The James Logan Courier

By Tierra Negra, Courier Special Correspondent

“Small is beautiful” by E. F. Schumacher came very late in my life otherwise it would have been one of those books that makes the deepest impression. Albeit a short story I read once, from a science fiction book, arrived earlier to provide such insight about human nature problems.

Sadly, I cannot remember the author or the title of the Spanish version and, about three years ago, the possibility of never finding it again prompted me to write my own utopia: “La Nueva Era”, more out of sheer desperation in an attempt to leave a vestige of the original ideas eagerly absorbed as a teenager.

January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Childhood
Hurston was "purposefully inconsistent in the birth dates she dispensed during her lifetime, most of which were fictitious." For a long time, scholars believed that Hurston was born and raised in Eatonville, Florida, with a birthdate in 1901. In the 1990s, it came to light that she was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama in 1891 (see for example Lowe, Jump at the Sun, 1994); she moved to Eatonville at a young age, and spent her childhood there.

Hurston also lived in Fort Pierce, Florida and attended Lincoln Park Academy. Hurston would discuss her Eatonville childhood in the 1928 essay, "How It Feels To Be Colored Me". At age 13, her mother died and later that year, her father sent her to a private school in Jacksonville.

Read Poker! by Zora Neale Hurston, one of three of her works available free from Project Gutenberg.