Biographers, including Robert Hemenway, must rely on Hurston's own story of her childhood as she tells it in Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Hers was a carefree, rough-and-tumble childhood lived as children should live, at least until her mother's sudden death. Perhaps because Hurston grew up without a lot of mothering, she became a strong, vigorous, independent girl who did not back off from fights with her brothers and other boys. She climbed trees to look at the horizon, just as Janie does in this novel, and she knew the different scent of blossoms and various colors of foliage in her yard.
As a youngster, Hurston loitered at Joe Clarke's store in Eatonville as much as she dared, listening to men talking, absorbing their tall tales and stories and filing them away for future use. As an adult, wherever it seemed as though she would stay in one place for a year or more, she always planted a garden of flowers, greens, and beans. Perhaps this habit was a carryover from the large gardens that helped her parents, John and Lucy Hurston, feed their family of eight children.
