eJournals REAL 37/1

REAL
0723-0338
2941-0894
Narr Verlag Tübingen
10.24053/REAL-2021-0016
2021
371

Life as Adventure: The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road

2021
Marina Kübler
10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 M arTina K übler Life as Adventure: The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road Calling Zora Zora Neale Hurston’s call to adventure comes in the form of “an old sow-hog” that “taught [her] how to walk” (22)� When her mother leaves baby Zora alone on the kitchen floor with a piece of corn bread in hand, an undetected pig enters the house to nuzzle for breadcrumbs and other delicacies� The animal’s arrival convinces sedentary baby Zora - who, at one year old, still “would not get on with the walking business” - that she “really ought to try” (ibid�)� The movement sparked by the sow subsequently instills in Zora a lifelong yearning for the open road and the adventures that beckon in the distance: With no more suggestions from the sow or anybody else, it seems that I just took to walking and kept the thing a’going� The strangest thing about it was that once I found the use of my feet, they took to wandering� I always wanted to go� I would wander off into 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� 1 (22-23) Most familiar from her second novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), African American author, anthropologist, and ethnographer, is known today as a major voice in American modernism and one of the most prominent representatives of the Harlem Renaissance� During her lifetime, however, much of her work was not recognized by her contemporaries as her writing focused more on African American folk traditions and “the complex social systems of rural black society than on the influence or oppression of white culture” (“Hurston” n. p.). Her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road was written at the height of her career, but, ever since its publication in 1942, readers and critics alike have puzzled over its form and genre� For one, it features a two-part organization into personal history and ethnography: after the first nine chapters detailing her childhood, youth, and 1 I refrain from marking nonstandard spelling and punctuation in Hurston’s autobiography� 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 350 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 education as an anthropologist, her autobiography turns to seven chapters of what can best be described as analytical essays on general topics such as love and religion� Other unusual attributes of Hurston’s autobiography include its mix of orality and literacy - she mixes Black folklore and erudite analysis - and its lack of confessions of her inner selfhood: she conspicuously omits any mention of certain stereotypical rites of passage - first love, for instance - and gives relatively little insight into the turmoil of personality development apart from her intellectual growth� Most notable, and most controversial, however, is her complete reticence on all incidents of personal or systemic racism, an omission so blatant that Hurston’s autobiography has notoriously been discredited as being untruthful - a question to which I return later on� 2 Strikingly, a number of critics have touched on Dust Tracks’ use of topoi familiar from adventure writing, but none have done so explicitly� Ann L� Rayson, for instance, in her evaluation of Hurston’s place in the tradition of African American life writing, points to medieval grail adventures when she observes that, “more than any other black autobiographer, [Hurston] sets herself up for special mention among men” (42) in that “she portrays herself as a reincarnation of the Melvillian isolato on a continual search for an unknown kind of holy grail” (42-43)� Other critics have referred to Hurston’s autobiographical persona as a picara, stressed the theme of wandering, and called her life a quest or even a mythical journey� 3 It is in this vein that my contribution ventures to take the perspective of adventure writing seriously� In the first part of what follows, I will attempt to identify tropes of adventure in Dust Tracks on a Road, and I will inquire about the benefits of this proposed kinship for our reception of Hurston’s exceptional autobiography� Indeed, taking into account Hurston’s own training as an anthropologist and renowned ethnographer, it is, I suggest, no surprise that she would turn to the tropes of mythological intertexts, thus ultimately modelling her own life on the hero’s journey. As Rayson confirms, “[t]here is […] an overt mythic framework built into her autobiography”, with “[h]er chapter titles suggest[ing] something of this mythic, questing element in her prose, the first few being ‘My Birthplace’, ‘My Folks’, ‘I Get Born’, ‘The Inside Search’, ‘Figure and Fancy’, and ‘Wandering’” (40). To me, Hurston’s affinity to myth and her profession as an anthropologist suggest a reading of her autobiography with special attention to Joseph Campbell’s explication of the hero’s journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a text which posits adventure as a central struc- 2 For a discussion of the ‘truthfulness’ of Dust Tracks on a Road, see, for instance, Fox- Genovese and Walker, for questions relating to genre, see Robey� 3 See Robey 670-671, and Rayson, who notes: “In her autobiography, like Hughes and McKay, Hurston becomes another version of the traditional picaro” (41)� The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 351 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 tural element of myth� In spite of adventure’s complex history as a term and as a concept, and in spite of Campbell’s disputed structuralist simplification of diverse material, it is nevertheless remarkable how many of Campbell’s mythical archetypes operate in Hurston’s autobiography� In a second step, I inquire into the relationship between autobiography and adventure writing in general in order to ask what its reliance on tropes of adventure means for Hurston’s text, particularly with respect to its place in the canon of African American autobiography� The Heroine’s Journey When the sow is on the loose and shifts baby Zora’s life from sedentary to “a’going”, from the kitchen inside to the woods outside, the heroine’s adventure story begins by invoking an essential topos of adventure writing� The coming of the sow and Zora’s long-awaited, fateful first steps represent the beginning of Zora’s adventure; her inclination to wander is a veritable “call to adventure” (Campbell 53) initiating the heroine’s journey that is to become her life� Following Campbell, Zora’s “always want[ing] to go” indicates that “destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his [sic] spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown” (ibid�)� In an important distinction between narratives of adventure and the more goal-driven quest romance, von Koppenfels and Mühlbacher note that quests pursue a predetermined goal whereas the hunt for adventure is characterized by an indeterminate longing for an exceptional experience (5)� An aimless departure driven by the presumed potential for adventure and a cursory desire for unknown, faraway places is precisely what Hurston’s mother refers to when she laments her daughter’s having been sprinkled in “travel dust”� It is this starting point from which I shall begin to examine the tropes of adventure writing in Dust Tracks on a Road� But how does Zora’s adventure continue after the porcine “herald” (Campbell 47) inspires her wandering at an early age? In addition to the sow, Hurston also endows the mystic power of her own exceptional mind with a heralding function: at no more than seven years old, Zora foresees twelve predicaments awaiting her over the course of her lifetime: “I don’t know when the visions began� […] Like clearcut stereopticon slides, I saw twelve scenes flash before me, each one held until I had seen it well in every detail, and then be replaced by another� […] I knew that they were all true, a preview of things to come” (Hurston 41)� Thus, by showcasing the most harrowing events of her life, Zora’s visions work as a preview of the challenges she must overcome on her adventurous path� Just like Odysseus’s, Zora’s trials are twelve in 352 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 number, and the fact that they are revealed to her beforehand testifies to the fact that adventures are usually simultaneously contingent and, as Susanne Gödde argues, providential (37)� This is also a typical adventure motif in Bakhtin, who - referring to the Greek romance as the origin of the “adventure chronotope” (100) - summarizes that “[m]eetings with unexpected friends or enemies play an important role, as do fortune-telling, prophecy, prophetic dreams, premonitions and sleeping potions” (88)� Campbell furthermore adds that the herald usually “mark[s] a new period, a new stage, in the biography” (61), adding that “[t]hat which has to be faced, and is somehow profoundly familiar to the unconscious - though unknown, surprising, and even frightening to the conscious