Hurston wrote in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), that she "heard tell" she was born on 7 January 1903 in Eatonville, Florida, the fifth of eight children. However, one brother gave 1891 as the year; another brother, Everette, was convinced by Hurston to set his age back seven years to cover the obvious discrepancies between what he said and what she wrote; and her brother John cited the 1903 date in a 1936 affidavit. Hurston used 1903 most often—but variously gave the year as 1900, 1901, and 1902. Hurston scholars Robert Hemenway and Alice Walker used 1901; but the 1900 census records subsequently proved she was born in 1891. Her parents, Lucy Ann Potts, a country schoolteacher, and John Hurston, a carpenter and Baptist preacher, met and married in Alabama, then moved to Eatonville, Florida, north of Orlando. Her father, a three-term mayor, helped cod- ify the laws of this all-black community, the first to be incorporated in the United States.
Lucy Hurston died in 1904, and this fact more than any other disrupted Hurston's schooling and her life. She was passed around from relative to relative, rejected by her father and his second wife, and forced to fend for herself.
This is a free page. This page contains 199 words. This
biography contains 8,143 words (approx. 27 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Zora Neale Hurston Access Pass.
