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Zora Neale HurstonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Hurston opens her autobiography with an account of the founding of Eatonville, Florida, her hometown, by three white men who bought up the land that had been opened up to white settlers in the aftermath of the Seminole Wars of the 1850s. According to Hurston, the town was an unusual place, one in which white settlers and the African Americans who came for work opportunities in the booming territory interacted with little friction.
When the town of Maitland was incorporated in 1858, both the mayor and sheriff were African Americans and their election seemed not to bother the white inhabitants at all. In the waning years of the 1800s, the African-American inhabitants of Maitland incorporated their own town, becoming, Hurston claims, one of the first such towns in the United States.
In this chapter, Hurston recounts her family history. John Hurston, her father, came from a family of poor Alabama sharecroppers and was rumored to be the son of a white man. Lucy Ann Potts came from a prosperous family that owned its own land. A strikingly handsome man, John Hurston began courting Lucy when he was 20 and she was 14. Despite strong opposition from the Potts family, the pair married and settled down in the plantation cabin where John lived.
By Zora Neale Hurston
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"
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Drenched in Light
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Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick
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How It Feels To Be Colored Me
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Jonah's Gourd Vine
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Moses, Man of the Mountain
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Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life
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Mules and Men
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Seraph on the Suwanee
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Spunk
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Sweat
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Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
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The Eatonville Anthology
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The Gilded Six-Bits
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
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