Hurston builds upon the rich tradition established by regional storytellers in the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century.

As white male predecessors Mark Twain, Josh Billings, Augustus B. Longstreet, and Artemus Ward do in their humorous sketches, Hurston chooses familiar regional settings as background; however, she does not settle for a superficial plot and stereotypical characters as do the raconteurs who draw their humor with broad strokes. Nor does she aim for social, political, and moral satire. She uses the cultural patterns and dialect of rural areas—western Florida, Eatonville in central Florida, and the Everglades in south Florida—to create a realistic story with believable characters. The regional setting itself adds to the local color as the writer depicts the communities surrounding Eatonville—Orlando, Winter Park, Maitland, Altamonte Springs, Sanford, Apopka—once-small towns that today are merged into a huge, sprawling metropolitan Orlando...