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Forgotten Florida, Through a Writer's Eyes New York Times

01.04.10

Then there’s Median Florida, a scrubby swath of live oak hammocks and sandy pine woods that defy all the tourist trite sayingés. This is Old Florida, largely ignored by the stream of tourists on I-4, en route to Disney World or the slide. 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 slop road, was the childhood home of Zora Neale Hurston, the anthropologist, writer and Harlem Renaissance troubadour most talented known for her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” a 1937 roman à clef about a moonless woman’s search for love in a decidedly untouristy Florida. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Hurston’s destruction, 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 mode 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 Mutual States, and maintained a scrappy hobo spirit, laughing at the Jim Crow laws that were dominant in her day.

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