Freedom

Jesse Walker | From the January 2024 issue

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.

"I didn't appreciate how good it was," says Monica Washington, looking back at her Eatonville childhood in the 1970s and '80s. Washington now lives in nearby Maitland; she and her husband Tommy have just opened Tommy's Kitchen, a restaurant about two minutes' walk from the spot where Joe Clark's store used to be. (I ordered the jerk chicken wings. They're great.) When she talks about the old days, Washington paints an idyllic picture of children playing outside together and looking out for each other. She doesn't think the town has changed that much since she was a girl ("though the kids like to play inside now"). A lot of the people she grew up with still live either in Eatonville or nearby. A lot of their parents and grandparents still have homes here too. It's a close-knit small town, she says, and it feels "like a warm hug."

It's also a living remnant of a vast but largely forgotten movement. From Princeville, North Carolina, to Allensworth, California, black Americans responded to repressive laws and extrajudicial violence by acquiring their own land, building their own institutions, and carving out a space where Jim Crow couldn't easily reach them. Hurston's father moved to Eatonville from Alabama when Zora was a toddler, leaving a stratified sharecropper community and putting down roots in a friendlier environment. Zora didn't realize how unusual their home was until she left for a school in a more conventional southern city. "Jacksonville made me know that I was a little colored girl," she later wrote. "Things were all about the town to point this out to me."

Eatonville was born a decade after Reconstruction ended, but the earliest sparks of black self-rule in Florida appeared far earlier, in the days when the peninsula was a haven for people escaping slavery. Across the South, maroons—fugitive slaves and their descendants and allies—settled wherever geographic barriers created sufficient protection; the swamps of Florida were such a place. But because the colony was ruled by the Spanish, and because the Spanish were often locked in conflict with Great Britain, another path to living freely soon emerged as well.

In 1693, Charles II of Spain issued an edict granting legal freedom to slaves who made their way to Florida and pledged their loyalty to his kingdom and to the Catholic Church. Not every governor of the colony was consistent in following this policy, but it carried enough weight to attract freedom seekers from the British territories to the north. In 1738, some of those immigrants formed the first officially sanctioned free black settlement in what is now the continental United States: Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, near St. Augustine. Its residents established homesteads and pledged to help defend the Spanish colony, declaring they would be "the most cruel enemies of the English"; their village lasted until 1763, when the British finally managed to conquer it.

A similar outpost began as a fort operated by the British in Prospect Bluff, out in the Florida Panhandle, during the War of 1812. After the English withdrew, the region's maroons occupied what became known as the Negro Fort, which they held until 1816, when a U.S. gunboat incinerated it with hundreds of people inside. Some of the settlement's survivors fled to Angola, a maroon colony along the Manatee River in southwestern Florida. Angola endured until 1821, when the territorial governor, future president Andrew Jackson, sent troops to destroy it. Many maroons left Florida altogether in the ensuing years, but a guerrilla resistance persisted into the 1840s—and the folklore of that resistance persisted even longer. Almost a century later, Hurston would collect a tale about "a great African medicine man" who is sold into slavery, flees to Florida, joins "the Indian-Negro forces" battling the white slavers, and finally, when the fight is lost, transforms himself into a gator and makes his home in a lake about a mile from the future site of Joe Clark's store.

When emancipation came, it suddenly seemed possible again to establish more visible self-governing black communities. In 1858, the libertarian abolitionist Lysander Spooner had argued that slaves were the rightful owners of the enterprises where they were forced to work—that they had "a natural right to compensation" for their bondage and that "the property of the Slaveholders and their abettors" would be a good place to get it. Just a few years later, Spooner's angry demand suddenly seemed like a live possibility.

Consider Davis Bend, a Mississippi peninsula where Joseph and Jefferson Davis had owned huge plantations before the Civil War. Jefferson is the more famous of the brothers, as he became president of the Confederacy, but it's Joseph who mostly concerns us here. A devotee of the utopian socialist Robert Owen, he decided to turn his plantation into a model system where the food and housing were better than usual, where slaves could start businesses and own property, and where an in-house judicial system drew its juries, judges, and sheriffs from among the enslaved. This was more humane than the typical slave camp, but it still was ultimately a slave camp. What's notable for our story is what happened in 1862, when Davis fled the approaching Union army: His former chattel stayed in Mississippi and kept running the plantation, this time for themselves.

When Gen. Ulysses S. Grant arrived, he declared that Davis Bend should "become a Negro paradise." Not everyone in the government went along with that high-minded promise—some black residents were evicted to make room for Union soldiers, for example, and the army decided to confiscate the freedmen's tools and animals—but refugees from surrounding areas were allowed to settle and work the land, with impressive results. By the end of the war, Eric Foner wrote in his 1988 book Reconstruction, the old plantations "had become a remarkable example of self-reliance, whose laborers raised nearly 2,000 bales of cotton and earned a profit of $160,000." The former slaves also maintained their own judicial system, and by the summer of 1865 they were making plans to build their own schoolhouses.

Alas: The federal Freedmen's Bureau still retained ultimate control of the property, with white superintendents reserving the right to overrule the black farmers. Meanwhile, Joseph Davis was pressing officials to give him back the land, arguing that the bureau had mistreated the freedmen. There was some truth to that—indeed, Davis' former slave Ben Montgomery, a leader in the freedmen's community, had asked his ex-owner to intervene when the bureau refused to lease the black men a cotton gin. But Davis made his case in ridiculously self-serving terms. "Formerly a negro did not expect a white man would cheat him or tell him a lie," he claimed in a letter to one senator, but "now he expects nothing else."

In 1866, President Andrew Johnson issued Joseph Davis a pardon, paving the way for him to retake the plantation. The aging planter promptly sold the land to Montgomery and his sons, but that saddled their enterprise with considerable debts, which became more oppressive during the economic downturn of the 1870s. Joseph, always the more liberal-minded of the Davis brothers, was willing to make allowances for the circumstances, but he died in 1870. Jefferson Davis was less tolerant: He had never supported the sale, he sued to retake the land, and in 1878 the state supreme court ruled in his favor.

Some Reconstruction governments made an effort to support black land claims. South Carolina established a commission to sell farmland to black tillers; the process was sometimes hobbled by corruption, but it did get some property into African-American hands, which is how the black town of Promised Land was able to put down roots in Greenwood County. More often, smaller versions of the Davis Bend story played out around the South. First, the freedmen took over the plantations and formed self-governing communities—in 1865, for example, the Savannah Republican printed a dispatch from Ogeechee, Georgia, where "each plantation elected a committee of three to represent their respective neighborhood" and where the district "is now mostly self-supporting and will soon be entirely so."........

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