She had gotten glimpses of those possibilities back in her native Eatonville.
She was born on 7 January in Eatonville, Florida, to John Hurston and Lucy Ann Potts Hurston. She kept the exact year of her birth such a secret that it was only recently that a conclusive date, 1891, was uncovered. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), she claims that one morning, she "just rushed out herself," the umbilical cord being cut by a passerby. She was the fifth of eight children. Her mother was a former country schoolteacher, her father a wayfaring carpenter, Baptist preacher, mulatto from "over the creek" in Alabama. The all-black, incorporated, self-governing town of Eatonville fostered and nurtured the strong, unshakable sense of self that was later to inform Hurston's fiction and govern her life. Lucy Ann Hurston died when Zora was thirteen, and it is this fact more than any other that disrupted Hurston's schooling and her life. She was passed around from relative to relative, rejected by her father and his new wife, and forced to fend for herself. She took a number of odd jobs to make ends meet and attended school only intermittently.
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