Zora and Me Read online

  Zora looked up at Joe Clarke. “You believe she fell, Mr. Clarke?”

  Joe Clarke’s eyebrows rose quizzically. “Well, way I heard it, she had a little fainting spell. . . .” It obviously hadn’t occurred to him to question the story.

  “Old Lady Bronson tell you that?” I didn’t know what Zora was thinking, but I could see the gears spinning.

  “Why, no, it was Mr. Calhoun told me. But —”

  One of the men on the porch interrupted him. “Hey, Marshal — I didn’t know you hired yourself a deputy!” That brought a round of chuckles, but I could tell they were curious just the same. Zora, though, didn’t have a speck of laughing in her. Joe Clarke saw that, and I watched him put his own smile in his pocket as he sat down on a little end of the bench to face Zora eye to eye.

  “Let’s see, now. Dave Calhoun come in real early this morning with a cracked shoe on the right front of that paint mule of his. He said Old Lady Bronson was fishing at Blue Sink yesterday and had a fainting spell —”

  He put his hand up to hold off any protest Zora might have made. “I’m just telling what I heard! He said she likely had a fainting spell on that little ledge that comes out, and fell straight over onto the rocks, and that’s where y’all found her. Said another couple of feet and she would have landed in the water and drowned for sure. She was banged up real good as it was,” he said. “But the whole thing I’m trying to say, the whole reason I brought this up, is that Old Lady Bronson would probably still be there if it hadn’t been for you!”

  Now he allowed himself a smile, but Zora didn’t. She drew herself up, like she was about to recite for class, and said, “Mr. Clarke, I don’t think Old Lady Bronson fainted or even just slipped.”

  There was some noise from the porch, but Mr. Clarke waved his hand like a preacher asking for a moment of silence. “You don’t? What you think, then?”

  “No, sir. I think a gator knocked her onto those rocks with his tail. That’s what I think. I warned her, too. Carrie was there — she’ll tell you.”

  I said, “That’s right,” but Zora was still talking, so I don’t think anybody heard me.

  “I even told my mama about it. Since you the marshal, I guess I should have told you.” Zora took a deep breath. “I saw Mr. Pendir turn into a gator with my own two eyes. I was out at the Blue Sink night before last, and I saw Mr. Pendir standing on his porch with a gator snout instead of a head!”

  For an instant I had a feeling that the whole porch was about to explode laughing. But no — aside from a single snort and a tongue click, there was just a bunch of grins. The porch didn’t take Zora’s accusations about Mr. Pendir seriously, but they understood that we were serious. Joe Clarke understood best of all.

  “Now, Zora. I’m gone tell you something and I want you to listen very good. You too, Carrie. You both listening?”

  “Yes, sir,” Zora said. “I’m listening.”

  I bobbed my head.

  “It ain’t nice to say things like that about folks. Especially old, lonely folks. Pendir — he don’t have no place on that wrinkled face to hide a thing like being something other than what he is. Y’all understand? Most folks only got so many hiding places. And I’m afraid old Pendir’s face ain’t one of his.”

  “Well, what is my face telling you, Mr. Clarke?” Zora was fearless. And sometimes her courage was so bold it spilled onto me and pushed away my fear, for at least a second.

  Joe Clarke got eye level with us. “I see what’s called a Zora on your face.” She beamed like the sun had an extra ray just for her. “And what’s on yours,” he said to me, “is something called Carrie.” I got my own ray, too.

  “What you see is Zora,” Zora repeated slowly, as if she were hearing her own name for the first time.

  “That’s right, girl. And Zora saved that old lady just the same as if Zora picked her up off those rocks and carried her home herself.”

  “She did?”

  Joe Clarke smiled. “She did.”

  Mr. Eddie Jackson, a short, skinny man with nutmeg skin, tipped his hat at us. “Good job.”

  A thin, greasy-haired man named Mr. Slayton asked, “What the grown men to do around these parts if little girls gone be the ones saving folks?”

  “What the grown men got to do then,” Joe Clarke said, “is give the little girls as much licorice as they can eat.” He opened the screen door of his store for us, went behind the counter, and pulled out a nearly full box of licorice sticks.