personality - makes itself known; and what formerly was meaningful may become strangely emptied of value” (ibid�)� This effect of alienation and defamiliarization is likewise picked up in Dust Tracks when Zora muses that her “childhood ended with the coming of the pronouncements” and that subsequently, even though she “played, fought and studied with other children”, she “always stood apart within” (Hurston 43)� When she adds that a “cosmic loneliness was [her] shadow” (44), she indicates that to follow the call to adventure is henceforth no longer merely an option but a necessity, a burden, and a task that must be fulfilled by the valiant heroine� Zora asks herself “why me? Why? Why? ” (ibid�) and admits: “Oh, how I cried out to be just as everybody else! But the voice said no� I must go where I was sent� The weight of the commandment laid heavy and made me moody at times” (43)� Nevertheless, in spite of Zora’s archetypal “refusal of the call” (Campbell 54), set forth she must� Thus, in a combination of an active hunt for the unknown and supernatural providence, the autobiographical persona’s propensity for adventure is established early on, and Hurston begins to paint herself as a stereotypical adventurer� It is therefore no wonder that other features of adventure writing are evoked throughout Dust Tracks� Elements underscoring Zora’s strong call to adventure are particularly striking and can be found in many scenes from Zora’s childhood days� When Campbell ascertains that “[t]ypical of the circumstances of the call are the dark forest, the great tree, the babbling spring, and the loathly, underestimated appearance of the carrier of the power of destiny” (47), for instance, it is not only Zora’s visions that come to mind� Notably, the dark forest as a space particularly suited for all things adventurous is also mentioned when Zora recalls that she “would wander off into the woods all alone” (Hurston 22)� In an uncanny resemblance to Campbell’s archetype, a great tree also plays an important role in Zora’s journey: The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 353 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 I had a stifled longing. I used to climb to the top of one of the huge Chinaberry trees which guarded our front gate, and look out over the world� The most interesting thing that I saw was the horizon� Every way I turned, it was there, and the same distance away� Our house then, was the center of the world� It grew upon me that I ought to walk out to the horizon and see what the end of the world was like� The daring of the thing held me back for a while, but the thing became so urgent that I showed it to my friend, Carrie Roberts, and asked her to go with me� She agreed� (Hurston 27) Reminiscent of the White Rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Zora’s evocation of the horizon is likewise an adequate representation of her desire for adventure as an indeterminate, ever-fleeting thing: just like the horizon that can never be reached, Zora chases adventure for the sake of adventure� Importantly, however, Zora’s “urge to go places” and her dream of chasing the horizon are brought back to earth with a jolt once Christmastime draws near� One night at the dinner table, their father asks Zora and her siblings what they want for Christmas, and Zora hopes to leverage her Christmas wish so that her “present could take [her] to the end of the world” (29)� When it is Zora’s turn to speak, she boldly tells her father: “I want a fine black riding horse with white leather saddle and bridles” (ibid�), a demand so immodest that her father replies furiously: “It’s a sin and a shame! Lemme tell you something right now, my young lady; you ain’t white” (ibid�)� Her father’s last utterance is marked with an asterisk� At the bottom of the page, the reader finds a note by Hurston, the author and ethnographer of African American folklore, explaining: “That is a Negro saying that means ‘Don’t be too ambitious� You are a Negro and they are not meant to have but so much�’” (ibid�)� This exchange between young Zora and her father is indicative of the additional questions that must be addressed in a contribution that attempts to read an autobiography by a Black woman as a tale of adventure: Does Hurston’s account, by interrelating autobiography with adventure, implicitly engage with race? If the active hunt for adventure is a constitutive element of adventurous heroes, does this primacy of agency preclude people that “ain’t white”, i� e� African American heroes and heroines, from adventure, especially in a time of rampant racism such as the Jim Crow US? And, if so, what are the implications of writing a Black woman’s life as an adventure nevertheless? I will return to these questions in the second part of this contribution� Despite her initial refusal of the call - she would prefer to be like everybody else - and her father’s caution against being too ambitious, Zora accepts the call when her visions occur� She learns that to wander, err, and struggle is her special providence� It is no wonder, then, that Dust Tracks continues to 354 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 mythologize Hurston’s life story, making use of further typical adventure topoi� Following Campbell’s structural analysis of the hero’s journey, we learn that “[f]or those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass” (63). As it happens, Hurston’s story introduces just such a figure but, as her autobiography stages her entire life as a heroine’s journey, Zora’s first helper enters the scene at her earliest trial possible: at the time of her birth� When her mother gives birth in their remote house, “there was no grown folks close around when Mama’s water broke” (Hurston 20)� With Zora’s father off at work and “Aunt Judy, the mid-wife, […] gone to Woodbridge” (ibid�), her mother gives birth with no help whatsoever� After the delivery, she is weak and barely conscious, lying on the floor with the newborn Zora, desperate for help. Out of nowhere, Zora’s first unlikely helper appears: Help came from where she [Hurston’s mother] never would have thought to look for it� A white man of many acres and things, who knew the family well, […] was there a few minutes after I was born� […] He followed the noise and then he saw how things were, and being the kind of a man he was, he took out his Barlow Knife and cut the navel cord, then he did the best he could about other things� When the mid-wife […] arrived about an hour later, there was a fire in the stove and plenty of hot water on� I had been sponged off in some sort of a way, and Mama was holding me in her arms� (20-21) In a noticeable similarity to the “old man” type in Campbell’s monomyth, Zora’s first helper is likewise a “robust, grey-haired, white man” (Hurston 30). More important than his age, however, is the fact that he is white, and thus his visiting and helping a Black family would have been decidedly unlikely in the late nineteenth-century US under common circumstances� Nevertheless, that the beginning of Zora’s life-adventure is aided by a well-meaning white man is not only typical for Hurston’s famously conciliatory attitude toward race relations; the ensuing unlikely mentorship between the white man and the Black girl also endows the heroine with the sense “that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world” (Campbell 66)� In other words, Zora’s being brought into the world by a white man contributes to her status as “a chosen, highly favored child” (Harris 182), to her role as an extraordinary heroine destined for adventure� When Campbell writes that “[w]hat such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny” (ibid�), this is mirrored in the fact that the old The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 355 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 white man keeps protecting Zora throughout her early years, teaching her a number of valuable lessons that will remain with her for the rest of her life� For instance, when Zora is about nine years old, he prepares her for adverse circumstances by enhancing her resilience, as “he would come by and tease [her] and then praise [her] for not crying” (Hurston 30)� The old white man soon gives young Zora more explicit advice on how to deal with enemies� He instructs her “not to let your head start more than your behind can stand” and to never “fight three kids at a time” (31). He offers more of his rules of combat by reminding Zora to “never let nobody spit on you or kick you” and “never threaten nobody you don’t aim to fight” (ibid.). With these words of fistfight wisdom, the old man once again acts as a helper, as he, as it were, “suppl[ies] the amulets and advice that the hero will require” (Campbell 66)� The helper also instructs Zora - whom he affectionately calls Snidlits - with respect to her particular position as a young Black girl: “Snidlits, don’t be a [n-word],” he would say to me over and over�* “[N-words] lie and lie! Any time you catch folks lying, they are skeered of something� Lying is dodging� People with guts don’t lie� […] Truth is a letter from courage� I