Hurston opens her autobiography with an account of the founding of Eatonville, Florida, her hometown, by three white men who bought up the land that had been opened up to white settlers in the aftermath of the Seminole Wars of the 1850s. According to Hurston, the town was an unusual place, one in which white settlers and the African Americans who came for work opportunities in the booming territory interacted with little friction.

When the town of Maitland was incorporated in 1858, both the mayor and sheriff were African Americans and their election seemed not to bother the white inhabitants at all. In the waning years of the 1800s, the African-American inhabitants of Maitland incorporated their own town, becoming, Hurston claims, one of the first such towns in the United States.

In this chapter, Hurston recounts her family history. John Hurston, her father, came from a family of poor Alabama sharecroppers and was rumored to be the son of a white man. Lucy Ann Potts came from a prosperous family that owned its own land. A strikingly handsome man, John Hurston began courting Lucy when he was 20 and she was 14. Despite strong opposition from the Potts family, the pair married and settled down in the plantation cabin where John lived.