Dust Tracks on the Page: Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon and Their Eyes Were Watching God

• Published in: Studies in American fiction Vol. 47; no. 2; pp. 191 - 217
• Main Author: Hoeller, Hildegard
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.12.2020
• Subjects: African American literature; American literature; Autobiographical literature; Autobiographies; Creative process; Dreams; Dust; Emotions; Fiction; Hurston, Zora Neale (1891-1960); Intertextuality; Men; Novels; Plot (Narrative); Race relations; Resignations; Women; Word meaning; Africa
• ISSN: 0091-8083; 2158-5806; 2158-5806; 2158-415X
• DOI: 10.1353/saf.2020.0009

In 1931, Hurston completed a manuscript entitled “Barracoon”—published in 2018 for the first time—that tells the story of Cudjo Lewis or Kazoola, known as the last survivor of the last slave ship, the famous Clotilda, which brought a final cargo of enslaved people to Mobile, Alabama, in 1859.2 Lewis “never lost sight” of Africa and always hoped to return to his homeland; however, in the end, he never saw Africa again and lived a life of pain and loss and unfulfilled dreams until his death in 1935. Hurston, enacting the literal meaning of the word “intertexos,” intertwines the two texts by rewriting and reinscribing Barracoon in her novel Their Eyes, signaling that the intertextual link between the two texts is constitutive of the later novel’s meaning.3 This essay follows these “dust tracks” of Barracoon in Their Eyes and details how rereading Their Eyes through its intertextual connections to Barracoon changes and enriches our understanding of Hurston’s famous novel and contributes new insights to some of the most central and perplexing critical issues that have been raised about it. [...]rereading the depictions of racial violence and the southern white justice system in Their Eyes—one of the novel’s most controversial elements—through Barracoon brings Hurston’s reworkings and her move into fiction and an idealized, almost utopian view of race relations and the legal system into stark relief. 5 Hurston encouraged this reading by linking the novel to her love affair with Percy Punter: while “the plot was far from the circumstance,” she writes in Dust Tracks on a Road, her autobiography, “I tried to embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him” in the novel.6 This account of a fast, almost inevitable, emotional outpouring of Their Eyes insulates the novel from other texts and suggests that its origin was rooted in Hurston’s emotional life.