"This is all hear-say," Hurston remarks, and she seems to believe it as she proceeds to tell her story as the fifth child of eight born to Baptist minister John Hurston. Interestingly, the chapters on her youth leave out deprivations she must have experienced; Hurston is eager to talk about her mother's death, but there is no real sense of the deep-South poverty of the early 1900s. In addition, she speaks of comforting visions that sustain her, but there is little information about her education or achievements, which were considerable, in the sciences.
Hurston's voice rings truest in recounting her explorations into literature, where she is first thrilled by the majesty of Hercules and Odin, but "utterly indifferent" to the Christian fables her elders hopefully pass on to her; authors such as Kipling and Stevenson "seemed to know what I wanted to hear." Her word-play obsession makes for entertaining reading as she punctuates her discussion of lively times in New Orleans with songs and random lyrics; ultimately, she erupts into a rush of fascinating prose describing the Haitian atmosphere that inspired "Their Eyes Were Watching God."
There is little of the racial reformer in Hurston, although the feminist cause inspires her to eloquence. The most surprising aspect of her text is how little attention she pays to the problems of blacks in the Jim Crow South; her chapter "My People, My People" devotes more discussion to the vision of a black utopia, an idea that obsesses her in later years as she grafts the dream onto Eatonville, Fla. She shifts from racial issues to feminism in later chapters, an idea with which she is much more comfortable.
Hurston was soundly rejected by fellow authors, most notably Richard Wright, for her advocacy of black utopian separation, and her autobiography reveals her attitudes more clearly perhaps than any other of her works. Any unit of study on Hurston springing from this work must acknowledge her approaches to poverty, literary inspiration and the black experience as being fundamentally nontraditional.