If you sit on the bench outside Natural Beautiii Haircare in Eatonville, Florida, and stare across East Kennedy Boulevard, you'll see the grassy lot where Zora Neale Hurston's house once stood. Hurston was a novelist and a folklorist, a champion of the culture that African Americans created for themselves, a Taft Republican of a fiercely decentralist and anti-imperialist bent, and a proud daughter of Eatonville, this barely-a-square-mile patch of Orange County that in 1887 became one of the first all-black municipalities to be incorporated in the United States.
Long before the hair salon was here, the place where you're sitting was the site of Joe Clark's store. That shop "was the heart and spring of the town," Hurston wrote in her memoir, Dust Tracks on a Road. "Men sat around the store on boxes and benches and passed this world and the next one through their mouths," spreading gossip and telling tall tales and making "sly references to the physical condition of women." Clark himself served as mayor for over a decade; in Eatonville's early days, his shop did double duty as town hall. Buildings and families have come and gone since then, but the community has kept itself alive.
