Zora and Me Read online

  When we reappeared on the front porch of Joe’s store, our pockets and mouths full of licorice sticks, the men of Eatonville broke into an uproar.

  “Joe, you let these two little girls sucker you into giving them treats again,” one man said.

  “Watch out, Joe,” said another. “These two gonna leave you bankrupt!”

  “Giving don’t got a thing to do with going bankrupt,” Joe Clarke answered. “Holding back does.”

  Back at the Hurstons’ house, we sat silently on the shady porch, the licorice divided neatly between us, steadily chewing our treats.

  We didn’t savor the licorice sticks the same way we did when we were rewarded for finding Old Lady Bronson. Of course the candy was sweet, and it was still delicious, but it didn’t seem like one of life’s treasures anymore, let alone the sweetest.

  I knew much more than I wanted to about so-called shortcuts in life, and senseless violence, and chasing down someone you love. I knew that death was death. I knew that outside the boundaries of Eatonville, it could be dangerous not to be white, and that inside those boundaries was no guarantee of safety.

  A wind rustled its way through the chinaberry tree. After about twenty minutes Mrs. Hurston, carrying baby Everett and a basket full of oranges, came up the walk. With her came the scent of citrus and gardenias.

  “Carrie, your mama just gave me these oranges,” she said. When she got closer to the porch, she stopped, turned her head, and cut her eyes. “What on earth possessed Joe Clarke,” she asked, “to laden you two down with all this candy?”

  The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. It was rare to have quiet around the Hurston house, and Zora took full advantage. Joe Clarke had asked us not to tell. We knew how to keep a secret, but Zora’s mother was always the one exception. Right there on the front porch, with us still sitting and Mrs. Hurston standing with baby Everett asleep on her left shoulder, Zora and I together told her everything.

  Every expression under the sun passed across Mrs. Hurston’s face. I was certain she was going to drop the basket of oranges. She didn’t, and she also kept silent until we were finished. Her first response was to place the basket on the ground. Then she sat down right between us. Neither of us thought twice about the flattened licorice.

  Mrs. Hurston, close to tears, placed Everett upright in her lap and put an arm around each of us. I felt the smidgen of tight feeling still left in my chest disappear.

  Until that moment, I believed that what I carried inside of me was just myself and nothing of other people, not even the ones I loved. If I ever had the nerve to open up my heart, I thought I’d be faced with nothing but a tall, round-faced brown girl with coal-black hair. I felt that alone.

  But on the hem of this experience, wrapped in Mrs. Hurston’s embrace, I got up the nerve to take a peek into my heart, and to my surprise I didn’t find that lonely picture of myself. What I found there was much bigger. I found all of Eatonville.

  There was a picture of Blue Sink on the clearest sunny day. There was a picture of Joe Clarke’s porch and all the shenanigans that went on there. The Loving Pine stood tall and affectionate as ever. There was the memory of my own parents, sitting holding hands on our front step. And I saw myself with Teddy, doing exactly the same thing someday. Of course Zora and Mrs. Hurston were in my heart too, snuggled under a light-as-air white blanket in Mrs. Hurston’s feather bed.

  After taking a good long look inside myself, I also knew that my heart didn’t belong to me. I wasn’t even its landlord. The people, dirt, trees, bricks, and air of Eatonville were. Eatonville wasn’t just my home. It was my destiny.

  The justice that old Mr. Ambrose and Joe Clarke said they would see to was achieved, in retrospect, swifter than an arrow.

  Mrs. Jefferson, who had hinted at Gold’s real identity in the first place, began whispering to folks that the bride-to-be was indeed passing. For three weeks, Negroes watched Gold doggedly.

  A woman said that Gold gave her the evil eye one day, and the next day she broke her foot. A man referred to Gold’s cords of blond hair as a lynch rope. A week or so later, someone cut the yellow-haired tail off that man’s only horse and threw it in his front yard. Every day there was a new episode. No one thought her mixed blood was the problem; the problem was that she saw her own people as a liability.

  So when Joe Clarke took a trip home to Orlando to visit with family for a few days, no one seemed to notice that Gold’s departure coincided with Joe’s trip. Folks were just glad to have the bad omen gone. But I knew that Mr. Clarke was behind the end of the scandal. For that matter, I knew Zora and I were, too.

  As for William — Gold’s man, Ivory’s likely murderer — his business dried up inside of a few months. He left his new home in Lake Maitland, ruined and broken, before the end of autumn.

  So two men, one black and one white, both protecting the sanctity of our peaceful world, had dispensed justice in a way so quiet that only five people in total ever knew about it. Joe Clarke and Mr. Ambrose had done in grown folks’ terms what Zora and I had done with our childhood fantasy — rooted out evil and laid crooked tracks straight.

  Eatonville was never the same for me after that. My child self belonged to the world of the gator king, to the Eatonville of our childhood fantasies. Whether that world was real or not doesn’t matter. It was true. And though it no longer exists outside of me or Zora’s stories, I still visit the memories.

