I regret all
of my books” (212).
In “My People! My People!,” the chapter that
critics often find problematic, Hurston provides
her ambiguous pronouncements about race and
race consciousness. For example, she writes, “The
bookless [blacks] may have difficulty in reading a
paragraph in a newspaper, but when they get down
to ‘playing the dozens’ they have no equal in Amer-
ica, and, I’d risk a sizable bet, in the whole world”
(217). Nevertheless, as Robert Hemenway points
out in his introduction, “Hurston’s nonconfron-
tational strategy was not unusual for the period,
but modern readers should know that Dust Tracks
sacrifices truth to the politics of racial harmony”
(xiii). Chapter 13, “Two Women in Particular,”
reveals Hurston’s special friendships with writer
Fannie Hurst and singer Ethel Waters. Chapters 14
and 15 share her candid views on love and reli-
gion. Hurston concludes Dust Tracks with “Look-
ing Things Over,” in which she examines political
and international affairs.
Written at the urging of Bertram Lippincott,
her editor, while she was in California working in
the movie industry, Dust Tracks was, upon publica-
tion, criticized for its unreliability, inconsistencies,
fragmentation, unconventionality, and assimila-
tionist perspective. Despite what some critics saw
as its shortcomings, however, Dust Tracks received
the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award from Saturday
Review for its contribution to race relations. A
reviewer for The New Yorker called Dust Tracks a
“warm, witty, imaginative... rich and winning
book by one of our genuine, grade A folk writers”
(71). In his often unflattering chapter on Hurston
in In a Minor Chord, DARWIN T. TURNER wrote that
Dust Tracks illustrates her “artful candor and coy
reticence... her irrationalities and extravagant
boasts which plead for the world to recognize and
respect her” (91).
In more recent editions of Dust Tracks, several
chapters previously altered or omitted have been
restored. Along with the original chapters, these
new additions offer tremendous insight into the
complex portrait of an individual and a writer
who rose from poverty to a place of prominence
among such leading artists and intellectuals of the
HARLEM RENAISSANCE as ALAIN LOCKE, LANGSTON
HUGHES, DOROTHY WEST, NELLA LARSEN, CLAUDE
MCKAY, GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON, COUNTEE
CULLEN, and W. E. B. DUBOIS.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. Philadel-
phia: J. B. Lippincott, 1942.
Rayson, Ann L. “Dust Tracks on a Road: Zora Neale
Hurston and the Form of Black Autobiogra-
p h y.” Negro American Literature Forum 7 (1973):
39–45.
Review of Dust Tracks on a Road. New Yorker, 14 No-
vember 1942, p. 71.
Turner, Darwin T. In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-Amer-
ican Writers and Their Search for Identity. Carbon-
dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971.
Loretta G. WoodardDutchman Amiri Baraka (1964)
A brutal, haunting, and allegorical commentary
on race in America, Dutchman remains AMIRI
BARAKA’s most frequently performed and most
celebrated work. Written when the poet and dra-
matist was known as LeRoi Jones, the play, which
follows one man’s symbolic descent into the hell-
ish reality of black life, was first produced off-
Broadway in 1964. It later won the Obie award.
A film version appeared in 1967. The title alludes
to the ghost ship, the Flying Dutchman, forever
cursed to repeat its voyage. Baraka suggests that
African Americans, like the legendary ship, con-16 0 Dutchman