Let’s just get this out of the way, I’ve never been a fan of Florida. Even though I lived in the Cocoa-Rockledge area as a child, going to elementary school; teenager, graduating from Merritt Island High School and as an adult, working at a local radio station and at Florida Today newspaper, it’s felt like a meantime place until I could get to wherever it was that I wanted to go. Even with family and friends still living in the state, I have felt reluctant to visit and when I did, I got out as soon as I could get in. But this trip has been different. And I don’t mean because of the spread of the Coronavirus which moved Florida to second place in the country for people testing positive. 

Coming back this time has been about working out with my childhood friend Jeanette Gray-White an Exercise and Wellness Coach, helping me to get stronger, leaner and healthier for what I pray will continue to be many more years of travel. I’m doing this while  checking  out a few interesting places within a couple of hours drive from the Cocoa-Rockledge area in central Florida other places other than Disney or Miami while staying with my brother, David and his wife, my sister-in-law Justine. Here’s my first of a three part Florida series on Zora Neale Hurston and her ties to Eatonville and Fort Pierce; then onto my Tampa and Ybor City with some past familial ties and St. Augustine, the longest continually inhabited European-founded city in the United States, commonly called the “Nation’s Oldest City.”

Let ‘s begins with what attracted me to Eatonville and Fort Pierce in Florida…none other than the novelist, folklorist and anthropologist herself, Zora Neale Hurston. I came to her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” by way of Alice Walker author of “The Color Purple.” Walker came to Florida to place a marker on Hurston’s unmarked grave in Fort Pierce. It was in my late 20’s after reading “The Color Purple,” that I became interested in other black women writers like Hurston, Gloria Naylor, Lorraine Hansberry and the indomitable Maya Angelou. 

Let’s begin!

Eatonville – the first self-governing all-black municipality in the United States and Zora Neale Hurston

Eatonville, on the northern edge of Orlando, is a small town and if you’re not aware, you can easily drive through it in a matter of a few minutes. The town was established in 1887 by and for African Americans, after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery,  to govern themselves.

Between 1880 and 1930, hundreds of such communities were established throughout the U.S., but few remain. Eatonville holds the distinction of being the first self-governing all-black municipalities in the United States. It was founded by 27 men on land adjacent to Maitland sold by a white former Union Army captain, Josiah Eaton, with the intention that it become a city of black self-government. The current predominantly black population of the 1.16 square mile town is about 2,300.

“The desire of African Americans to control their own destiny, in view of the fact that they remained unable to claim the rights of full American citizenship, remained unflagging, and the Florida frontier became the stage for at least one instance of success in the founding of the Town of Eatonville.

“In the late 1870s, newly-freed slaves began to drift into Central Florida. They came from as far west as Mississippi and as far north as South Carolina, with Georgia and Alabama in between. Many of these freedmen settled around St. John’s Hole (LakeLily) in the heart of what was then called Fort Maitland, a community of winter homes established mainly by wealthy northerners on the northern shore of Lake Maitland.

“The freedmen and their families came in search of work and soon began to toil at clearing land, planting crops and citrus groves, and helping to build houses, hotels, and the railroad, which had been completed between Jacksonville and Fort Maitland in1880.

“Eventually they built more permanent homes on land west of the town and established themselves as community leaders, landowners, and businessmen.

“They were instrumental, together with white northerners who had come south seeking economic opportunities, in bringing about the incorporation of the town of Lake Maitland in 1884.

“Despite the apparently cordial relations between the white and black inhabitants of Lake Maitland, there was great interest among the black settlers informing their own town. The prospects of establishing a black township in the vicinity of Lake Maitland did not at first appear promising. During the years between 1875 and 1877, an effort was made by African Americans Alien Ricket and Joseph E. Clarke to purchase land in Central Florida for the purpose of establishing a colony for colored people, but the white land owners were unable or unwilling to sell them any tract large enough for that purpose. In 1882, two white men, Josiah Eaton and Lewis Lawrence, who were among the founders of Lake Maitland, offered to sell blacks a large tract of land one mile west of Maitland.

“The land offered was part of a 160 acre tract bought by Eaton on November 15, 1875 from William Stubblefield. From his holdings, Eaton sold 22 acres to Lewis Lawrence, a philanthropist from Utica, New York, on May 24, 1881. Lawrence had the north ten acres platted and donated the property to the trustees of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, formerly known as the Lawrence Church of Maitland. The south 12 acres were deeded to Joseph E. Clarke on November 18, 1885. The property held by Clarke and the Lawrence Church of Maitland is thought to be the first property procured for the purpose of establishing a new black township in Florida. Eventually, more acreage from the tract of land owned by Joseph Eaton was acquired, so that at the time of incorporation the original city limits finally had grown to 112 acres.

“The additional land was bought by Joseph Clarke, who would be one of the first mayors of Eatonville. If it is true that every town should have a founding father, then Eatonville’s should certainly by Joseph E. Clarke. Clarke (born 1859) and Allen Ricket, another signer of the Eatonville charter, had tried unsuccessfully immediately after the Civil War to establish a settlement for freedmen in other parts of Florida.