  Zora loved Eatonville every bit as deeply as I did, and Eatonville was just as much a part of her as it was a part of me, but even then I knew that it was in her to go. One day her mother’s arms and a best friend would not be enough to contain her. Soon enough we’d be women, and I’d have to love my friend from afar while I stayed nestled in the bosom of my town.

  I can’t help but wonder how many other hearts — even those of folks who have never set foot in Florida — have bits and pieces of Eatonville in them now because of Zora’s travels. It warms me from the top of my head to the tip of my toes to think that folks all across the world have the Loving Pine in their soul. It warms me even more to know that Zora, with all of her knowing might and her need to talk to the world, planted it there.

  To hear Zora Neale Hurston tell it, she was born in Eatonville, Florida, the daughter of a mayor, in 1901, or 1903, or 1910. Even from a young age, Hurston was an inventor of stories, a creator of masks and disguises. In reality, she was born in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, the fifth of eight children raised by John and Lucy Hurston. Her mother was a schoolteacher and her father a preacher and former slave (who did eventually become the mayor of Eatonville).

  Although Alabama was her place of birth, Eatonville, Florida, was the place that truly felt like home to Zora. It was the first incorporated all-black township in the United States, established by twenty-seven African-American men soon after the Emancipation Proclamation. Hurston and her family moved to Eatonville when she was just a toddler, and the thriving community infected her with energy, confidence, and ambition. Hurston’s childhood was idyllic.

  But then in 1904, when Hurston was just thirteen, her mother passed away. Thus began what Zora would later call the “haunted years.” Lucy Hurston had been the one to encourage her daughter to have courageous dreams. John Hurston encouraged his daughter, but just as often tried to tame her rambunctious spirit, sometimes harshly. After his wife died, John had little energy or money to devote to his children and grew detached from them emotionally. When he remarried, Zora and his new wife were like oil and water.

  Zora left home after a vicious fight with the new Mrs. Hurston and struggled to finish high school while working a variety of different jobs. One of those jobs was working as a maid to a singer in a traveling theater troupe, an experience that sparked Hurston’s love of performance, a passion that would last the rest of her life. In 1917, she found herself in Baltimore. She was twenty-six and still without her high-school diploma. So Hurston lied about her age, convincing the school that she was sixteen so that she coul
d re-enroll and complete her education. From that point on, Hurston would always present herself as younger than she actually was.

  In 1919, Hurston entered college, first at Howard University and then at Barnard College, where she was the only black student and studied under the famous anthropologist Franz Boas. During these years, her writing began to get recognized. Her first short story, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” was published in Howard University’s literary magazine in 1921.

  In the 1920s, Hurston moved to New York City and became an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance, befriending poet Langston Hughes and singer-actress Ethel Waters, among many other cultural luminaries. Zora was the life of the party, frequently hosting artists at her home (though she retreated into her room when she needed to get any writing done).

  In 1933, publisher Bertram Lippincott read Hurston’s short story “The Gilded Six-Bits” and inquired as to whether Hurston might be working on a novel. Hurston answered yes — and then set to work writing one, which became Jonah’s Gourd Vine. By 1935, Hurston had her first novel and a collection of southern folktales under her publishing belt.

  In 1937, Hurston’s most renowned novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published. In that novel, Hurston’s heroine, Janie Crawford, lives a conventionally circumscribed life until she chooses to break out of the mold and live only for herself. Much like Hurston, Janie has her eyes on the horizon and believes in a better life beyond it. The novel has been praised as a classic of black literature and a tribute to the strength of black women.

  Hurston went on to write several other works, including a study of Caribbean voodoo practices, two more novels, and her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. All in all, she wrote four novels and more than fifty short stories, plays, and essays. Sadly, Hurston never enjoyed any monetary reward for her success during her lifetime. When she died in 1960 at the age of sixty-nine, her neighbors had to take up a collection for the funeral. Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Florida, because the neighbors hadn’t been able to raise enough funds for a funeral and a gravestone.

  In 1973, a young writer named Alice Walker traveled to Fort Pierce to visit the burial site of the woman who had inspired so many black female authors with her courage and strength: Hurston had insisted on living life on her own terms during a time when many black Americans had been pressured to assimilate. “A people do not forget their geniuses,” Walker said, and arranged to have a monument placed, at last, to honor the life and achievements of Zora Neale Hurston.

  1891

  Born in Notasulga, Alabama, the fifth of eight children, to John Hurston, a carpenter and preacher, and Lucy Potts Hurston, a former schoolteacher.

  1894

  The Hurston family moves to Eatonville, Florida, a small all-black community.

  1897

  Hurston’s father is elected mayor of Eatonville.

  1904

  Lucy Potts Hurston dies.

  1917–1918

  Attends Morgan Academy in Baltimore, Maryland, and completes high-school requirements.

  1918

  Works as a waitress at a nightclub and a manicurist at a barbershop that serves only whites.

  1919–1924

  Attends Howard University and receives an associate degree.

