Beginning ~ with her birthplace

Chapter 1 ~ My Birthplace

Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me.  Time and place have had their say.  So you will have to know some-thing about the time and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life.

Dust Tracks on a Road ~ by Zora Neale Hurston, 1942, autobiography

First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, Dust Tracks on a Road is Zora Neale Hurston’s candid, funny, bold, and poignant autobiography — an imaginative and exuberant account of her childhood in the rural South and her rise to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.  As compelling as her acclaimed fiction, Hurston’s very personal literary self-portrait offers a revealing, often audacious glimpse into the life — public and private — of an extraordinary artist, anthropologist, chronicler, and champion of the Black experience in America.  Full of the wit and wisdom of a proud, spirited woman who started off low and climbed high, Dust Tracks on a Road is a rare treasure from one of literature’s most cherished voices.

I also want to share the first lines of the Foreword by Maya Angelo (c. 1991):

There is an eerie, sometimes pathetic, ofttimes beautiful urge that prevails in Black American lore, lyrics and literature.  The impulse, simply put, is to tell the story...to tell one's own story...as one has known it, and lived it, and even died it.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts Book Beginnings on Fridays. Click here for today's Mister Linky.