FactEatonville was founded with just 27 families in the 1880s. While Eatonville is a historic model of black empowerment, it is also a community where poverty rates are twice the national average. When Hurston wrote about it in a Florida guidebook, she linked it with self-government and independence, but also "illiteracy, remarriage, and sex," not a portrait that everybody in the town agreed with or appreciated.
The town has seen many changes since its fictional portrayal in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Eventually, forced integration ended the town's isolation. In the 1950s, a group of young white man came and threw oranges and watermelons at people sitting at the side of the road (the sprawl from Orlando put an interstate through the town's western edge). Now, the city is still 90% African American, but not as fenced-off as before. In the 1980s, Orange County officials wanted to put a five-lane highway through town. The town put on a Hurston festival, which portrayed the damage that would be done to the town. The city eventually backed away from its plans. Although changed by the century, Eatonville remains an isolated place. According to the NY Times, Advanced permission is needed for interviews, and certain town artifacts are not permitted to be photographed.To drive through Eatonville, residents say, isn't anything extraordinary. "But if you actually stop and take a moment to look at the history," said an 11-year-old resident, "it's a very nice city." |
FictionTheir Eyes Were Watching God portrays Eatonville, as a "scant dozen shame-faced houses scattered in the sand and palmetto roots," a place so humble and undeveloped that Joe Starks comments, "God, they call this a town? Why, 'taint nothing but a raw place in de woods."
The town is so new and small it has no mayor, no store, no post office, not even a street lamp -- all of which Starks soon sees to providing. A store, he says, gives people a place to come when they buy land, and is a meeting place for a town. The nearest saw mill is seven miles away, in Apopka, and Joe wants to get to building as soon as possible so the place can become a "metropolis uh de state.". Soon, ten new families move to town. When Joe buys the street lamp, he makes a show of it, putting it up in a case for everyone to see, and sends men to cut a cypress to cut its post. For the lamp lighting ceremony, they celebrate with a barbecue, where the townsfolk sing and swap stories. Joe also puts in a town ditch to drain the street, and builds a house for himself and Janie to live in. The rest of the town looks like servants' quarters compared to his "big house," which is two stories with bannisters. Though the novel doesn't say directly that the town is an incorporated black town, we get the sense that it is settled by many who were once slaves. Because of Joe's high airs some people begin to resent him, and see him as the master living in the "big house" and lording it over the rest of them, an allusion to the slave's experience on the plantation. |