want you to grow guts as you go along� So don’t you let me hear of you lying� […]” (Hurston 30-31) Even though Hurston has once again furnished the white man’s statement with an asterisk, explaining in the footnote that the n-word “used in this sense does not mean race� It means a weak, contemptible person of any race” (30), it is nevertheless remarkable that the use of the racist n-word as a synonym for “weak” and “contemptible” is in stark contrast with the ideal hero or heroine as strong, honorable, and extraordinary� This is an indicator, then, that adventurousness seems to include the marker of whiteness and that to be able to be a brave, sturdy, and smart hero conversely means to be less Black� Rayson stresses that Hurston’s autobiographical persona is “an individual who refuses to be typecast in any Negro or intellectual role” and that “she is taken up, as figures in myth often are, by a series of influential benefactors” (41)� Throughout her life adventures, Zora associates with and receives help predominantly from white people� Especially in her early years, when she has not yet left the familiar sphere of her town and family home in pursuit of the unknown, Zora is prepared for her eventual crossing of the threshold into the unknown space of adventure by a number of white helpers� Next to the old white man, she also encounters two white women who visit her village school, presumably to find a Black child in need of philanthropy. When she impresses the two women with her impeccable reading skills, Zora is given a cash prize of one dollar and later receives “a huge box packed with clothes 356 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 and books” (Hurston 30)� As “the books gave [her] more pleasure than the clothes” (39), Hurston subsequently describes young Zora’s reading material in more detail, noting that “[i]n that box was Gulliver’s Travels, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Dick Whittington, Greek and Roman Myths, and, best of all, Norse Tales” (ibid�) and adding that later on she would read books by Hans Christian Anderson, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling� Many of these texts can clearly be assigned to the genre of adventure fiction, and all of young Zora’s childhood reading centers on male heroes� Zora even remarks explicitly that “[t]here were other thin books about this and that sweet and gentle little girl who gave up her heart to Christ and good works” (ibid�), yet excitement and adventure are unequivocally marked as male, inciting Zora to identify with the white, male adventurers instead� Especially Hercules, with his dexterity to solve difficult tasks, arouses Zora’s admiration and imitation, causing her to announce: “I resolved to be like him” (ibid�)� These books consequently take on an important role in uncoupling her from the conventional gender norms and in propelling her, at least mentally, further and further away from her familiar surroundings: In a way this early reading gave me great anguish through all my childhood and adolescence� My soul was with the gods and my body in the village� […] Raking back yards and carrying out chamber pots, were not the tasks of Hercules� I wanted to be away from drabness and to stretch my limbs in some mighty struggle� (41) Fittingly, in her own story, Zora’s first, tentative attempts at “stretching her limbs” and traversing the spatial barrier between the known and the unknown occur once again with the involvement of white helpers� When white travelers pass by her house en route to Orlando, she hails them and asks “Don’t you want me to go a piece of the way with you? ”, subsequently “rid[ing] up the road for perhaps half a mile, then walk[ing] back” (34)� In spite of Zora’s adventurousness, Dust Tracks still contrasts this desire with the ludicrousness of a Black child being so unapologetically proactive in her demeanor towards white people, and we learn that her “grandmother worried about [her] forward ways a great deal� She had known slavery and to her, [her] brazenness was unthinkable” (ibid�)� Hurston thus depicts her autobiographical persona as a daredevil rehearsing for what Campbell calls “the crossing of the first threshold” (71), and, in so doing, she already crosses the threshold of race and gender: she ventures outside of what behooves a young Black girl� As she accompanies the white travelers and briefly traverses the spatial boundary between the known and the unknown and then returns, Zora’s short forays are a testing ground for the great leap yet to come� Again, however, spatial transgressions are coded as white, a challenge Zora overcomes by adhering The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 357 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 to white role models instead of listening to her Black family members, for example her father who thinks “[i]t did not do for Negroes to have too much spirit” and that “white folks were not going to stand for it� [Zora] was going to be hung before [she] got grown” (Hurston 13)� When Zora finally crosses the threshold and leaves her family and her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, this decisive movement comes not as a leap but as an expulsion: after her mother’s death and with her father “away from home a great deal” (69), Zora, the youngest of the Hurston children, is sent to school to Jacksonville� So, when the day of her departure has come, and “[t]he midnight train had to be waved down at Maitland for [her]” (ibid�), Zora knows that her adventure is about to start because she sees the first picture of her visions realized: “I had seen myself upon that curve at night leaving the village home, bowed down with grief that was more than common� […] I was on my way from the village, never to return to it as a real part of the town” (69-70). Campbell illustrates that beyond the first threshold lie “darkness, the unknown, and danger; just as beyond the parental watch is danger to the infant and beyond the protection of his society danger to the member of the tribe” (71), and it is just this absence of safety and parental care which characterizes Zora’s passage� With this departure starts Zora’s real heroine’s journey, an adventure with several trials in store for her� Overcoming the first foreseen trial - being cast away from her family and having to adapt to a new environment at a strange school in a foreign town - is described as relatively easy for the young heroine� Always willing to learn and readjust, Zora’s first trial once more has to do with negotiating the disadvantage of being Black and female� On the one hand, “Jacksonville made [her] know that [she] was a little colored girl” and “[t]hings were all about the town to point this out to [her]” (Hurston 70), an ostracization Zora overcomes by being more cautious and less forward in her dealings with white people� The gender roles Zora faces are a more difficult obstacle, especially the feminine demureness that is expected of her� Unlike her more well-behaved female classmates, Zora is “rated as sassy” (ibid�) and has “to talk back at established authority”, even though “that established authority hated back talk worse than barbed-wire pie” (ibid�)� After collecting “a licking or two” (71), however, Zora finally masters this trial and gets along well at the school. According to Campbell’s monomyth, the crossing of the first threshold is followed by the hero’s passage along the road of trials: Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. This is a favorite phase of the mythadventure� It has produced a world literature of miracu- 358 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 lous tests and ordeals� The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region� Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage� (89) Underlining Hurston’s close adherence to mythical intertexts, the same is true for Zora, and it is no coincidence that her autobiography refers to the spatial passage via the metaphor of ‘the way’ or ‘the road’ already hinted at in its title� After her father fails to pay her school tuition and indifferently offers Zora up for adoption, the school sends her back to her hometown where her new stepmother refuses to take her in� With this, Zora’s second vision picture fulfills itself. She reflects: My vagrancy had begun in reality� I knew that� There was an end to my journey and it had happiness in it for me� It was certain and sure� But the way! Its agony was equally certain� It was before me, and no one could spare me the pilgrimage� The rod of complement was laid to my back� I must go the way� (Hurston 85-86) Thrown out of school and out of her father’s house, Zora’s ensuing vagrancy ensures her movement across space as an important constitutive feature of adventure writing. At first, she “shift[s] from house to house of relatives and friends, [finding] comfort nowhere” (87), until at fourteen years old she starts working as a domestic worker to a rich white family� Once again, Zora’s emancipated personality is an obstacle to her fitting in: “I did very badly because I was interested in the front of the house, not the