“I overheard Mr. Calhoun tell Fanny two or three times that she should apply to a teacher’s college in Alabama. Now that Fanny’s married, it’s too late. Soon we’ll hear that she’s having a baby. The next time we see her, she’ll have four or five children underfoot, the only pupils she’ll ever have now. It’s not fair!” Zora blazed.
For girls, especially colored ones like us, little was fair. While we never questioned our inherent value, the safety and dignity we experienced within the borders of Eatonville did not lead us to assume we should expect equality beyond them.
“I’m not getting married!” Zora declared. “Not in three years, not in three hundred years! Marriage scoops girls up and takes us out of the world. Not me. I want to travel places as far away as Lahore.” Zora held up the book. “Yes, Eatonville is my home, always will be. But I don’t have to hang around here and make sure Eatonville is all right. You and Teddy will do that just fine.”
Her assertion floored me. “We will? How can we? Without you?”
“You’ll have each other — that’s how.”
Until that very moment under the Loving Pine, I had never considered that there was anything about Zora that made taking up the mantle of wife or mother impossible. Zora’s wheel would take her places I couldn’t imagine, and provide her with experiences her books would one day testify to. I wish now I had told her that a girl like Zora Neale Hurston gets born ahead of her time so she can show folks what the future looks like. But I didn’t know how to say that then. I was young and born for the calendar years that cradled my joys and suckled my sorrows.
I was lucky.
The world is covered in dull and sharp points alike. That’s just nature’s way. And there are few, if any, perfectly straight lines in nature, except maybe the horizon and the occasional thread in a spiderweb. There’s a curve in every stream. Branches bend and lean. Thorns stand guard at an angle. Straight lines are man-made, and from the moment I started doing folks’ laundry, I cursed men for their invention.
Before I carried my first basket of her linens down the road, Mrs. Hopson of Woodhouse Lane let me know she had fired her last girl for using too little soap and that she wouldn’t pay me, “not by the pound, not on my pride,” if her sheets weren’t folded edge to edge, straight line on straight line, just so. I nodded, said “Yes, ma’am,” and toted the basket away, wondering how that woman could look straight ahead with eyes so deeply set she resembled a flounder. Just the same, about a half dozen baskets of Mrs. Hopson’s laundry later, I stood on my porch one afternoon a week before school started alongside Mama, stacking that lady’s lines and boiling in my skin. Then Teddy strolled up. The sight of him blew into my front yard like an ocean breeze. He made everything flutter, especially my heart.
“What you two doing?” Teddy asked. “Nobody has any business working that hard in August.”
“Well,” Mama said, her voice dancing a little. “We ain’t nobodies. We’re somebodies. So we honor the promises we made to folks to get their things clean, August or not.”
“You’re the one who’s hardly breaking a sweat,” I said, giggling, then stepped away from my work, leaned against the porch post, and drank Teddy in.
“I do most of my chores early,” Teddy said. “Pop insists. On the farm, we have to. Plus, tomorrow I’m apprenticing to Doc Brazzle.”
“You being so busy reminds me,” Mama said, “think you and Micah can make time soon to come by and remove the well cap? We’re running out faster than usual with all the washing we’re doing.”
Teddy nodded, as though adding the chore to his mental list. “You two women don’t have no business with that heavy limestone cover. On a day like this one, the only business anyone should have is with a swim hole. It’s too hot for anything else. Let’s go swimming,” Teddy said.
“Look around here.” I gestured. “Do we look finished?”
“You will be if I help,” Teddy said, stepping up on the porch and lifting a sheet from the ironing board. I grabbed the other end and the cotton stretched between us like the blank slate of a shared future. Alone, the orderliness and predictability of work often numbed me. With Mama and Teddy, I might as well have been dancing around a maypole. Feigning ignorance and looking away, I brushed my cheek with Teddy’s when we matched corners. Each time the sheet became a more perfect, smaller square, Teddy gave my ear a quick nuzzle perfectly timed to avoid my mother’s glance. It didn’t hurt that Mrs. Baker had done just as good a job teaching her boys how to do housework as my Mama had me. In a delighted flash, we were finished.
“Where shall it be,” Teddy asked, “Blue Sink?”
“Yep,” I said, pulling off my scarf and untucking the braid at the nape of my neck. For Mama, it was undoing her apron and hanging it on the back of the white folks’ pantry door that signaled the official end of her workday. For me, it was taking off my scarf.
“I like your single braid,” Teddy said. “You look womanish.”
“Flattery won’t get you more than my hand,” I said, holding it out to him. Mama frowned playfully at the thought of him having that much.
