IF YOU SIT on the bench outside Natural Beautiii Haircare in Eatonville, Florida, and stare across East Kennedy Boulevard, you’ll see the grassy lot where Zora Neale Hurston’s house once stood. Hurston was a novelist and a folklorist, a champion of the culture that African Americans created for themselves, a Taft Republican of a fiercely decentralist and antiimperialist bent, and a proud daughter of Eatonville, this barely-a-square-mile patch of Orange County that in 1887 became one of the first all-black municipalities to be incorporated in the United States.
Long before the hair salon was here, the place where you’re sitting was the site of Joe Clark’s store. That shop “was the heart and spring of the town,” Hurston wrote in her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road. “Men sat around the store on boxes and benches and passed this world and the next one through their mouths,” spreading gossip and telling tall tales and making “sly references to the physical condition of women.” Clark himself served as mayor for over a decade; in Eatonville’s early days, his shop did double duty as town hall. Buildings and families have come and gone since then, but the community has kept itself alive.
“I didn’t appreciate how good it was,” says Monica Washington, looking back at her Eatonville childhood in the 1970s and ’80s. Washington now lives in nearby Maitland; she and her husband Tommy have just opened Tommy’s Kitchen, a restaurant about two minutes’ walk from the spot where Joe Clark’s store used to be. (I ordered the jerk chicken wings. They’re great.) When she talks about the old days, Washington paints an idyllic picture of children playing outside together and looking out for each other. She doesn’t think the town has changed that much since she was a girl (“though the kids like to play inside now”). A lot of the people she grew up with still live either in Eatonville or nearby. A lot of their parents and grandparents still have homes here too. It’s a close-knit small town, she says, and it feels “like a warm hug.”
It’s also a living remnant of a vast but largely forgotten movement. From Princeville, North Carolina, to Allensworth, California, black Americans responded to repressive laws and extrajudicial violence by acquiring their own land, building their own institutions, and carving out a space where Jim Crow couldn’t easily reach them. Hurston’s father moved to Eatonville from Alabama when Zora was a toddler, leaving a stratified sharecropper community and putting down roots in a friendlier environment. Zora didn’t realize how unusual their home was until she left for a school in a more conventional southern city. “Jacksonville made me know that I was a little colored girl,” she later wrote. “Things were all about the town to point this out to me.”
‘UNOFFICIAL PLACES BY THEIR VERY NATURE’
EATONVILLE WAS BORN a decade after Reconstruction ended, but the earliest sparks of black self-rule in Florida appeared far earlier, in the days when the peninsula was a haven for people escaping slavery. Across the South, maroons—fugitive slaves and their descendants and allies—settled wherever geographic barriers created sufficient protection; the swamps of Florida were such a place. But because the colony was ruled by the Spanish, and because the Spanish were often locked in conflict with Great Britain, another path to living freely soon emerged as well.
In 1693, Charles II of Spain issued an edict granting legal freedom to slaves who made their way to Florida and pledged their loyalty to his kingdom and to the Catholic Church. Not every governor of the colony was consistent in following this policy, but it carried enough weight to attract freedom seekers from the British territories to the north. In 1738, some of those immigrants formed the first officially sanctioned free black settlement in what is now the continental United