back” (88)� Eventually, she joins a traveling theater troupe as a maid to one of the female performers, and she tours with her for eighteen months� Yet, even though she enjoys the performers’ company, the time with the theater group is presented as a test to Zora because her actual aim of being in school, reading, and learning is moved all the more out of sight in her need to make a living� At the same time, even Zora’s preceding years at the Jacksonville school are determined with the imagery of geographical movement� Having stood a number of emotional tests - for example when nobody pays for her tuition or when her father does not pick her up from the Jacksonville school (81) -, Zora describes her emotional challenges in geographical terms: “I had always thought I would be in some lone, arctic wasteland with no one under the sound of my voice� I found the cold, the desolate solitude, and earless silences, but I discovered that all that geography was within me” (85)� By metaphorizing her emotional loneliness and her disappointment with her loved ones in geographical terms or, conversely, by admitting that the barren landscape is within her heart, Dust Tracks on a Road also displaces adventure writing’s characteristic move- The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 359 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 ment across space onto the psychological plane - and vice versa� With this, autobiography and adventure writing dovetail in Hurston’s account� Hers is a literal, spatial move beyond the threshold of the known into the unknown, but it is also simultaneously an intrapersonal journey, with trials and tests all of its own. In an appropriate conflation of these internal and external components of Zora’s adventures, she finds that strength and the readiness to fight are likewise motivated from within� Before she leaves the theater troupe to begin a new episode in her adventures, Zora takes stock of her abilities and reflects: “Now, I was to take up my pilgrim’s stick and go outside again. […] I took a firm grip on the only weapon I had - hope, and set my feet” (119). Thus, Zora’s wandering journey leads her, via many a detour, back to high school and, finally, to Howard University and then to Barnard College. For the readers asking, “How did I get back to school? ”, Zora answers “I just went” (122), and even though the odds are once more stacked against the heroine, providence again helps her succeed: “Being out of school for lack of funds, and wanting to be in New York, I decided to go there and try to get back in school in that city. So the first week of January, 1925, found me in New York with $ 1�50, no job, no friends, and a lot of hope” (139)� As Bakhtin posits in his description of the “adventure chronotope”, one basic feature of adventure writing is a certain “random contingency” within the adventure, consisting of “chance simultaneity (meetings) and chance rupture (nonmeetings), that is, a logic of random disjunctions in time” (92, italics in original), i� e� the succession of events as ostensibly random but crucially coincidental� This characteristic is also true for Zora’s progress from one opportunity, one meeting, one offer, one enabler to the next, always seemingly spontaneously deciding on her next move, never planning far ahead, yet always being in the right place at the right time� Once she arrives at Barnard College in New York City, she summarizes her life’s journey in a most fitting manner: So I came to New York through Opportunity, and through Opportunity to Barnard� I won a prize for a short story at the first Award dinner, May 1, 1925, and Fannie Hurst offered me a job as her secretary, and Annie Nathan Meyer offered to get me a scholarship to Barnard� My record was good enough, and I entered Barnard in the fall, graduating in 1928� (Hurston 139, italics in original) This passage is an apt résumé of the contingencies and coincidences that characterize Zora’s life story: not only is she “offered” things on a regular basis, she is also awarded prizes and opportunities� The fact that “Opportunity” is repeated twice here underlines this strong sense of contingency - even though the specific Opportunity italicized in the above passage is the name of a magazine for which Zora begins to write - but also a certain favorable providence 360 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 bestowed upon our heroine� As Bakhtin summarizes, “[i]n this [adventure] chronotope all initiative and power belongs to chance” (100), and Zora is indeed the chosen recipient of rare opportunities, the one to whom things happen by accident, but the one to whom these accidents are most likely to happen� Life as Adventure By modeling Zora’s journey on an archetypal hero’s journey familiar from adventure writing, Hurston blends autobiography and adventure writing, and, as I argue in what follows, it is crucial to inquire into the affinities and differences between the two modes of writing in order to understand Hurston’s text� On a first glance, autobiographies and adventure stories share a number of commonalities� Both usually describe a series of events in their hero’s or protagonist’s life, some of which appear as challenges that must be overcome� In doing so, both types of stories also frequently feature elements familiar from the picaresque novel or the Bildungsroman, but to include an in-depth analysis of these features would exceed the scope of the present chapter� In spite of their similarities, however, adventure and life writing differ significantly in the fact that, while adventure stories are usually placed squarely in the realm of fiction, autobiographies come with at least a certain claim to materiality. As Depkat notes, “[t]he problem of fact and fiction forms the epistemological core of autobiography” (280), but autobiography scholars nowadays take “the constructedness of autobiography for granted” (281) in that it “necessarily contain[s] fictional elements” (ibid.) and uses “patterns and elements of fictionalization” (282) in order to narrate the life portrayed. At the same time, however, and in spite of poststructuralist analyses of autobiography that emphasize its textual and rhetorical effects, 4 “theoreticians of autobiography have not given up on the idea of referentiality” (283) as it remains vital that autobiography is “tied to the realities of a lived life and the subjective experience of it” (ibid�)� It is my contention that in Dust Tracks on a Road, this fictionalization of the life lived functions via the incorporation of the adventure topoi, which is perhaps also why scholars and readers have often criticized Hurston’s account as “reviews show that from its inception, Dust Tracks confused readers by its label as ‘autobiography’, particularly in regard to personal testimony” (Pietka 100)� For readers expecting internal action and confessions of Hurston’s ‘inner self’, Dust Tracks lacks emotional insight or personal reflection. Instead, it all too often amounts to an externally focalized stringing together of anecdotes illustrating hardships, surprising events and 4 See, most notably, de Man� The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 361 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 encounters, and challenging circumstances, conventions that are much more reminiscent of plot-driven adventure stories� The work’s title, Dust Tracks on a Road, likewise hints at the combination of life and adventure writing contained in its pages, especially due to the invocation of the metaphor of ‘the road’, a frequently used trope both in adventure writing and in life narratives� Next to ‘the road of trials’, ‘the road’ is also a common metaphor for ‘life’ in idioms such as ‘life journey’, ‘the road of life’, etc� Furthermore, “The Life and Adventures of …” has long been a popular title for all kinds of life writing - including autobiographies, biographies, autobiographical novels, and novels masquerading as autobiographies -, most notably The Life and Strange Surprizing [sic] Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, itself in turn an archetypal piece of adventure writing� In addition, both life and adventure writing are characterized by a complicated relationship with suspense: while both often depict gripping and risky episodes, the reader of both types of stories already tends to know their outcome� The fact that autobiographies are written already gives away the result that their protagonists will have lived to tell the tale, much like readers are unlikely to fear the adventurer’s early failure or return home if the story is to continue for the book’s remaining number of pages� Indeed, when scholars of adventure writing posit that adventure only emerges as an effect of a narrator who establishes connections between events so that contingencies are retrospectively turned into tests or trials (Gödde 59) 5 , this proposition is reminiscent of autobiography’s most well-known definition as a “retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality” (Lejeune 4)� Both perspectives emphasize retrospectivity and the constitution of a coherent sense of