Eatonville

Many people are familiar with the work of writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, and the historic significance of the town of Eatonville, Florida, but that was not true 30 years ago.

In 1987, the town of Eatonville celebrated its centennial as the oldest incorporated African American municipality in the United States. That same year, community organizer N.Y. Nathiri attended a public hearing about the proposed widening of Kennedy Boulevard into a five lane road. Listening to the discussion, Nathiri realized that the project would destroy her historic hometown.

“There are three ways that you destroy a community,” says Nathiri. “You either remove a school, you remove houses of worship, or you insert a highway. The hearings were pro forma. The staff had already determined what the recommendation would be to the county. We didn’t realize that, of course. The commission hearing was very cynically placed in terms of time. The hearing was the Monday before Thanksgiving, the beginning of the holiday season, when no one is going to pay attention.”

The Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community (P.E.C.), was organized to fight the destructive road project and save the historic community made famous in the books of Zora Neale Hurston, including her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” her anthropological work “Mules and Men,” and her autobiography “Dust Tracks on a Road.” The group formed a coalition with their predominately white neighbors in Maitland.

“I became a reluctant spokesperson,” says Nathiri. “I remember the late Mr. Frank Otey and other people saying ‘N.Y., P.E.C. cannot just say you don’t want the road. That’s not going to work. You’re going to have to talk about alternatives, and your alternatives can’t be emotional.’ So, immediately that meant that we were engaging with planners, with engineers, looking at the technical case for the road and why it was flawed. That was one part. The other part was [explaining] what it is that makes historic Eatonville special. If you can imagine, in 1987, the decision makers, the opinion shapers, in other words white Orange County, had not heard of Zora Neale Hurston.”

As part of a public awareness campaign, the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, under the direction of N.Y. Nathiri, organized the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities. The event included academic panel discussions about Hurston and her Harlem Renaissance contemporaries, art exhibitions, theatrical presentations, musical performances, and an outdoor festival with vendors and food. Although Hurston was not very well known in Central Florida, people around the world were familiar with her work, and came to celebrate it.

“When we organized the first festival in 1990, we had ten thousand people coming to this little community,” says Nathiri. “Those are not exaggerated figures; we literally were able to count. We had all of the names that you would want to have, the late [actress] Miss Ruby Dee, Dr. Robert Hemenway [Hurston’s] literary biographer, Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize winning author of ‘The Color Purple.’ The big thing was that ‘The Color Purple’ had become a movie, so everyone knew about it. We had also done a call for academic papers, and we had fifty-five scholars to respond.”

P.E.C. continues to present the annual ZORA! Festival during the last week of January. The organization benefits the community year-round by operating the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Arts, the Excellence Without Excuse Computer Arts Lab, and a community garden.

It took ten years for the organization to get Eatonville designated as a National Historic District.

While Eatonville has historic significance as America’s oldest incorporated African American town, and the home of Zora Neale Hurston, the town does not have many historic structures. Joe Clark’s store from “Their Eyes Were Watching God” does not exist, and neither does the home that Hurston grew up in. This lack of historic buildings caused difficulty for Nathiri and P.E.C. at the state and national levels.

“Even though Eatonville may not have had built environment, buildings, there was a case to be made in terms of the criteria to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.”

Nathiri’s persistence was rewarded, as the historic significance of Eatonville is widely known today.

The 28^th annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities was held January 21-29.

The event was presented by the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, and included a series of presentations called “Communities Conference: Civic Conversations Concerning 21^st Century American Life in Communities of Color” in venues at Rollins College and Eatonville.

Elizabeth Van Dyke performed in “Zora Neale Hurston: A Theatrical Biography” at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, and the ZORA! Golf Tournament was held at Metro West Golf Course. There was a tour of yards and gardens in Historic Eatonville.

The three day Outdoor Festival portion of the event featured vendors selling original arts and crafts, food vendors with fried fish and other festival food, and musical performances throughout each day including headliners The Whispers, and Jonathan Butler & Friends.

Eatonville is the oldest incorporated African American municipality in the United States. Growing up in the all black town had a profound effect on Zora Neale Hurston’s attitudes about race that can be seen in her work.

“We say that Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville community are two sides of the same hand,” says N.Y. Nathiri, executive director of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community. “For Zora Neale Hurston, Eatonville represents the quintessential cultural impact that people of African ancestry, particularly rural southern people in this country, contribute to the culture of the United States.”

In the 1930s and ‘40s, writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston was a celebrated figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston is best remembered for her 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” the story of Eatonville resident Janie Crawford and her attempts at self-realization.

“’Their Eyes Were Watching God’ is history, it’s fiction, it’s pathos, it’s tragedy, all rolled up together in one incredible literary gem,” says Florence Turcotte, literary manuscripts archivist at the University of Florida’s P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History. “Making history come alive is sort of what I like to do, and that’s what excites me about Zora, is that she fictionalized real life and said a lot about the human condition, and a lot about life in Florida during her stay here.”

Hurston’s other novels include “Jonah’s Gourd Vine,” the story of an unfaithful man with an understanding wife; “Moses: Man of the Mountain,” a retelling of the biblical story of Moses; and “Seraph on the Suwanee,” Hurston’s only book that features white people as main characters. Hurston also wrote dozens of short stories, essays, and dramatic works.

Hurston’s literary career began even before she graduated from Barnard College in 1927. In 1925, her short essay “Spunk” was included in a respected anthology called “The New Negro.” While attending college in New York, Hurston worked with Harlem Renaissance contemporaries including Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman on the literary magazine “Fire!”

After earning her Bachelor of Arts degree in anthropology, Hurston continued her graduate studies at Columbia University. As an anthropologist who studied under the renowned Franz Boas, Hurston published two collections of folklore. “Tell My Horse” looks at life in Haiti and Jamaica, including the practice of Voodoo. She wrote the book “Mules and Men” while living in Brevard County, in Eau Gallie.

“The book ‘Mules and Men’ was published in 1935, and was essentially a non-fiction account of Hurston’s adventures and experiences as a folklorist and anthropologist, in the late 1920s and early 1930s,” says Virginia Lynn Moylan, author of the book “Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade.” “The first section is devoted to her experiences in Eatonville collecting folklore, and includes 70 of her glorious folktales, including ‘Why Women Always Take Advantage of Men.’ The second section covers the period that she did research in New Orleans, into Hoodoo religion and practices. Today, it is still considered the preeminent collection of African American folklore.”

By the time Hurston died in 1960, she was broke, forgotten, and her books were out of print. Today, she is recognized as an important writer whose work is taught in classrooms around the world.

“Work that is truly of merit, lives,” says N.Y. Nathiri. “Today, Zora Neale Hurston’s work, her literature, her genius, is acknowledged and celebrated throughout the literary world.”