Dust Tracks on a Road

Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston

NY:  HarperCollins, 1942

ISBN 0-06-096567-3

(8)  Didn’t own pots to pee in, nor beds to push ‘em under.  Didn’t have no more pride than to let themselves be hired by poor-white trash.

(32)  He was supposed to be so tough, it was said that once he was struck by lightning and was not even knocked off his feet, but that lightning went off through the woods limping.

(63)  The Master-Maker in His making had made Old Death.  Made him with big, soft feet and square toes.  Made him with a face that reflects the face of all things, but neither changes itself, nor is mirrored anywhere.  Made the body of Death out of infinite hunger.  Made a weapon for his hand to satisfy his needs.  This was the morning of the day of the beginning of things.

(67)  The one who makes the idols never worships them, however tenderly he might have molded the clay.  You cannot have knowledge and worship at the same time.  Mystery is the essence of divinity.  Gods must keep their distances from men.

(68)  I just had to talk back at established authority and that established authority hated backtalk worse than barbed-wire pie.

(83)  So my second vision picture came to be.  I had seen myself homeless and uncared for.  There was a chill about that picture which used to wake me up shivering.  I had always thought I would be in some lone, arctic wasteland with no one under the sound of my voice.  I found the cold, the desolate solitude, and earless silences, but I discovered that all that geography was within me.  It only needed time to reveal it.

(145)  Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

(159)  “Race Solidarity” looked like something solid in my childhood, but like all other mirages, it faded as I came close enough to look.  As soon as I could think, I saw that there is no such thing as Race Solidarity in America with any group.  It is freely admitted that it does not exist among Negroes.  Our so-called Race Leaders cry over it.  Others accept it as a natural thing that Negroes should not remain an unmelting black knot in the body politic.  Our interests are too varied.  Personal benefits run counter to race lines too often for it to hold.  If it did, we could never fit into the national pattern.  Since the race line has never held any group in America, why expect it to be effective with us?  The upper-class Negroes admit it in their own phrases.  The lower-class Negroes say it with a tale.

(182)  Somebody had turned a hose on the sun.  What I had taken for eternity turned out to be a moment walking in its sleep.

(191)  Each moment has its own task and capacity;  doesn’t melt down like snow and form again.  It keeps its character forever.

(202)  It seems to me that organized creeds are collections of words around a wish.

(206)  Being an idealist, I too wish that the world was better than I am.  Like all the rest of my fellow men, I dont want to live around people with no more principles than I have.

(208)  What all my work shall be, I don’t know that either, every hour being a stranger to you until you live it.  I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.

(218)  If you still have doubts, study the man and watch his ways.  See if all of him fits into today.  If he has no memory of yesterday, nor no concept of tomorrow, then he is My People.  There is no tomorrow in the man.

(238)  All clumps of people turn out to be individuals on close inspection.

(244)  The world is not just going to stand still looking like a fool at a funeral if I can help it.  Let’s bring up right now and lay a hearing on it.

(248)  Democracy, like religion, never was designed to make our profits less.