Three of Hurston's seven books are, in part, autobiographical. Jonah's Gourd Vine is a thinly fictionalized version of her parents' courtship and marriage. Using their real names Lucy Potts and John (Pearson, which is not her father's real last name, but has the same number of letters as Hurston), she recreates the womanizing preacher-father, making clear, though, that the person he loved was always and only Lucy. Lucy dies early in life and in fiction, and John follows thirteen years later in life and sooner in fiction when he drives his car onto the tracks at the same time a train comes along. Hurston uses the actual town of Notasulga, Alabama, the meeting place of her parents and her own birthplace, as the place where John Pearson and Lucy Potts meet. The fictional and the real family both move to Eatonville, Florida, where in novel and in life, John becomes the pastor of Zion Hope Baptist in Sanford and the mayor of Eatonville.

The novel is the story of John Pearson, but his wife's unflagging love and support—right up until the moment she dies—parallels Hurston's feelings about the role her mother played for her father. Lucy's death scene in the novel is similar to the story Hurston recounts in her autobiography—much ado about the physical arrangements of the room in which she lay. In the novel, Lucy entrusts her daughter Isie, the author's alter ego, with a deathbed duty: “When Ahm dyin' don't you let 'em take de pillow from under mah head, and be covering up de clock and de lookin' glass and all sich ez dat. Ah don't won't it done, heah? Ahm tellin' you in preference tuh de rest 'cause Ah know you'll see tuh it.”¹ Overpowered by her neighbors, sister, and father, Isie is not able to honor her mother's trust. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Hurston tells the same story, with the regret of her failure: “What years of agony that promise gave me!”²

In life and in Jonah's Gourd Vine, John Hurston and John Pearson marry a woman that Zora (Isie) does not like—a woman too young and a marriage too soon, but Isie's feelings are not the point of the novel. Hurston makes the artistic decision to keep John and his feelings of guilt as the focus of the novel.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Crawford is a woman looking for love. She has two marriages before she finds Tea Cake, the bee for her “blossom—a pear tree blossom in the spring.”³ Hurston has two marriages, both of them short-lived, but decidedly connections made out of love. However, Tea Cake for Janie and Hurston's perfect man are a match. After work interrupts even those moments when they were “soaked in ecstasy,” Hurston claims in her autobiography that she “pitched in to work hard on [her] research to smother [her] feelings. But the thing would not down. The plot was far from the circumstances, but [she] tried to embalm all the tenderness of [her] passion for him in Their Eyes Were Watching God.”⁴

Hurston creates Joe Starks as a reflection of Joe Clarke, an early settler in Eatonville, the owner of the town store, and mayor before her father. Descriptions of the fictional Joe, his stories, and his brusque way of speaking to Janie are based in Hurston's memories of the real-life adult Joe Clarke she would have known as a child. Joe Starks's description of Eatonville to Janie, and Hurston's narrative—the story of the land acquisition, the people of the town, the talk on the front porch—are all based on the layout of the early twentieth-century Eatonville proper, the people who were her neighbors, and the stories she heard often from her favorite perch on the top of the gate post. The hurricane that descends on the muck is based on the historical 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, but Hurston's memory is fed by a five-day hurricane in 1929 that she lived through in Nassau: “It was horrible in its intensity and duration. I saw dead people washing around on the streets when it was over. You could smell the stench from dead animals as well.”⁵ Growing up in Florida, though, Hurston would have been no stranger to hurricanes—to the sound of the wind, the heavy feel of the air, and from the inside vantage point of a window, to the sight of the deluge of heavy rain pelting every visible object.

Her autobiography—as is true with all autobiographies—both confirms and calls into question the stories of her life. Throughout the book, she fabricates her age, subtracting four years, claims Eatonville as her birthplace, and drops into some repetition of the stories of her Florida folktale collecting days. In places, a reader must return to the novel to get what has to be some truths that are omitted from the autobiography. For example, when Lucy Potts is preparing to die in real life, Hurston records in Dust Tracks that she never expected her mother's death to be so soon. In Jonah's Gourd Vine, though, she is specific in the instructions Lucy leaves with Isie: “'Member tuh git all de education you kin. Dat's de onliest way you kin keep out from under people's feet. You always strain tuh be de bell cow, never be de tail uh nothin'. Do de best you kin, honey. … Don't you love nobody better'n you do yo'self.”⁶ While not recorded elsewhere, the instructions are applicable to the way that Hurston lived her own life. After her mother's death, Hurston spent some time in Jacksonville. First in school and later living and visiting with her brother, these parts of Jacksonville—the city where Janie and Tea Cake marry—are drawn accurately in Their Eyes Were Watching God. In short, reading Dust Tracks in conjunction with the first two novels opens all three texts to expansion.

In Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State, compiled and written by the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Florida, as part of the American Guide Series, much of the 1939 volume is unsigned by its authors, but the description of Eatonville is assigned to Hurston's pen. What she adds to this guide book is helpful in seeing more clearly the lakes where Janie and Tea Cake go fishing:

But all of Eatonville is not on the hard road that becomes Apopka Avenue as it passes through town. There are back streets on both sides of the road. The two back streets on the right side are full of little houses squatting under hovering oaks. These houses are old and were made of the town's first dreams. There is loved Lake Sabelia, with its small colony of very modern houses, lived in by successful villagers. Away in the woody rises beyond Sabelia is Eatonville's Dogtown that looks as if it belonged on the African veldt.Off the road on the left is the brown-with-white-trim modern public school, with its well kept yards and playgrounds, which Howard Miller always looks after, though he can scarcely read and write. They call this part of town Mars Hill, as against Bones Valley to the right of the road. They call the tree-shaded land that runs past the schoolhouse West street, and it goes past several small groves until it passes Jim Steele's fine orange grove and dips itself in Lake Belle, which is the home of Eatonville's most celebrated resident, the world's largest alligator.⁷

Throughout the Florida guide, many of Hurston's entries are signed and several references are made to Their Eyes Were Watching God. For the small town of Pahokee, one of the shipping points for winter vegetables on the muck, Hurston, obviously writing in third person, makes reference to the description in her novel. While not specifically signed by Hurston, the entry is clearly hers.⁸

Hurston's other two novels, Moses, Man of the Mountain and Seraph on the Suwanee, are inspired by her travels in her folktale-collecting days. When she was writing for the Federal Writers' Project, she also used her time to write Moses. She was fresh from her days spent in Haiti, where the idea came to her to cast the biblical Moses through a Negro perspective, exploring the Damballah figure as the chief voodoo god. Hurston herself was an initiate into hoodoo while traveling in Louisiana in the earlier part of the 1930s. She would have known well the biblical story of Moses by listening to her father's sermons; thinking about the Moses story again from the viewpoint of her voodoo research in Haiti had to be appealing to her. She assigns to Moses his connection to the mountain: “And there was the mountain to see and to feel. No, he did not desire to go away from here. His cells had the memory of this locality. It was easy for Moses to conceive that the dust that he was made from came off of that mountain there. This was the place that had called him in his unfinished dreams since childhood.”⁹ Hurston might have said the same thing about her beloved Florida; there were places in the state that felt to her like peace itself—Eau Gallie was one and clearly Eatonville was another. Hurston chose, after all, not to stay in the North; her cells had the memory of Florida.

Notes

1. Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990), p. 130.

2. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995), ed. Cheryl A. Wall, p. 616.

3. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Perennial Classics, 1998), p. 106.

4. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, pp. 749, 750.

5. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, p. 702.

6. Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine, p. 130.

7. Federal Writers' Project, Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 362.

8. Florida, pp. 475-6.

9. Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991), p. 91.