  “Ladies, have as many as you like.”

  We had no shame. Zora began to fill the pockets of her shift with the sweet twisty whips. I followed suit, and when we got through with cramming our dress pockets, we put as many of the sticks as we could on the inside of our knee socks, stuffing what didn’t fit there into our shoes. Zora tried walking a few steps and found that she couldn’t — not so much because her feet hurt as because walking threw too much of the candy clear out of her shoes. So she took off her bucks and filled them with the licorice, too, like little Easter baskets.

  “More room without my feet,” she said.

  “You want your licorice sticks tasting like feet?” I asked.

  Mr. Clarke laughed like a good-natured giant.

  “Shucks, I don’t hardly wear my shoes no way,” Zora answered.

  Stumped for an answer to that, I sucked on a licorice stick.

  Just then Chester Cools rode up to the store on his sad old mule. “An awful thing happened, Joe,” Mr. Cools muttered. “Awful thing!”

  “There’s a body by the tracks!” Chester sputtered. “It don’t have no head. The body don’t have no head. . . .”

  The whole porch gasped, then fell quiet. Goose pimples sprung up all over my body, like I had been dipped in ice-cold water. Zora was almost twitching. She turned to me to make a silent Shh! sign, her eyes hot with interest.

  Chester Cools had a small farm not far from the railroad tracks that ran from Jacksonville to Lake Maitland and shot along the edge of Eatonville. We inched closer to the screen door to hear, but no one noticed.

  “What you say?” Joe Clarke said in disbelief.

  “I said, they a dead man by the tracks! Y’all deaf?”

  “Who — who is it?” a quivering voice from the porch chorus asked.

  Mr. Cools was shaking. “How am I supposed to know? The man’s head is gone. His head is gone!”

  Another voice: “That leave me out! I still got my head.”

  There was nervous laughter, but Joe Clarke waved his hand and the menfolk shushed up. He put his hand on Mr. Cools’s shoulder.

  “Pay ’em no mind, Chester. Folks forget how to act when they can’t stand a truth.”

  Mr. Cools shot a look at the men, who were all long faces now, solemn as a jury.

  Joe Clarke went on. “Anything special about him?”

  Mr. Cools closed his eyes and tilted his head back, making a mental catalog of the man. “Mm, nothing special. Wearing overalls, beat-up boots. Probably a turpentine worker in Lake Maitland . . .” He blinked. “Huh — had a braided red strap on his shoulder.”

  “Was there . . . ?” Joe Clarke started to ask a question and then stopped, like he was afraid to ask the rest.

  Mr. Cools lit up a little suddenly, remembering more. “Hey, did I say about the git-tar? They was a git-tar few feet away. All smashed to pieces, though — can’t do nothing with it.”

  “Oh, sweet Lord!” Joe Clarke barely whispered the words: “Oh, sweet Lord!”

  “What is it, Joe?” another anonymous voice asked. Mr. Clarke didn’t answer. He turned his back on the men and put one hand on the screen door, hanging his head down low. Zora and I were still on the other side of the screen, but he never saw us, and we didn’t make a sound.

  “Take me there,” Joe Clarke said to Chester. “Now.”

  Mr. Cools got back on his mule, Joe swung up on his pretty bay mare, and they went off. Half the men on the porch trailed them on foot. The other half went their own ways. Zora an
d me were left alone.

  “We knew him,” Zora said. “The man without a head. We knew him.”

  I was looking at the floor but I couldn’t see it right. Then I was sitting down. And Zora was sitting next to me with her arm around my shoulder. I shook my head.

  “Yes, we did,” she said in a soft voice that almost didn’t sound like her. “We did, Carrie. I’m sorry, girl, but we did.”

  I don’t know when it sank in and I started sobbing. It seemed like a long time before I stopped. I couldn’t think why I was so broken up about a man I had met just the day before, a man who sang a little and chatted with us a little and was gone inside half an hour. Ivory was just a traveling worker with a sweet voice. But he was dead, and he wasn’t coming back. I kept sobbing, and Zora kept saying, “I know, I know.”

  Finally I stood and wiped my eyes and swallowed hard. “Who would do that? And why would somebody do that to a man? Why?”

