A Reflection Upon Dust Tracks On a Road
In chapter 15 of Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks On a Road, she describes her experience growing up in a Baptist Church and how her early questions about faith eventually led to her total disillusionment. Through her personal anecdotes, Hurston probes the efficacy of the Church in bolstering faith. Rather than a place where she could wrestle with her questions about sin, death, and salvation, the Church was primarily a place of theatrics--a place where she “made the necessary motions and forgot to think.” Church traditions such as new convert testimonies, baptisms, and funerals were enjoyable and exciting for Hurston because of the “high drama,” but they never proved compelling enough to clear her “misty fumes of doubt.” After college, she came to the conclusion that the spectacle that she saw her father and his church members perform every week was no different from the military campaign of Constantine or the persuasive sermons of the Apostle Paul. According to Hurston, all people of religion are weighed down by a “feeling of weakness” that compels them to construct an omnipotent “creature of their own minds.” As for herself, Hurston “feels no need for such” religion, but she asserts that she is in no way attempting to deprive another of theirs.
Hurston probes the efficacy of the Church in bolstering faith. Rather than a place where she could wrestle with her questions about sin, death, and salvation, the Church was primarily a place of theatrics--a place where she “made the necessary motions and forgot to think.”
This very well may have been her intention, however. I would argue that Hurston de facto seeks to prompt her audience to question the necessity of religion, specifically the necessity of the Black Church. In Richard Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” he describes the role of Christianity in the Black community as being the “only sense of a whole universe, [the] only relation to society and man, [the] only guide to personal dignity” for millions of Black folk. For Hurston, these roles are fulfilled elsewhere, and it would be weak and foolish of her to have such a dependency on religion. And if it were weak and foolish for Hurston, certainly it would be weak and foolish of others, especially a Black audience that would have had similar church experiences.
The Black Church has been seen as the major tool used by Black folk to navigate the world around them
In this way, I believe that Hurston fulfills Wright’s call to the “Negro writer” to “mould [sic] or influence the consciousness of the Negro people” by “address[ing] their messages to them through the ideologies and attitudes fostered” in institutions like the Black Church (1383). By recounting the events of revival services and the music that accompanied them and investigating their validity, Hurston invites the reader to do the same with their own experiences within the Church. Although historically the Black Church has been seen as the major tool used by Black folk to navigate the world around them, Hurston deems this tool as unnecessary and foolish and implicitly suggests to her audience to question its efficacy as well. Hurston’s decision to leave the Black Church, and religion altogether, was induced by her deciding to “start thinking again.” This naturally begs the question: are those still within the Black Church failing to think for themselves? Are religion and intellectualism mutually exclusive, especially for the Black writer, scholar, academic?
“The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door.”
