community. Located in Florida, this all-black town
was where John Hurston was elected mayor. It was
there that Zora Hurston’s mother died in 1904 and
where the future novelist, the sixth of seven chil-
dren, struggled to find domestic and familial stabil-
ity in the wake of her mother’s death and her
father’s subsequent remarriage. Eatonville emerges
in a number of Hurston’s works, perhaps most
memorably in her 1937 novel THEIREYESWERE
WATCHINGGOD.
Bibliography
Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora
Neale Hurston.New York: Scribner, 2003.
Campbell, Josie. Student Companion to Zora Neale
Hurston.Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biog-
raphy.Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
“Eatonville Anthology, The” Zora Neale
Hurston(1926)
A series of local-color sketches that ZORANEALE
HURSTON, a native of EATONVILLE, Florida, pub-
lished in the September and October 1926 issues of
THEMESSENGER.In the 14 vignettes, Hurston in-
troduces a number of households, most of them
marked by some kind of marital tension. In these
sketches, or what biographer Valerie Boyd refers to
as “the literary equivalent of Hurston’s animated
storytelling sessions at Harlem parties” (Boyd, 140),
Hurston provides intriguing and disturbing glimpses
of everyday life, marital troubles, and community
politics. The majority of protagonists in the pieces
are women who range from long-suffering wives of
adulterous husbands to local vamps to independent
single mothers.
The first story in “The Eatonville Anthology” is
“The Pleading Woman,” a lively set of observations
about a melodramatic and hypocritical woman
named Mrs. Tony Roberts, who “just loves to ask for
things.” Despite the fact that her husband “gives her
all he can rake and scrape, which is considerably
more than most wives get for their housekeeping,”
Mrs. Roberts “goes from door to door begging for
things” (59). The community essentially provides
her with meals for her children, in spite of her less-
than-grateful responses to their charity that soon
suggest a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder
rather than a deliberate domestic strategy. Other
stories, such as “Turpentine Love,” the concise
three-paragraph account of Jim Merchant and the
wife he loves, and the untitled third story about
Becky Moore, an unmarried mother of “eleven chil-
dren of assorted colors and sizes,” provide oblique
commentaries on how individuals and communities
deal with potentially unsettling situations or charac-
teristics. Jim Merchant waits patiently and without
fanfare until his sweetheart is “cured” of her pen-
chant for fits before he marries her. Becky Moore
emerges as the victim of men who simply will not
propose. “She has never stopped any of the fathers
of her children from proposing,” notes the narrator,
whose indictment then turns to the other women of
the town who refuse to interact with her or let their
children play with hers.
Other stories reveal a more troubling aspect of
domestic life. “Tippy,” for instance, is about a dog
that will not die, despite the fact that he has “been
sentenced to death dozens of times, and the sen-
tences executed upon him.” The stoic narrator
calls attention to the dog’s resilience, noting, “[i]n
spite of all the attempts upon his life, Tippy is still
willing to be friendly with anyone who will let
him.” The theme of long-suffering survivors also
extends to the wronged wife in “The Head of the
Nail” who defies everyone’s expectations and beats
the brazen vamp named Daisy Taylor, who is se-
ducing her husband, so badly that Taylor leaves
town immediately. Additional works that explore
problematic community passivity include the unti-
tled ninth and tenth works about devoted female
churchgoers who suffer domestic abuse and live
without ever seeing their church intervene on
their behalf.
The collection is a forerunner of works such
as “SWEAT” (1926) and Hurston’s 1937 novel
THEIREYESWEREWATCHINGGOD,which is set
in Eatonville and includes some of the characters
introduced in the magazine sketches. The collec-
tion, as biographer Valerie Boyd notes, includes
tales that Hurston came to know of while living
in Eatonville and others that were well-known
and part of the larger African-American culture.
In form, the vignettes model the presentation
that RICHARDWRIGHTchooses for his 1940 au-
tobiographical sketches entitled “Ethics of Living
Jim Crow.”“Eatonville Anthology, The” 133