"Dust Tracks on a Road," author Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, is not a typical black autobiography. Hurston is a complex woman and author who addresses both black and white audiences, shifting the cadences of her voice to invoke a readership that can hear the textures of many voices and respond to an underlying call to a world where race is a prominent feature of the landscape, but not the major or only landmark. Hurston does not want to be pigeonholed on the subject of the "race problem." Yet race is such a salient feature of Hurston's persona as a black female author in the 1930s that she is obliged to comment on it. Carefully dropping ethnic and racial semantic cues, Hurston universally condemns racial and ethnic braggadocio, and narrows her sympathizers to whoever can drop race pride of any sort from their lexicons. Despite this position, Hurston has pride in her roots, as evidenced in folk tales of the rural South which she relates with a voice that beckons those hungry for both the apocryphal and the authentic. Some of her most reverent language is reserved for her education at Morgan College and Howard University. Certain critics argue that Hurston's autobiography fails to explore the private motives that led to her public success. Yet a strong woman does not require an explicit reference to anything but her own work in order to articulate her sense of self. (MM)