“That’s enough,” Teddy said, and kissed my wrist.
Mama smiled, pleased with how lightheartedly and tenderly Teddy treated me.
“Have fun, now,” she said.
We did. We walked closely together through the coppice of runty cedars on the sandbank beyond my house, smiling and laughing at nothing at all. The sandbank overlooked a clearing of pale-pink bearberry. Teddy picked a few blossoms and set them in my hair. Then he knelt; I got on his back and he carried me, as if I weighed little more than his clothes, across the clearing, through the cool woods, and nearly to Blue Sink’s bank.
We spied Zora swinging her feet over the edge.
Teddy let me down and called after her: “What you doing sitting instead of swimming?”
Zora stood, hand on hip; she turned to face us. “I’ve been waiting on you two.”
Teddy stripped down to a light pair of knickers, his clothes a denim puddle at his feet. While Teddy politely focused on how the wind parted the rows of Spanish moss draped on the old willow, Zora and I quickly stripped down to bloomers and chemises. I felt prickly and pointed in a body that had rounded out and softened. I swallowed hard. Zora counted, “One, two, three!”
We jumped. We swam. We climbed up the mossy rocks and stepped to the edge, where we jumped and swam again and again. Finally, exhausted, we returned to our clothes and walked off from Blue Sink just like that, the way we always did, like it was nothing at all. If we had known that was the last time ever that the three of us would swim there together, we might have lingered long into the evening. Thunder and lightning would have had trouble driving us away. But endings in life don’t often do us the courtesy of declaring themselves, the way they do in books with the last words on the last page.
Stories are similar to man-made straight lines. Life is not.
The next day, Zora helped me haul laundry, and on our way home, we stopped by Mr. Cools’s place near the border with Maitland. Mr. Cools had a turnip patch, a half-blind mule named Girly, and the best peaches for three counties. He didn’t mind folks coming onto his property for the occasional peach, and that’s what Zora and I were in the mood for. His strangeness aside, Mr. Cools nevertheless deserved — and got — folks’ respect and restraint.
Girly stood snorting in her split-rail yard, so we knew Mr. Cools was home. We knocked on his cabin door to ask his permission to pick a few peaches. “Mr. Cools,” Zora called. “Mr. Cools.”
A minute passed without an answer, so we figured he was napping or something. Girly snorted and whipped her tail, egging us on. So we gathered up peaches in the skirts of our dresses and fed the mule as many as she could eat. Satisfied, she trotted away to the other side of the yard. Dismissed by Girly, we gathered a few peaches for ourselves, then sat under the tree to eat them. I don’t know how much time had passed — maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour — when we heard a loud thud c
ome from Mr. Cools’s house. That was followed by whining, like the sound a small child might make after a spill.
I tried not to worry. “Something must have just fallen over in there or was dropped.”
“What if it was Mr. Cools? What if he fell down?” We got up and walked over to the cabin and peered into a window. “Mr. Cools,” Zora spoke at the glass. “You all right in there?”
In place of a curtain, a brown sack too short and too narrow to cover the entire pane hung there. Around the edges of the sack covering, I could see into the room. A table, a trunk, and a threadbare chair were all piled against the front door. Suddenly Zora jumped, startled, and the back of her head crashed into my face. The surprise, more than the collision, knocked me to the ground. I looked up. The old sack had been pushed aside.
On the Florida frontier, we lived with gators, bobcats, and cottonmouths in our midst. Danger lurked, snorted, snapped, and was hungry all around us constantly. Mr. Cools stood there in the window, one of the world’s deadliest sights: a frightened man aiming a gun. The gun, pointed squarely at us, was worse than any wild animal. I couldn’t help but recall the terror I felt when those white men burst into my home with their dogs.
Zora kept her head. “It’s us,” she said, pointing to herself and then to me, “Zora and Carrie.” Chester Cools tapped the glass with the rifle barrel as if making sure the window was still between him and us. The action startled me to my feet, but we were still very much in range of a bullet. I think it was our fear that finally made us recognizable to him. The wild shine of his eyes dulled, and the panic left him. Without it, he began to cave in and unravel.
“Go away!” he howled piteously. “I ain’t bin here, or anywhere, for a long, long time!”
Tears mingled with the sweat on Mr. Cools’s collapsed face. Zora pressed her palm to the window. It was as close as she could get to touching his cheek, to comforting him. “We’re not going anywhere,” she cooed. “In fact, we’ll stay here as long as you need us,” she promised, placing urgency and kindness one on top of the other. “Come out here with us, Mr. Cools, and together we’ll go tell Mr. Clarke that something’s bothering you. Just put down the gun. Please!”
