Forgotten Florida, Through a Writer’s Eyes
By Adam H. Graham
for the NY Times
published in the weekend edition for April 4, 2010
Think of Florida and some well-worn images are likely to spring to mind: gaudy seaside hotels, palm-studded avenues, beaches dotted with towels and umbrellas.
Then there’s Central Florida, a scrubby swath of live oak hammocks and sandy pine woods that defy all the tourist clichés. This is Old Florida, largely ignored by the stream of tourists on I-4, en route to Disney World or the coast. And this is where one of the country’s first all-black communities, Eatonville, was incorporated, 123 years ago.
The town, once neatly divided by a dirt road, was the childhood home of Zora Neale Hurston, the anthropologist, writer and Harlem Renaissance troubadour best known for her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” a 1937 roman à clef about a black woman’s search for love in a decidedly untouristy Florida. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Hurston’s death, and Eatonville and other towns that Hurston lived in are taking note of the author’s vibrant life.
Much has been written about Hurston’s novels, her ethnographic fieldwork and her contrarian style of politics that railed against conventional race relations. But few have written about her as a traveler. She journeyed extensively in the Caribbean and in the southern United States, and maintained a scrappy hobo spirit, laughing at the Jim Crow laws that were dominant in her day.
In her autobiography “Dust Tracks on a Road” (1942) Hurston describes the elation of jumping midnight trains, riding paddleboats and roving around as a wardrobe girl for a roaming Gilbert & Sullivan theater troupe. She loved traveling, and nowhere more so than in Florida. Indeed, she created a guide for the state, part of a series produced by the Federal Writer’s Project between 1935 and 1943.
Though Central Florida has changed radically over the last century, the places Hurston called home during her childhood (before 1914) and later, from 1932 to 1960 — Eatonville, Fort Pierce, Sanford, Daytona Beach and Jacksonville — have retained much of their Old Florida charm. Together these towns and cities reveal an evocative slice of Hurston’s Florida.
Hurston’s accounts of her childhood are by turns ambiguous and exaggerated. She claimed to have been born in Eatonville in 1901, but her birth date has since been determined to be Jan. 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Ala. She was a preacher’s daughter, the fifth of eight children of the Rev. John Hurston, who eventually became mayor of Eatonville, where the family moved in the 1890s, and Lucy Ann Hurston, a former schoolteacher.
The area became the inspiration for Hurston’s fiction and essays, and was also the source of her W.P.A. work (Hurston studied anthropology with Margaret Mead and Franz Boas at Columbia University, and it was her work on an ethnographic project that brought her back to Florida in 1927; in 1932 she returned permanently.)
In “Dust Tracks,” Hurston regales readers with stories of her ruminative youth, too aspirational to believe at times. “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. It grew upon me that I ought to walk out to the horizon and see what the end of the world was like.”
But the writing in her 1939 guidebook, “Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State,” reveals an honesty that captures the spirit of both her and the town: “Right in front of Willie Sewel’s yellow-painted house, the hard road quits being the hard road for a generous mile and becomes the heart of Eatonville.”
When Hurston was 13, her mother died, and Zora was sent to boarding school at Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville. After being expelled (for nonpayment) in 1905 at age 14, she returned to Eatonville via the City of Jacksonville, a famed side-wheeler that chugged along the St. Johns River to Sanford. In “Dust Tracks,” she describes the journey: “The curtain of trees along the river shut out the world ... the smothering foliage that draped riverbanks, the miles of purple hyacinths, all thrilled me anew.”
Many of the towns Hurston sailed past and later wrote about have vanished as Florida’s railroads, and then highways, replaced the St. Johns River as the major thoroughfare in the region. Today, a few river cruises try to re-create Florida’s steamboat era: the M/V Rivership Romance is a retired tug from Chicago, refurbished before beginning a new life as an eco-tour vessel, and USA River Cruises travels between Amelia Island and Sanford.
Eatonville is where travelers interested in Hurston will want to linger. Hurston returned to Eatonville from an economically depressed New York in 1932 to conduct ethnographic fieldwork and with the hope of teaching at area colleges. On April 27, 1932, a few years into the Great Depression, Hurston wrote a letter from New York to her benefactor, the New York socialite Charlotte Osgood Mason, saying: “I am going to Eatonville, Fla., and keep in touch with schools from there. Somehow a great weight seems lifted from me.”
On May 8, 1932, no more than a week back home, she wrote Mrs. Mason, exclaiming: “I am happy here, happier than I have been for years. The air is sweet, yes, literally sweet. I am renewed like the eagle. The clang and clamor of New York drops away like a last year’s dream.”
A WALK down East Kennedy Boulevard, Eatonville’s main thoroughfare, passes by Fades to Fro’s Barbershop and Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, where Hurston’s father, the mayor in 1897, became the minister in 1902. The Zora Neale Hurston museum on Kennedy Boulevard arranges guided tours and has free maps for self-guided walks.
Across the street from the museum is Hurston’s alma mater, the boxy-looking Hungerford School. At the southern end of town on West Avenue is glassy Lake Belle, where “the mocking birds sang all night and alligators trumpeted from their stronghold,” according to a passage in “Dust Tracks.”