how past events have led to the present state, a bona fide hero or heroine in adventure writing or a Self in autobiography, both crucially constructed in and through narration. Schnyder confirms with respect to stories of medieval adventurers’ trials that adventure does not exist without its narration (370) 6 , and Hurston perhaps similarly notes that “people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be” (26), asking: “What if there is no me like my statue? ” (ibid�)� With this, she also alludes to the possibility that the self might only just emerge in the process or as an effect of its representation - whether 5 In the German original: “eine Erzählinstanz, die den Zusammenhang herstellt, in dem jene Kontingenz sich als Probe oder Prüfung erweist” (Gödde 59)� 6 In the German original: “Es gibt keine âventiure, die nicht erzählt ist” (Schnyder 370)� 362 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 it be a statue or an autobiography -, just like adventures become adventures through their narration� 7 I hold that Hurston’s incorporation of adventure into her autobiography - or, put another way, the fictionalization of her autobiography via the tropes of adventure writing - is a deliberate discursive choice� With this, Hurston makes recourse to three types of intertexts, the effects of which I will expound in what follows� First, I argue, Hurston’s application of the adventure structure alludes to the tradition of African American autobiography and its foundation in the slave narrative� Thus, I show how Zora’s heroine’s journey reclaims tropes of the fugitive slave and turns them into a tale of active adventure� Second, I demonstrate how Hurston’s life story told from the perspective of a young, Black heroine also writes back to the strand of adventure writing propagated by white, male European ‘explorers’ to the American continent� And, third, I claim that Hurston’s adventure autobiography also relates to her position as a black, female scientist, an anthropologist conducting research in the field. Adventure and the Slave Narrative Strikingly, many of the adventure topoi in Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography are at the same time structural elements familiar from slave narratives and the tradition of the early African American autobiography� Especially Zora’s movement away from home - her crossing the threshold from the familiar into the unknown - is a movement parallelized not only by slaves in their forced migration via the Middle Passage and their dislocation from one slaveholder to another but also by the typical flight from the plantation and subsequent journey North chronicled in many slave narratives or African American autobiographies from the era of the Great Migration� Alexandra Ganser notes that “geographical mobility, tied to social ascent, has always had a high symbolic value, shaping distinctly American idea(l)s of freedom and national identity” (15)� But while mobility and Americanness are closely 7 Interestingly, Cesareo makes a more general but similar observation when he remarks upon the structural analogy of travel and writing� We could say that travel is also an important aspect of adventure writing and writing is part of the autobiographical act, which is why this quote is well worth noting here: “In this respect, travel and writing are similar practices structurally situated between self, other, and discovery, the last of these constructs understood as the production of a certain knowledge, the opening up of a practical and / or theoretical space in which the self is recreated and repositioned in a new configuration” (Cesareo 101). The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 363 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 linked, this decidedly American kind of mobility has always been inextricably connected to whiteness: American myths of mobility, however, largely reflect the historic perspective of the White (male) Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and rest on a construction of alterity and hegemonic spatial politics which, for a number of Americans, has produced territorial confinement: the slave quarter, the Native American reservation, the internment camps for Japanese-Americans� (16) In spite of this determination of mobility with whiteness, many slave narratives appropriated the mobility narrative in an effort to align the Black subject with the values of a white supremacist society� As Cesareo notes, “the survival-aesthetic of the eighteenth-century slave narrative places its most striking effect upon its audience in the realm of the adventure of an individual’s will to power, focusing upon the individual and his adventures to highlight his independence, daring, and curiosity” (109), ultimately vindicating the slave as a human being� With their focus on capture, enslavement, escape, and freedom, early slave narratives obviously evoked adventure tales which, due to their association with white bourgeois masculinity, agreed well with the intended effect of the humanization of Black people� Correspondingly, a number of popular slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth century made explicit use of the currency of adventure, for example - note even the author’s name! - Venture Smith’s 1798 A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, the 1849 Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, or the 1837 Slavery in the United States, fittingly subtitled A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man� While these titles related to patterns familiar from adventure writing, the advancement of the abolitionist cause eventually shifted the tone of the slave narratives� They now intended to not only prove Black people’s humanity but also to expose the squalor of plantation life and the atrocities of white society in order to advocate abolition� Thus, toward the mid-nineteenth century - and most notably in narratives such as Frederick Douglass’s of 1845 -, slave narratives stressed exemplary hardships and emphasized the collective experience of racism and white tyranny instead of individual skill and adventures, a cluster of themes that remained with the African American autobiographical project well into the twentieth century with narratives such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945)� Twentieth-century texts in the slave narrative tradition continued to speak of mobility, but with an inflection distinct from white mobility stories: as a consequence of the stifling and inhospitable environment of the Jim Crow South, many African American autobiographies routinely culminate in their persona’s migration to one of the North’s urban centers, most often New York City 364 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 or Chicago. African American autobiographies of the first half of the twentieth century therefore map the Great Migration in just the same way as traditional slave narratives typically depicted the slaves’ escape north a century earlier, and Hurston’s is no exception� However, both the slave narratives and the succeeding African American autobiographies are characterized by a relatively narrow margin of agency on the part of their persona, whose life is determined by hardship and flight - the necessitated movement into the unknown. While this movement appears similar to the adventurer’s crossing of the threshold, these genres notably differ in the fact that the slave or oppressed Black person is running from something while the adventurer is venturing toward something, actively seeking adventure and deciding to follow the call of the beckoning unknown� Nichols observes a similar shift with respect to the Black picaro, who is likewise characterized by a lack of agency and the necessity of restlessness: For the black picaroon never can escape the iron ring of his caste status� His alienation and struggle for survival are more intensely felt� He must be capable of playing numerous exacting roles, for he is the victim of accident, chaos and irrational caprice� His world conspires to oppress and unsettle him� The maxim of the society is summed up in the directive: “Keep this [n-word] running�” 8 (292) Written by a black author in the early twentieth century and tracing the familiar migration to the North, Hurston’s autobiography invariably stands in this tradition of African American autobiography originating from the slave narrative� Yet, Hurston employs topoi from adventure writing, a genre that, in spite of a number of similarities - the move away from home, the struggle, the road of trials and tribulations - differs from the slave narrative tradition precisely in the presence or absence of agency on the part of the protagonist: flight from oppression, slavery, or racialized violence, I argue, is not an adventure, even if followed by number of trials or quests� Even though Olney describes individual passages in slave narratives “that as to style might well come from an adventure story, a romance, or a novel of sentiment” (49), the defining difference between the two genres is that in adventure fiction, adventure is an exceptional state whereas for the