Eatonville

Eatonville. Home of Zora Neale Hurston. Zora Neale Hurston was born on Jan. 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, when she was still a toddler. Her writings revel no recollection of her Alabama beginnings. For Hurston, Eatonville was always home. Established in 1887, the rural community near Orlando was the nation’s first incorporated Black township. It was, as Hurston described it, “a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools and no jailhouse .”, In Eatonville, Zora was never indoctrinated in inferiority, and she could see Black men, including her father, John Hurston, formulating the laws that governed Eatonville. She could look to the Sunday Schools of the town’s two churches and see Black women, including her mother, Lucy Potts Hurston, directing the Christian curricula. She could look to the porch of the village store and see Black men and women passing worlds through their mouths in the form of colorful, engaging stories., By 1935, Hurston--who’d graduated from Bernard College in 1928--had published several short stories and articles, as well as a novel (Jonah’s Gourd Vine) and a well – received collection of black Southern folklore (Mules and Men). But the late 1930s and early ‘40s marked the real zenith of her career. She published her masterwork , Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937; Tell My Horse, her study of Caribbean Voodoo practices, in 1938; and another masterful novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, in 1939. When her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a road, was published in 1942, Hurston finally received the well-earned acclaim that had long eluded her. That year, she was profiled in Who’s Who in America, Current Biography and Twentieth Century Authors. She went on to publish another novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, in 1948.