  Something moved across Zora’s face, an idea that started just under her bottom lip and rode up to her eyebrows.

  “You remember what Ivory said?” She cocked her head and gave me a long, penetrating look. “That he was going to go swimming in the Blue Sink last night!”

  A shiver ran down my spine. “But Zora,” I said, “that doesn’t mean it was Mr. Pendir who killed him!”

  Even as I said it, I didn’t believe my own doubting. And my asking seemed to make Zora surer of her own judgment.

  “Ain’t no regular folks do nothing like we just heard, Carrie. It’s not a somebody that cuts off and steals a man’s head — it’s a something.”

  Only a monster could do what was done to Ivory.

  We had only known about Ivory’s death for a few hours when it came suppertime in the Hurston household. The news had spread through Lake Maitland and Eatonville, and a pall had already fallen on the whole town.

  Like many a traveling man, Mr. Hurston wanted nothing to dampen his spirits before a trip, and so he determined not to let the evil of the world spoil his last night with his family before leaving to preach in Orlando for a week.

  Mr. Hurston had been home only two weeks since his last trip, and to make up for another absence so soon, he promised each one of the Hurston boys and girls a gift of their choosing from the big town. Sitting around the dinner table that night after a good filling meal of hoecake and collards, it felt like the sun was shining indoors. Pitchers of fresh-squeezed lemonade rushed down our throats.

  Sarah went first. She was far and away her father’s favorite, but she never rubbed it in. She didn’t have to. I had known the Hurstons my entire life. During that time I had never seen Sarah with a trailing hem, a hair out of place, or a grass-stained dress, and I learned from watching her that a daddy’s girl isn’t a kind of person, but a species. Neither Zora nor I belonged to it.

  “I want some lace, Daddy, to trim my recital dress with.” Sarah was the only one who was allowed music lessons proper. In fact, Mr. Hurston had bought a piano for Sarah alone.

  Mr. Hurston beamed with pride. “What color you want, honey?” Sarah, prim and proper, beamed back.

  “Pink and white, Daddy,” Sarah cooed.

  “Then, darling, that’s what you’ll get.”

  And so went the ritual. John wanted a chemistry book —“Anything about chemistry!” Joel pleaded his case for multicolored jacks. Even the baby of the family, Everett, sitting on his mother’s lap, knew when it was his turn. He couldn’t make words yet, but he made enough sounds to get his point across.

  “I think my baby boy is telling me he wants a new rattle!” Mr. Hurston laughed, and the rest of the table laughed with him; Everett laughed too, and that made his father roar. Satisfaction was still in the air, and Mr. Hurston was sucking it up in gulps. Then it was Zora’s turn.

  “Daddy, I don’t care about a gift,” she said. “I want to talk about the man they found by the tracks. . . .”

  As soon as the words left Zora’s mouth, you could see the good feeling flee the room. We froze in our seats. Mr. Hurston gripped the arms of his chair and pushed slowly back from the head of the table, his eyes fixed on Zora. Baby Everett looked up at his mother, but even he didn’t make a peep. Mrs. Hurston looked at her husband as if her eyes alone could temper him. They couldn’t. Her understanding of Zora’s curiosity and conviction was no match for Mr. Hurston’s sudden rage. Before Zora could continue her story, her father stood and placed his palms flat against the table.

  “Girl,” he said with a roll of thunder on his tongue, “we will not talk about such things at my table!” Some people feel a child should not speak unless spoken to. Mr. Hurston didn’t mind if children talked, so long as we didn’t say anything he didn’t want to hear. That meant the questions children ask when something terrible happens were especially out of bounds.

  Zora was a slow student of that school on the best of days. She blinked hopefully. “But Daddy, I think I know what killed him, and we got to do something. We just got to!” I wanted to slide under the table and hide till the storm passed.

  “Do you — do you think you white?” Mr. Hurston was shaking with anger. His face was twitching. “Wanting to talk about death — right here at the dinner table! That is the kind of thing white folks do!”

  “Everyone at this table knows who they are,” Mrs. Hurston interrupted quietly.

  “I beg to differ, Lucy. I beg to differ. But this ain’t between me and you. It’s between me and this child.”