slaves and, later, for the oppressed Black population of Jim Crow America, humiliation, arduous tests, and hazardous situations are the dire quotidian norm� Hence, the desires that characterize the protagonists of slave narratives and those that equip the heroes of modern adventure are, as it were, contrary: while fugitive slaves and Black autobiographical personae in search of a better life aim for the (white) normality of “freedom, equality, 8 For a detailed discussion of the slave narrative’s generic kinship with the picaresque novel, see Nichols� The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 365 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 and citizenship” (Harris 184), adventurers commonly desire exceptionality, novelty, thrills, fame, or fortune� The tests and trials faced by fugitive slaves and adventurers are likewise opposite in nature: whereas fictional adventurers usually face minor obstacles that are actually possibilities to prove and showcase their strength and ingenuity - the reader knows they must survive for the story to continue -, fugitives must endure rather than triumph, submit to tyranny and bondage for messy survival rather than for the sake of demonstrating mastery� The fact that many slave narratives and early African American autobiographies start with the typical “I was born” formula further runs counter to the adventurer’s active search: a slave or oppressed Black person is born into an oppressive system, and hazards, challenges, and hardships are their reality and not an exciting exception to a bourgeois lifestyle� Yet, significantly, Hurston withholds any mention of racism or discrimination and frames her life story as an adventure� Instead, even the typical “complex of literacy-identity-freedom that we find at the thematic center of all of the most important slave narratives” (Olney 49), though present in her text, is framed as a quest to complete� Indeed, the course of Zora’s adolescence is a perpetual quest for books and education, for example when Zora mentions that she “was without books to read for most of the time, except where [she] could get hold of them by mere chance” (Hurston 87)� In another instance, Zora voices her “frustration” because “[t]here was to be no school for [her] right away” (100), explaining that “the wish to be back in school had never left [her]” (119)� In the end, as mentioned, Zora succeeds in going back to school and completes perhaps the biggest quest of all, graduating from Barnard College and finally becoming a research assistant to the acclaimed Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas� It is striking that, while Hurston draws on the literacy-identity-freedom theme, whose successful completion results in her living an independent, intellectual life and being able to attest to it by writing her autobiography as well as many works of fiction and ethnography, the way she does so heavily relies on markers of adventure writing� This incorporation of adventure into her life story is precisely where the subversive potential of Hurston’s text resides� She depicts her struggle for education as a series of trials to overcome� Whether it is a cumbersome menial job that Zora has to take on - she admits at one point that time after time “[she]’d get tangled up with their reading matter, and lose [her] job” (88) - or whether it is an actual physical fight that has to be fought against her evil stepmother (76-77) whose power over Zora’s father makes him refuse to pay for her tuition, most of the adventures on Zora’s road of trials seem to have to do with the endeavor, and the political quasi-impossibility, to attain an education� In a way, then, her call to adventure is 366 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 not luring her into the unknownbut into the known - in other words, knowledge is the “ultimate boon” (Campbell 159) that must be won in Zora’s adventure story� In her unwavering efforts invariably geared towards learning, Hurston also redefines the African American northern migration from passive flight into active “wanderings” (67) out of her own volition� Conversely, though, by structuring her life story with adventures, Hurston also refers back to African American autobiography’s historical ties to the slave narrative and the conflict between agency and adventure on the one and disenfranchisement and racism on the other hand, reimagining both in an interesting combination of adventure and mobility as cornerstones of American citizenship� In other words, Hurston uses adventure topoi to participate in the national mobility narrative and, without losing sight of her autobiographical forebears, to reclaim agency� By portraying her struggle for education as an adventure, she appropriates and subsequently dismantles the white privilege of adventure� Failed Explorers In addition to her rewriting of the conventions of African American autobiography, Hurston’s blending of autobiography and adventure writing disrupts yet another important cultural intertext: the specifically American myth of exploration� More than perhaps any other nation, American identity is steeped in a self-understanding as the very product of an adventure: if ‘explorers’ such as Christopher Columbus had not ventured across the ocean to chart ‘virgin’ territory and ‘discover’ America and if brave pioneers had not pushed the frontier ever further west, the national myth goes, the United States would not have come into existence� Hurston is well aware of this grand national narrative and engages with these explorers early on. The very first chapter, entitled “My Birthplace”, starts with the following announcement: 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 something about the time and place where I came from, in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life� (1) The “material that went to make” her, it soon turns out, is not only physical but textual as well: Hurston relates the story of how her hometown of Eatonville, Florida was ‘discovered’ and came to be one of the first self-governing all-black municipalities in the United States: Eatonville is what you might call hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick� The town was not in the original plan� It is a by-product of something else� It all started The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 367 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 with three white men on a ship off the coast of Brazil. They had been officers in the Union Army� When the bitter war had ended in victory for their side, they had set out for South America� Perhaps the post-war distress made their native homes depressing� Perhaps it was just that they were young, and it was hard for them to return to the monotony of everyday being after the excitement of military life, and they, as numerous other young men, set out to find new frontiers. But they never landed in Brazil� Talking together on the ship, these three decided to return to the United States and try their fortunes in the unsettled country of South Florida� No doubt the same thing which had moved them to go to Brazil caused them to choose South Florida� This had been dark and bloody country since the mid-1700’s� Spanish, French, English, Indian, and American blood had been bountifully shed� (ibid�) The founding of her hometown, Hurston claims here, was the (inadvertent) result of an explorers’ adventure - and a rather unsuccessful, anticlimactic one at that� In addition, Eatonville is also the product of chance when, “[t]wo years after the three adventurers entered the primeval forests of Mosquito County, Maitland had grown big enough, and simmered down enough, to consider a formal government” (5), and the black candidate surprisingly wins the first mayoral election and founds a new town. Consequently, “on August 18, 1886, the Negro town, called Eatonville, after Captain Eaton, received its charter of incorporation from the state capital at Tallahassee, and made history by becoming the first of its kind in America, and perhaps in the world” (6)� A descendant of this fortuitous chain of events and well aware of the national significance of the adventure story in the American collective memory, Hurston chooses to preface her life story with a reference to this exploration adventure� With this double intertext comes a sense of agency� Not only does Hurston appropriate a prestigious script imparted to her by the American national sense of origin, but she also writes back to the cultural narrative of adventure as male and white: she appropriates adventure, claims to spring from it, and subsequently endows it with her own, black and female, history� By claiming the power and prestige associated with the privilege of adventure, Hurston absolves herself of victimization: an adventurer who sets out for climes unknown is a far cry from the inherited lot of the Black person forced to migrate due to oppression, poverty, and racial violence� It may be for this reason that Hurston, though writing back to white, male notions of adventure, renounces narratives of victimhood and shows the reconciliatory attitude towards race