“The difficulty in obtaining land for Negroes was made dramatically clear in a notice that appeared on the front page of the January 22, 1889 edition of the city’s weekly newspaper The Eatonville Speaker:
‘Colored people o f the United States: Solve the great race problem by securing a home in Eatonville, Florida, a Negro city governed by Negroes,’” from the National Register of Historic Places of the U.S. Department of Interior from 1998.

Although Zora was born in Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891, her parents John and Lucy Potts Hurston moved their family to Eatonville in 1892 where she grew up where she wrote many stories about the African American experience including her most famous novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” about the town. And the town in turn have embraced her literary legacy with an annual festival along with the town museum and library named in her honor.

“Hurston was the next to the youngest of eight children and the daughter of a Baptist minister and Mayor of Eatonville. Her family lived close to the center of town, where she encountered a wide cross section of E atonville’scitizens. Hurston’s mother died when she was nine, and she left home at age fourteen to join a traveling dramatic troupe.

“After leaving the troupe, Hurston studied at Howard University in Washington, D.C., then went onto Columbia University and Barnard College. She received an A.B. from Barnard in 1928—after working closely with the eminent anthropologist Franz Boas. From 1927 to 1932 Hurston conducted field research in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and the Bahamas. Her first field work was undertaken in Eatonville and the surrounding area, since she knew the culture and had maintained strong family connections.

“Her best known folklore collection, Mules and Men (1935), included black music, games, forallore, and religious practices largely based on her field research in thearea. She later collected folklore in Jamaica, Haiti, Bermuda,and Honduras. Tell My Horse (1938) was a similar collection illustrating the folklore of Jamaica and Haiti.

“Hurston became well-known among the authors and intellectuals of New York’s “Harlem Renaissance”duringthemid-1920and1930s. Herethnographicworkwasconductedatatimewhen black culture was not a popular field of study, so it had an impact on many black writers of the time. However, she became famous primarily for her novels based on characters in social contexts drawn from her field work and childhood experiences in Eatonville, Florida.

“She published four novels: Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses. Man of the Mountain (1939), and Seraph on the Sewanee(1948). “Her prolific literary out put also included short stories, plays, journal articles, and an autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).

Hurston’s novels were noteworthy for her portrayal of a strong black culture in the South. Hurston herself was also known for her flamboyant character, her faith in individual initiative, her love of the South, and her ability to live unimpeded by racism,” from the National Register of Historic Places of the U.S. Department of Interior from 1998.

The City of Fort Pierce, where Hurston died and is buried, created a “Zora Neale Hurston Dust Tracks Heritage Trail,” of places during the final years of her life. Although Fort Pierce is a bigger, more populated city than the town of Eatonville, Zora mainly lived and worked in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Fort Pierce where she was a columnist for the Fort Pierce Chronicle, a black owned newspaper, and a substitute teacher before suffering a stroke and dying at the St. Lucie County Welfare Home. Hurston, who died penniless and alone, in 1960 was initially buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce until novelist Alice Walker purchased

Like Eatonville, the Lincoln Park neighborhood in Fort Pierce has several landmarks honoring Zora, such as the library named after her and the home she lived in while working as a journalist for the Fort Pierce Chronicle.

During its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s, Avenue D was the main corridor in the Village of Lincoln Park – it was the bustling center for African American-owned shops, restaurants, businesses and a theater.

It is also home to many of the world-renown Florida Highwaymen artists, a group of 26 African-American self-taught, self-mentoring landscape artists inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2004. The neighborhood is also home to the historic Lincoln Theater, one of only four African-American owned theaters in the country, and Lincoln Park Academy, an academic magnet school, one of the nation’s top performing schools.

The Zora Neale Hurston Dust Tracks Heritage Trail maps throughout the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Fort Pierce designates eight or so places clustered on a map of the neighborhood that Hurston called home during the last years of her life.

Follow me through a portion of Zora Neale Hurston’s life in Florida from her beginnings in Eatonville to her death in Fort Pierce.

Fort Pierce

Fort Pierce Mosaic Artist Anita Prentice and Her Zora Mosaics; And More

When I first saw the mosaic bench at the Zora Neale Hurston branch library in Fort Pierce, Florida, of Zora, I did not know who the artist was but I was so impressed by her work that I had to find her. And, low and behold, I did. 

She’s Anita Prentice whose beautiful mosaic works can be found throughout the Fort Pierce  area. Although it was her painted mosaic portraits of Zora that drew me to her, she has created a tribute to the Highway men at the Fort Pierre Intermodal Train Station, grave markers for several Highwaymen artists and so much more. 

Anita, who has spent the last 30 or so years in Fort Pierce, began her mosaic career some 25 years ago when she decided to adorn an old taxidermist fish, she found in a dumpster, into a beautiful work of art. 

While Anita can create a variety of art mediums, she is best known for her painted mosaics using colorful glass pieces like a pallet to carefully ‘paint’ her mosaic art pieces. Here’s Anita Prentice with Zora and more. 

 

The City of Fort Pierce, where Hurston is buried, put together a timeline of her life including her education, published writings and anthropological work. You can check it out at: https://www.cityoffortpierce.com/412/Timeline-of-Zora-Neale-Hurston. And, the Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive by the University of Central Florida also provides a chronology at: https://chdr.cah.ucf.edu/hurstonarchive/?p=chronology.