There are more than a dozen churches in town, too, including the gigantic Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church and the smaller St. Lawrence African Methodist Church, the town’s first, founded in 1881 and rebuilt in 1974. The modern structure is filled with 1920s-era murals depicting Eatonville residents at worship.
Today, residents often gather at Gordon’s Be-Back Fish House, a modest but clean five-table diner on the corner of East Street and Kennedy Boulevard where the tasty offerings include moist slices of ’tater bread, grits and hush puppies. A fried fish basket is $7.50. On a wall hangs a photograph of President Obama’s inaugural ceremony, next to a sign that reads: “No Wearing Pants Below the Waist in Here.” A former mayor, Abraham Gordon, runs the place.
You’ll hear the clang of the Amtrak train from the shaded bench outside. That train, which stops in neighboring Winter Park, is the same one that the characters Janie and Joe arrived on after their shotgun wedding in Green Cove Springs in “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” In her adult years, Hurston lived in Eatonville on and off for a decade but moved around to places like St. Augustine, Jacksonville, Sanford, Daytona, Eau Gallie and Belle Glade, sometimes venturing farther inland to Cross City and Polk County. She spent her later years in Fort Pierce, which has done more than any other community in the area to honor Hurston’s life.
The small Treasure Coast city has erected eight Dust Track Trail markers. One of them is now placed at her gravesite, which the author Alice Walker unearthed in 1973 when she wrote her now-famous “Looking for Zora” article in Ms. Magazine, and which renewed interest in Hurston’s work. A three-day Zora Fest, April 16 to 18, will include lectures, discussions, performances and guided trolley tours.
Fort Pierce’s business district snakes down Avenue D and resembles a colorful Caribbean town. Brightly painted storefronts like La Chic Beauty Salon, Shorty’s Cold Spot and Soul Fighters for Jesus Ministry, adorned with hand-painted signs, have a jumbled grace about them. At the end of Avenue D sits Granny’s Kitchen, which opened in 1975 and churns out hearty mashed lima beans, fried chicken and chitterlings.
It’s run by Miss Hassie Russ, a former student of Hurston’s at the Lincoln Park Academy, where Hurston taught Language Arts in 1958. On a chilly December day, Miss Russ sat down at my table to refill my unsweetened tea and share a few good Hurston yarns.
When Hurston fell ill around 1959, Miss Russ, then her neighbor, cared for and cooked for her at a sunny shotgun cottage with a garden out back. It was owned by a local doctor, Clem C. Benton, who let Hurston use the house free, and it’s now labeled with Dust Track Heritage Marker 3. Dr. Benton’s daughters have lovingly restored the house and filled it with orange-crate bookshelves, period furniture and books that Hurston read.
Hurston spent her last days in the St. Lucie Welfare Home in Fort Pierce. She died on Jan. 28, 1960, and was buried in the weed-choked Genesee Cemetery (renamed the Garden of Heavenly Rest), now marked by Dust Track Heritage Marker 4 and considerably manicured. Her name was misspelled on her gravestone — it read Zora Neil Hurston — but it’s since been corrected by Alice Walker, and the epitaph reads, “A Genius of the South.”
Miss Russ regaled me with stories of the 1950s, while I tucked into my smothered steak and collard greens. “But what about segregation? All those buses and trains Zora rode? Didn’t she ever ride in the back of the bus?” I asked, still puzzled by the logistics of her intrepid travels with little mention of inequality.
Miss Russ laughed, and said: “Oh, no. Zora marched to her own beat. She talked her way up front.”
IF YOU GO
EATONVILLE
The Zora Neale Hurston museum (227 East Kennedy Boulevard;407-647-3307; zoranealehurstonmuseum.com), 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday; 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free, but donations encouraged. Offers free detailed maps of Hurston’s Eatonville. The exhibit “Zora Neale Hurston: The Legacy of Inspired Reality” features photos and artworks of and inspired by Hurston, through Aug. 27.
Gordon’s Be-Back Fish House, (558 East Kennedy Boulevard; 407-644-6640). Catfish basket, $7.50; sides, including hush puppies, fried okra and grits, $1.50.
Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church (412 East Kennedy Boulevard; 407- 647-0010; www.mdonia.org). Sunday services at 7:45 and 11 a.m. Though the building has gone through many moves and transformations, this is the church where Hurston’s father preached.
SANFORD
Sanford Cemetery (intersection of West 25th Street and Hardy Avenue). Behind the ornate headstones of Sanford Cemetery is an overgrown African-American cemetery, where Hurston’s mother, Lucy, is thought to be buried, though her grave has yet to be discovered.
FORT PIERCE
Garden of Heavenly Rest Cemetery (17th Street and Avenue S). Hurston was buried here, when it was the Genesee Cemetery, in 1960 under a headstone that misspelled her name. Alice Walker discovered Hurston’s grave in the 1970s.
Granny’s Kitchen (901 Avenue D; 772-461-9533). Hassie Russ was a student of Hurston’s at Lincoln Park Academy. Miss Russ now serves up delicious soul food at her cozy restaurant at the head of Fort Pierce’s Avenue D. Smothered steak, with mashed potatoes, cornbread and a side of mashed lima beans, is $7.50.
http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/travel/04culture.html
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