relations that she has often been criticized for� 9 By leaving out incidents of systemic or individual racism, Hurston’s autobiography 9 See, for instance, Spencer, Trefzer, Rayson, or Robey� 368 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 gains impact as a discursive statement establishing her as an autonomous agent� What is more, her opening allusion to the exploration expedition is also presented in her characteristic ironic tone and with a decidedly anti-climactic delivery� By portraying the founders of her hometown as bored ex-soldiers, accidental settlers, and failed, underachieving explorers, Hurston simultaneously invalidates the grand American myth of colonialism� In order to do so, and rather than starting her autobiography with the hardships of a Black life begun under precarious circumstances, Hurston refuses to mark herself as disenfranchised or discriminated against and instead opens with the failed adventure of three white men� Her twelve visions, by contrast, align her with not just any average Victorian adventurer but with Odysseus and his twelve trials� She thus inscribes herself into a lineage of world-renowned adventurers and honors her mother’s encouragement to aim high and “jump at de sun” (Hurston 13), not just to set sail for Brazil and land in swampy South Florida instead� Research as Adventure Once Zora arrives in New York and enrolls at Barnard College, her quest for knowledge seems to have reached its ending� Conventional adventure stories, however, typically feature a cyclical structure, terminating with the hero’s eventual return home� The author Zora Neale Hurston, by contrast, was to spend the next few years in New York City, where she became one of the prime representatives of the artistic and literary movement of the Harlem Renaissance� Campbell notes, however, that [w]hen the hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source […], the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy� The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds� (179) Upon closer examination, this description also fits Zora’s life’s journey quite perfectly: “Two weeks before I graduated from Barnard, Dr� Boas sent for me and told me that he had arranged a fellowship for me� I was to go south and collect Negro folk-lore” (Hurston 141)� Zora, who has reached her goal of being granted the opportunity to learn and grow intellectually, quite literally takes Campbells “runes of wisdom”, her anthropological education, back to the South in order to conduct her research in the very place from which her journey started� It is precisely what Campbell calls “the ultimate boon” (159) The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 369 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 that Zora has obtained in the North - insight, wisdom, scholarship, science - and with which she now returns ‘home’� I put ‘home’ in inverted commas because Hurston’s attitude toward her native South seems to have changed over the course of her journey and within the pages of her autobiography: whereas she still describes Eatonville and Florida as “my birthplace” (1) at the beginning, her quest for knowledge seems to have transformed her� Once she has gained enough knowledge to apply it as an ethnographer, she intends “to go out and find what is there” (143, my italics), referring to her home state as “the field” (141), signaling her shift from studied object to observant subject of anthropological research� It is in light of this transformation and Campbell’s return of the boon that the often criticized and indeed perplexing bipartite organization of Hurston’s autobiography may be read. When, after the first nine chapters, Zora’s life’s journey concludes with her arrival in New York, Hurston uses the remaining seven chapters for a number of ethnographical essays on topics such as “Research”, “Love”, and “Religion”� Thus, in this second part, we encounter Hurston not as an autobiographical persona but as a professional anthropologist who imparts to us readers the knowledge she has struggled to gain in the first part. Among the variety of essay topics to which Hurston dedicates the second part of her book, the chapter entitled “My People! My People! ” stands out� In it, Hurston turns explicitly to the matter of race relations, a topic which the first part notoriously eschews. While critics have puzzled over Hurston’s conservative attitudes and internalized racism, what interests me are the implications of the chapter’s discursive decision to provide ethnographic research on Black people� 10 bell hooks importantly notes that, even though there has never been any official body of black people in the United States who have gathered as anthropologists and / or ethnographers whose central project is the study of whiteness, black folks have, from slavery on, shared with one another in conversations ‘special’ knowledge of whiteness gleaned from close scrutiny of white people� (338) 10 Puzzling attitudes include Hurston’s unwillingness to recount episodes of racial violence or prejudice in her autobiography, and statements that disregard systemic racism such as: “I do not share the gloomy thought that Negroes in America are doomed to be stomped out bodaciously, nor even shackled to the bottom of things� Of course some of them will be tromped out, and some will always be in the bottom, keeping company with other bottom-folks� It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between� It has never happened with anybody else, so why with us? No, we will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else� It is up to the individual� If you haven’t got it, you can’t show it” (192)� 370 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 While the chapter “My People” would be the opportunity for Hurston to rectify this discursive imbalance, to provide the formalized, codified Black perspective on whiteness that is so crucially lacking, her anthropological essays do just the opposite and add to the already existing - white - knowledge on Blackness a decidedly Black angle� With this, Hurston does not simply mirror white knowledge production on the Black racial Other, but she appropriates, enhances, and corrects the white gaze, thus ultimately commanding the historiography of her own race� Keeping in mind the race of her readership as predominantly white, Hurston furthermore revises established power hierarchies to a certain extent: in an interesting inversion of her own mentorship by mostly white patrons, she now imparts her knowledge and explains her own race to her predominantly white readers� At this point, our heroine Zora has received and followed the call to adventure, has accepted the aid of helpers and embarked on the road of trials, has mastered the previously divined trials, reached her goal, obtained the sought-after elixir of knowledge, and brought it back to her home pastures both in the form of ethnographical research and as the very autobiography we are reading� We could therefore assume that the variety of ways in which topoi of adventure manifest in Dust Tracks on a Road ends at this juncture� Yet, the adventure theme in fact continues into the essayistic second half of Hurston’s autobiography� Julika Griem notes that public discourse on science and research is increasingly characterized by the topos of the adventurous (“Topos des Abenteuerlichen”, 17)� She explains that, upon closer examination, many of the themes and motifs with which research is described are familiar from adventure writing, especially when researchers are said to embark on a journey (“Fahrt”) or an exploration expedition (“Entdeckungsreise”) toward knowledge (18)� This charismatization of research, especially in the humanities (Griem 30), is parallelized in Hurston’s narrative when she writes that “[r]esearch is formalized curiosity� It is poking and prying with a purpose� It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein” (143)� More than just functioning as a metaphor for scientific insight, however, it is an important distinction from Griem’s argument that Hurston’s anthropological fieldwork is actually adventurous as her inquiring mind and bold methods put Zora in a dangerous situation more than once: My search for knowledge of things took me into many strange places and adventures� My life was in danger several times� If I had not learned how to take care of myself in these circumstances, I could have been maimed or killed on most any day of the several days of my research work� Primitive minds are quick to sunshine and The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 371 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 quick to anger� Some little word, look or gesture can move them either to love or to sticking a knife between your ribs� (Hurston 146) In contrast to the sedentary researcher described by Griem, whose adventures remain ever metaphorical, Zora’s actual physical adventures come with the anthropological practice of participant observation� Moreover, as Langston Hughes recounts in The Big Sea, Hurston was known for her brave and daring scholarly spirit� He remembers that “[a]lmost nobody