Between stately homes in Jacksonville's Sugar Hill, where Black culture flourished with the richness of jasmine in bloom, Zora Neale Hurston discovered the landscapes that would ultimately inform her literary consciousness. Along ornate porches and through St. Johns River breezes, she absorbed the rhythms of a neighborhood that taught her both the power of words and the weight of silence. History remembers her as the literary force behind Their Eyes Were Watching God and the anthropologist who preserved Black Southern folklore, but it was in this place where she first learned to discern the narratives dwelling beneath the surface of unspoken things.
