The Last Dust Track by Lucy M. Freibert

Set in 1960, Laurence Holder's play The Last Dust Track purports to dramatize the last day in the life of anthropologist, author Zora Neale Hurston. In numerous overlapping flashbacks, the play mingles Hurston's life, with its use in her publications, her associations with major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, and divergent racial perceptions of both Caucasians and African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. The most exciting aspect of the play is the playwright's weaving together of the realistic details from Hurston's life with the magical aspects of folklore.

During her lifetime, Hurston deliberately obscured certain biographical details, especially her birth year. She was actually born in 1891, in Alabama, to John and Lucy (Potts) Hurston. Zora grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black town in the country. Her father, a carpenter by trade and a minister by vocation, was three times elected the mayor of the town. Although influenced by her father's interest in the cultural power of the word, she was more powerfully influenced by her mother's awareness of how social customs silenced women. Hurston spent her life searching for the voice that would allow her to speak out for women. Her mother's death when Hurston was thirteen seems to have solidified that dedication.

In 1917 Hurston moved to Baltimore, where she attended Howard University. By 1925 she was in New York, where her story Spunk received the second place award given by the magazine Opportunity. Once established in the City, she enrolled at Barnard College, from which she was graduated in 1927. While at Columbia University, Hurston studied with anthropologist Franz Boas, who encouraged her to go back to the South and collect the folklore that she believed was so important to her tradition. Out of that research and later trips to Jamaica and Haiti, came her books of folklore Mules and Men (1935), Tell My Horse (1938) and the folk elements that appeared in her novels Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), and in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).

From the outset the characters in Hurston's novels were at least partially based on her family. The events in Jonah's Gourd Vine are loosely based on her parents courtship and marriage and her father's ministerial experiences; Joe Starks in Their Eyes...is also based on her father's being the mayor of Eatonville. Janie in Their Eyes...alternately resembles Hurston's mother and Hurston herself.

During her New York years, Hurston worked as a secretary for Fanny Hurst. She was also supported financially by Mrs. Rufus Osgood Mason. Hurston's devotion to her dual career contributed to the failure of at least two marriages,
one, in 1927, to Herbert Sheen and another, in 1939, to Albert Price. Other significant relationships of Hurston's life were her associations with Big Sweet, who became her guardian and guide during her field work in the backwoods and lumber camps of the South during her attempts to study the spiritual mysteries of hoodoo, and with the New Orleans priestess Marie Leveau, who "completely transformed her." Another woman who personally affected Hurston's life was Ethel Waters, by whom Hurston was captivated.

Besides committing her folklore knowledge to print, Hurston also took it to the theatre in a series of concerts, which she presented in New York, Chicago, and Florida. Hurston's other theatrical connection was the play that she wrote with Langston Hughes, Mule Bone, A Comedy of Negro Life. The play, which created dissension between Hurston and Hughes, was not published until 1991.

Hurston was persecuted by envious folks among her own people. In 1948, when she was engaged in tutoring disadvantaged youth, she was accused of having sodomized a retarded boy. Only through the diligence of Assistant District Attorney Frank O'Connor, who verified that she was not in town the day the alleged crime was committed, was she cleared of the accusation and released. Her accusers never did anything to make restitution for the evil they had done to her reputation.

Additional personalities who turn up in Holder's play include Cudjo, the last survivor of the last slave ship; Alain Locke, Hurston's mentor at Howard, philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance, and editor of The New Negro; the renowned sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, who believed in Blacks mastering the white world; Carl Van Vechten, photographer of the Harlem Renaissance, whose contrasting pictures of Zora are used by Alice Walker for the cover of her book on Hurston, I Love Myself When I Am Laughing...and Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive (1979).

Current biographical information about Hurston and a helpful short bibliography of primary and secondary works may be found in Cheryl A. Wall's sketch in the second edition of African American Writers, Vol. I (2000).