else could stop the average Harlemite on Lenox Avenue and measure his head with a strange-looking, anthropological device and not get bawled out for the attempt, except Zora, who used to stop anyone whose head looked interesting, and measure it” (Hughes 239)� Correspondingly, her autobiography comprises a number of anecdotes in which Zora the researcher-adventurer actually gambles with her own life for the sake of anthropological insight� Perhaps the most venturesome situation occurs in an episode in ‘the field’ - i. e. the US South - where Zora is collecting African American folk songs: “This is the primeval flavor of the place, and as I said before, out of this primitive approach to things, I all but lost my life� It was in a saw-mill jook in Polk County that I almost got cut to death” (Hurston 152)� She subsequently recounts how a local woman called Lucy tries to attack her because she disapproves of Hurston’s spending time with her ex-partner - “a valuable source of material to [Hurston]” (ibid�)� When Zora moreover befriends Lucy’s town nemesis Big Sweet, the jealousy turns into a proper bar fight, and Big Sweet urges Zora to escape. Zora “really ran, too� [She] ran out of the place, ran to [her] room, threw [her] things in the car and left the place” (156)� Thus, even though the path to knowledge is routinely depicted as a series of tests to pass and obstacles to overcome, eventually leading to the holy grail of knowledge, the narrative formula of the research adventure turns from metaphor to actuality when Hurston runs for her life as “Lucy strode in, knife in hand” (155)� With the help of wits, aides, and luck, Zora vanquishes her adversary and escapes, only to set out for new frontiers: “When I left Louisiana, I went to South Florida again, and from what I heard around Miami, I decided to go to the Bahamas” (157)� Hurston employs the trope of ‘research as adventure’ but outperforms sedentary, metaphorical researchers by getting into actual physical danger� The Adventure of a Narrated Life Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, we have seen, masterfully evokes topoi familiar from mythological adventure stories� We have also seen that, while her account draws on the tradition of the slave narrative and the African 372 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 American autobiography, it also rejects many of its conventional themes in favor of elements familiar from classic stories of white, male adventure� In so doing, Hurston frequently shows herself as challenging and outperforming typical white, male bastions of adventure such as exploration and research� With this, I argued, Hurston claims agency and establishes herself as anything but an oppressed and displaced Black woman struggling for a voice� The term ‘adventure’ generally has a dual nature: as event or experience on the one hand and as a narrated plot (element) on the other� It is my contention that autobiography is precisely the point where these two meanings overlap as autobiographies such as Hurston’s incorporate adventurous episodes and topoi to fictionalize their lived experience. It is thus no coincidence that life writing and adventure writing are historically interlaced� In their standard work on autobiography, Smith and Watson note that “some wellknown patterns for presenting processes of self-knowing are linked to other genres of literature”, notably the “quest or adventure narrative, [in which] a hero / heroine alienated from family or home or birthright sets forth on a mission to achieve elsewhere an integration of self that is impossible within the constraints […] imposed in a repressive world and to return triumphant” (70)� Smith also points to adventure tales as early instances of life writing: Adventurers, those sailors and soldiers who set out from European ports to traverse the globe, understood themselves as dauntless men unbound by insular tradition, men unwilling to be contained by the world as it was contemporaneously mapped, men willing to defy the superstitions and fixed itineraries of earlier travelers. […] These heroes mapped seas, traced coastal lands, and recorded the daily rhythms of their journeys� Through both technologies of knowledge production known to them - mapping and writing - they gathered the newly known world, transported that world back to Europe, and then reassembled it� (2-3) Isn’t it precisely this combination of “mapping and writing” - grounded in the topoi of adventure writing - that Hurston’s Dust Tracks performs? Half writing (her life) and half mapping (“the field”), her autobiography stages the very balancing act of an explorer, ultimately transporting and assembling a story of a place, time, and heroine hitherto unknown� By thus conceiving of herself as an adventurer in her own right, Hurston naturally presents her life as an adventure� In an important differentiation from Campbell, whose adventures remain ever textual, and in contrast to a critical tradition which casts romance - to which adventure writing is commonly assigned - and reality as opposites (Duncan 2), Hurston claims that adventures are real and that they happen in real life, all the time� And even if they do not actually happen, Zora tells us, a good writer is ready to find a way: The Black Heroine’s Journey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road 373 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 Since Papa would not buy me a saddle horse, I made me one up� No one around me knew how often I rode my prancing horse, nor the things I saw in far places� Jake, my puppy, always went along and we made great admiration together over the things we saw and ate� We both agreed that it was nice to be always eating things� (Hurston 29) By thus appropriating the cultural narrative of adventure characterizing the world’s great myths, Hurston proves that, rather than remaining a privilege limited to mythological characters, a heroine’s journey can be embarked upon by anyone, even and especially by a young, poor Black girl� She shows that a Black female author and scientist can experience, narrate, and, if need be, make up adventures, and as she does so, she also counters established notions of knowledge production� Unlike Campbell and the self-glorifying exploration adventures by brave heroes who, full of hubris and self-aggrandizement “understood themselves as dauntless men unbound by insular tradition, men unwilling to be contained by the world as it was contemporaneously mapped”, Hurston recounts her adventures with a casual distance from her own story, using humor and an ironic, often self-mocking tone, always challenging the authority of her own or anyone’s story� Hurston thus refuses to acknowledge the conservative adventure story’s masculine tradition, in which women are either nondescript maidens or severely punished for their valor (Bruzelius 36)� In this way, by writing her autobiography instead of a novel with a female hero, by making up adventures where possibly there were none and furthermore positing them as her autobiographical truth, she certifies a black woman’s capacity for two simultaneous acts of world-making: plot-making and story-telling� Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M� “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics�” Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist� Austin, TX : U of Texas P, 1981, pp� 84-258� Bruzelius, Margaret� Romancing the Novel: Adventures from Scott to Sebald� Lewisburg: Bucknell UP , 2007� Campbell, Joseph� The Hero with a Thousand Faces, commemorative edition� Princeton: Princeton UP , 2004� Cesareo, Mario� “When the Subaltern Travels: Slave Narrative and Testimonial Erasure in the Contact Zone�” Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse, edited by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romreo-Cesareo� London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, pp� 99-134� 374 M arTina K übler 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0016 de Man, Paul� “Autobiography as De-facement�” Comparative Literature, vol� 94, no� 5, 1979, pp� 919-930� Depkat, Volker� “Facts and Fiction�” Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction, edited by Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf� Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019, pp� 280-286� Duncan, Ian� Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel� Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 1992� Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth� “Myth and History: Discourse of Origins in Zora Neale Hurston and Maya Angelou�” Black American Literature Forum, vol� 24, no� 2, 1990, pp� 221-235� Ganser, Alexandra� Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970-2000� Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009� Gödde, Susanne� “Abenteuer avant la lettre� Kontingenz und Providenz in Epos und Roman der griechischen Antike�” Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, edited by Martin von Koppenfels and Manuel Mühlbacher� München: Fink, 2019, pp� 35-60� Griem, Julika� “Wissenschaft als Abenteuer? 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