  1921

  Publishes her first story, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” in Howard University’s literary magazine.

  1925–1927

  Moves to New York City and attends Barnard College as its only black student. Receives a bachelor of arts degree.

  1927

  Goes to Florida to collect folktales.

  1927

  Marries Herbert Sheen.

  1930–1932

  Organizes the field notes that become Mules and Men.

  1930

  Works on the play Mule Bone with Langston Hughes.

  1931

  Breaks with Langston Hughes over the authorship of Mule Bone.

  1931

  Divorces Sheen.

  1934

  Publishes Jonah’s Gourd Vine, her first novel.

  1935

  Mules and Men, a collection of folklore, is published.

  1936

  Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study West Indian obeah practices.

  1937

  Visits Haiti. While there, writes Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks.

  1937

  Their Eyes Were Watching God is published.

  1938

  Tell My Horse is published.

  1939

  Receives an honorary doctor of letters degree from Morgan State College.

  1939

  Marries Albert Price III. They are later divorced.

  1939

  Moses, Man of the Mountain is published.

  1942

  Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, is published.

  1947

  Goes to British Honduras to research black communities and writes Seraph on the Suwanee.

  1948

  Seraph on the Suwanee is published.

  1956

  Works as a librarian at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida.

  1958

  Works as a substitute teacher at Lincoln Park Academy in Fort Pierce, Florida.

  1959

  Suffers a stroke and enters the St. Lucie County Welfare Home.

  1960

  Dies in the St. Lucie County Welfare Home. Buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce.

  The Complete Stories (1995)

  Published after her death, this collection features Zora Neale Hurston’s short fiction, which was originally published in literary magazines during her lifetime. Spanning Hurston’s writing career from 1921 to 1955, the compilation showcases the writer’s range, rich language, and development as a storyteller.

  Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)

  Hurston’s autobiography tells the story of her rise from poverty to literary prominence. The writer’s story is told with imagination and exuberance and offers a glimpse into the life of one of America’s most esteemed writers.

  Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States (2001)

  Originally collected by Hurston in 1927, this volume of folklore passed down through generations offers a glimpse of the African-American experience in the South at the turn of the century.

  Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934)

  Hurston’s first published novel. Based loosely on her parents’ lives, it features a preacher and his wife as the main characters.

  Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939)

  An allegory based on the story of the Exodus and blending the Moses of the Old Testament with the Moses of black folklore and song. Narrated in a mixture of biblical rhetoric, black dialect, and colloquial English.

  Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life (1930)

  A collaboration between Hurston and Langston Hughes, this comedic play is set in Eatonville, Florida, and focuses on the lives of two men and the woman who comes between them. Due to a copyright disagreement between Hurston and Hughes, the play was not performed until 1991.

  Mules and Men (1935)

  Gathered by Hurston in the 1930s, the first great collection of black America’s folk world, including oral histories, sermons, and songs, some dating as far back as the Civil War.

  Seraph on the Suwanee (1948)

  A novel that explores the nature of love, faith, and marriage set at the turn of the century among white “Florida Crackers.”

  Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938)

  Hurston’s travelogue of her time spent in Haiti and Jamaica in the 1930s practicing and learning about voodoo ceremonies, customs, and superstitions.

  Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

  The most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in African-American literature and the piece of writing for which Zora Neale Hurston is best known. Tells the story of Janie Crawford as she develops a sense of self through three marriages and grows into
an independent woman.

  Lies and Other Tall Tales. Adapted and illustrated by Christopher Myers. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.

  The Six Fools. Adapted by Joyce Carol Thomas. Illustrated by Ann Tanksley. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.

  The Skull Talks Back and Other Haunting Tales. Adapted by Joyce Carol Thomas. Illustrated by Leonard Jenkins. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

  The Three Witches. Adapted by Joyce Carol Thomas. Illustrated by Faith Ringgold. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.

  What’s the Hurry, Fox? and Other Animal Stories. Adapted by Joyce Carol Thomas. Illustrated by Bryan Collier. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book owes its existence to the Zora Neale Hurston Estate for generously endorsing our work; Lois Hurston Gaston and Lucy Hurston for trusting us with one of the most precious of life’s gifts: a truly beautiful family legacy; Victoria Sanders, our brilliant and wickedly funny Xena warrior of an agent; Mary Lee Donovan, our dream editor, who saw our potential and added so much grace to our story; Richard Simon, for reading every word, lending his brilliance at a moment’s notice, and generally making every page sing louder; Drew Baughman, for giving this story — with his companionship and love of nature — its candlelit skies and its swollen heart; Hildegard McKinnon, for being our tireless reader and supporter; Abou Farmanfarmaian, for reading and editing and believing; Mark Siegel, for his loving encouragement; Melanie Gerald, for her encyclopedic empathy; Robert Burnett Jr., for owning fully how he sees the world; and Zora Neale Hurston herself, for giving to the world an inexhaustible store of story, language, and thought that has nurtured and sustained us for all these years.