Dust Tracks on a Road

"Time and place have had their say. So you will have to know something about the time and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life."

Hurston's birth in Eatonville, and, by extension, the South, had a decisive influence on her personality and writing. In this quote, she makes the connection between place and identity.

"Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to 'jump at de sun.' We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground. Papa did not feel so hopeful. Let well enough alone. It did not do for Negroes to have too much spirit. He was always threatening to break mine or kill me in the attempt."

Hurston's aspirations and self-belief were unusual since she came of age during a time when women—and African-American women, in particular—were given fewer opportunities. Hurston's ambition likely had its roots in her mother's belief in her children, while John Hurston's caution reflected a common attitude of African Americans, one that feared the real possibility of racial violence against children who exhibited any spark of ambition or defiance of segregationist laws.

"I always wanted to go. I would wander off in the woods all alone, following some inside urge to go places. This alarmed my mother a great deal. She used to say that she believed a woman who was an enemy of hers had sprinkled ‘travel dust’ around the doorstep the day I was born. That was the only explanation she could find. I don't know why it never occurred to her to connect my tendency with my father, who didn't have a thing on his mind but this town and the next one."

Hurston's life was one that included a great deal of travel because of poor circumstances and later, as she became more established, because of a desire to satisfy her curiosity by doing research. This quote established that the desire to be mobile was one that dated back to childhood.