Dust Tracks On The Road By Zora Neale Hurston

851 Words4 Pages

In the late 1890's, growing up in America's first incorporated Black community meant growing up sheltered from the harsh reality of the rest of America. For Zora Neale Hurston, it also meant growing up with a fiery personality as a Black woman. At that time in America, African Americans faced horrifying racial injustice including the Jim Crow Laws, violence, and poverty, with Black woman being even more oppressed. The Black female experience growing up in Eatonville, Florida is illustrated in Zora Neale Hurston's "Dust Tracks on the Road" by employing the use of diction, hyperbole, and details. Hurston utilizes powerful diction in order to describe her home life growing up. Her attitude towards her life growing up is featured in …show more content…

Hurston had grown up sheltered from the rest of the world. Her parents feared that she was unprepared for the harsh reality of the world. She writes about this in the last paragraph when she stated that her "Papa always flew hot when Mama said that. I do not know whether he feared for my future, with the tendency I had to stand and give battle... He predicted dire things for me. The white folks were not going to stand for it." The hyperbole in this quote, "flew hot", is used to translate her father's fearful concern about her future. The hyperbole "with the tendency to stand and give battle" is used to show that Hurston was fiery, which was not accepted of a Black woman outside of Eatonville. The hyperboles used illuminates how far removed from the world Hurston was because of her happy childhood. Hurston also stated that "Posses with ropes and guns were going to drag me out sooner or later on account of that stiff neck I toted. I was going to tote a hungry belly by reason of my forward ways," meaning that she believed that she was not going to succeed in life because of her red-hot personality. The hyperbole is used to emphasize how much of an impact her childhood was going to leave on her adult life, which was going to be, what her father thought, ill-fated. With this said, her childhood actually set her up for success as a freewheeling