By Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston is the novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, most famous for writing novels set in the South and speaking to the black experience. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on A Road (or full book), she speaks of the natural world around her as a place of wonder and childhood inquiry.
For instance, for a long time I gloated over the happy secret that when I played outdoors in the moonlight the moon followed me, whichever way I ran. The moon was happy when I came out to play, that it ran shinging and shouting after me like a pretty puppy dog. The other children didn’t count… The unfaithfulness of the moon hurt me deeply…. But after a while, I ceased to ache over the moon’s many loves. I found comfort in the fact that although I was not the moon’s exclusive friend, I was still among those who showed the moon which way to go. That was my earliest conscious hint that the world didn’t tilt under my footfalls, nor careen one-sided just to make me glad…
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
But no matter whether my probings made me happier or sadder, I kept on probing to know.
- How has ZNH captured childish innocence with her word choice/diction?
- What characteristics does ZNH imbue nature with in this passage? How is personification used?
- Later in the passage she describes “It was summer time, and the mockingbirds sang all night long in the orange trees. Alligators trumpeted their stronghold in Lake Bell. So fall passed and then it was Christmas time. Papa did something different a few days before Christmas.” How is nature woven into her narrative as a part of everyday life? How might you use a similar technique to think about the passage of time?
- What else do you notice? What other questions do you have?
GREEN & GROW 