  Zora stood up slowly, slid her chair under the table, and stood behind it. I could see it took all the courage she had. “Saying what I know and wanting answers,” she said, “doesn’t make me white. I know who I am. I’m Zora.”

  Of all the Hurston children, Zora looked the most like her father, and I think the likeness only fueled his anger. Sometimes there’s nothing more aggravating than looking in a mirror.

  From what Mrs. Hurston told us, her husband had been glad to open his heart and home to his third child — and first daughter — when Sarah was born. He just never counted on having to do it a second time. The one thing in John Hurston’s life that had truly surprised him was Zora being born a girl. He often said that he couldn’t forgive Zora for playing such a trick on him. Just by being born she had proven that not even the affairs of his own home were totally under his control. And if there was one thing Mr. Hurston didn’t like, it was being shown up.

  “Sit, Zora.” Mrs. Hurston spoke in a calm, low voice. “Sit down, child.”

  Zora hated to disobey her mother. But she set her lips and shook her head, never meeting her mother’s gaze. She didn’t have it in her to swallow shame when she felt wronged.

  “Oh, I see,” Mr. Hurston said, an angry smile playing on his lips. “You telling me who you are now. Well, let me tell you something. If it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t be a Zora. And if it’s up to me, there won’t be a Zora much longer!”

  Mr. Hurston took two strides the length of the table, arriving in front of Zora like a wraith carried on the wind. He raised his hand to strike her. Zora gripped the back of her chair, but didn’t flinch.

  Suddenly Mrs. Hurston cried out — called her husband’s name. That one sound, that one syllable, was a brick wall shielding her daughter’s face from her husband’s hand.

  I can’t count the times I saw Mr. Hurston’s love of his wife spare Zora physical pain. But he never spared Zora other kinds of hurt.

  “Do you know what being white is? Being white is wanting things that are out of your reach. And for white folks, that’s fine and dandy, ’cause they stand niggers one on top of the other to pull down from the sky what they want. But you don’t got no ladder, Zora.” Zora jerked her head back — his words fell on her like a blow.

  “That’s enough,” Lucy Hurston said.

  “That child of yours don’t got sense,” Mr. Hurston chided. “Ruining my last night at home with talk of a murder! She ain’t mine. She’s all yours, Lucy. All yours.”

  “Then let what’s mine be.�
� Mrs. Hurston stood with Everett in one arm, taking an empty pitcher in the other. All of the Hurston children except Zora took their mother’s cue and began to clear the table. Mr. Hurston continued to stand, staring at Zora, empty-handed and silent; then he shook his head, turned, and strode into the parlor.

  Zora sulked away toward the front door, and I followed her. She turned around and looked at me when we got to the gardenia bushes.

  “I don’t feel much like talking, Carrie.” There was a quiver in her voice.

  “All righty,” I responded. “You’ll feel better if I don’t say anything. So that’s what I’m going to do: stand here beside you without saying a word.”

  Zora tried to smile, but she couldn’t manage it and leash her tears, too. So she made a face somewhere between getting a cramp in your foot and a gnat in your eye.

  We sat for a half hour or so, not talking, just smelling the gardenia and listening to the cicada sing.

  Walking home later, I thought about the difference between a mama’s girl and a daddy’s girl. I decided that a daughter who belongs to her daddy expects gifts, while a daughter who belongs to her mama expects a lot more. Not from her mama. From herself.

  Even though I felt sad about Zora’s troubles with her father, I would have welcomed some trouble with mine. The thing about not seeing someone for a long time, especially someone that you love, is that your memory of them becomes one-sided. Or at least that’s what happened to me.

  Except for him leaving, all of my memories of my daddy were good ones. Him fixing me breakfast because my mama had to leave so early. Him singing “Sleep, Little Pretty One” to me when I woke up crying from a bad dream. Him carrying me to bed after I fell asleep on the front step watching fireflies buzz by like shooting stars. Him laughing and the flash of his smile when he tickled my feet and saw — I hope — joy mixed up with love all over my face. I had a collection of those memories that I used to sift through before I went to sleep, making sure I remembered every detail of each one, even straining to find another detail I might have missed so I could add it to the treasure.