If her parents had marital problems, Hurston never elaborated on them. The closest she came to baring paternal infidelities is reflected in her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934). A major character in the novel is, like her father, a popular pastor of a small Baptist church and a man who is attractive to the ladies in the church. Lucy Hurston, Zora's mother, was a small, frail woman. However, she was quite capable of managing her husband, as well as her children. Although he was an assertive, three-time mayor of Eatonville, John Hurston never stressed education. Lucy, on the other hand, encouraged Hurston and the other children to "jump at de sun." Like Janie's Nanny, Lucy was ambitious for her children.
Lucy's death was half of a double trauma for Hurston. When Lucy was dying, she asked Hurston to reject two folklore traditions: her pillow was not to be removed from under her head, and the clock and mirror were not to be draped. These requests were heavy burdens for the child. Needless to say, the women of the town always followed tradition, and little Zora was told to disobey her dying mother's last requests. As a result, Lucy left a distraught daughter, one who would carry a bothersome sense of guilt for many years.
The other half of Hurston's trauma was her father's rather hasty marriage to a woman who rejected his children. Hurston and her sister Sarah had been sent to a school in Jacksonville, Florida, but Sarah pleaded homesickness and returned to Eatonville. It was Sarah who wrote to Zora that their father had remarried. Whenever Hurston was home, squabbling between her and her stepmother continued, and several years later, the miserable situation finally culminated in a pitched battle between Hurston and her stepmother. Experienced from many fights with her brothers, Hurston easily won. However, she realized later that, during the fight with her stepmother, she was well on her way to killing the woman, a fate that Hurston believed that the woman deserved.