Mr. Cools shook his head, like a shriveled blossom dangling from a broken stem. “I ain’t bin Chester Cools for a long time,” he said sadly. A vein bulged in his forehead. “I bin dead!” Now he was shouting. “DEAD, I SAY!”
My skin crawled and my scalp tingled. As much as his shocking words were nonsense, for a moment, they made sense; they matched his shattered, grotesque face. Zora shuddered and I pulled at her arm to leave. But her curiosity and compassion kicked in.
“No, you’re not,” Zora said. “How could that be? How?”
But reason would not change Chester’s mind. “I’m dead! Now, go on, git! You run from this zombie if you know what’s good for you!” Chester Cools waved the rifle barrel around so wildly it resembled a snake. The weapon discharged. We screamed. Wood pulp exploded from the roof. Zora and I grabbed hands and our feet motored, headed for the place we’d always gone in an emergency: Joe Clarke’s.
Willie Mosely was dozing in a rocker on Joe’s porch when we came stampeding up the steps and startled him awake.
“What you gals doing, waking me up all hurly-burly like that? Mighty rude,” Mr. Mosely charged.
In its burlap sling, Willie Mosely’s broken arm looked like a small sack of vegetables tied to his chest. Bo Wilson, a struggling sharecropper, appeared behind the screen door. “Hold your horses,” he said, then stepped out on the porch. One look at us and his narrow face became serious. “What’s this about?”
“Chester Cools,” Zora blurted out, “he needs help! He’s saying —” She stopped. “Strange things. He lost control and fired his gun!”
News of the gun going off alarmed both men. “Anybody hurt?” Willie Mosely asked.
“We don’t know!” I said desperately. “Maybe Mr. Cools is, him acting so strange!”
“Slow down and tell us what happened,” Mr. Wilson said.
“Mr. Cools has barricaded himself in his house!” Zora replied.
“A barricade?” Confusion marked Mr. Wilson’s face. “To protect himself from what?”
“We don’t know!” Zora insisted, impatient. She did not say anything about a zombie. “Where is Mr. Clarke? We need Mr. Clarke!”
“Joe’s in Tallahassee today, seeing about the expansion,” Mr. Wilson said. “I’m minding the store. Willie, would you watch the store while I go get Doc Brazzle? He needs to pay Chester a visit.”
“What can Brazzle do ’bout a man shooting off a gun in his own house?” Willie asked. “Other than get shot himself?”
“Chester’s not going to shoot anybody. And if Chester’s hurt himself, Doc can help. If Chester hasn’t hurt himself, maybe Doc can talk some sense into him. Are you going to watch the store or aren’t you?”
“Sure I will. But I don’t like how none of this sounds.”
“Neither do I,” Mr. Wilson agreed. “But somebody’s gotta alert Brazzle if Chester is sick or crazy.”
“Or both,” Willie declared. Mr. Wilson left for Doc Brazzle’s.
“Don’t get shot,” Willie called after him. When Mr. Wilson was out of view, Willie turned and gave us a hard stare.
“Sorry we woke you,” Zora said. “How’s your arm?”
“On holiday,” Willie said. “Unfortunately, it’s put the rest of me out of work, too.” Looking at me, Willie continued, “Teddy was with Doc Brazzle when he set my arm. If Teddy were a little older, a little stronger, I would have let him set the bone.”
“I’ll tell him,” I said, smiling with pride. Teddy was famous in Eatonville for the animal hospital he had built outside one of his family’s barns. An assortment of pens and cages housed wild and domesticated animals alike. The men who came to the Baker farm to buy seed from Mr. Baker began picking Teddy’s brain on the health of their livestock. Doc Brazzle caught wind of the boy’s expertise and thought Teddy could easily learn to treat humans. Doc Brazzle asked Mr. Baker if Teddy could serve as his apprentice. Mr. Baker liked the idea. People can tell you what hurts and don’t generally peck, bite, or scratch. Teddy agreed.
“In fact, don’t tell the doc this,” said Willie, “but I think Teddy might have a better chance of getting through to Chester than he does.”
“Why do you say that?” Zora asked.
“Teddy knows animals,” he said, “and that’s just what Chester is sounding like right now — a scared animal.”
As we learned later, Bo Wilson arrived at Doc Brazzle’s only to find the doctor away in Orlando for the day. So Mr. Wilson left a message with his daughter, Stella, before hurrying on to Mr. Cools’s farm. He arrived around four, spied the makeshift barricade through the window, and something more: Chester sound asleep in his bed. Bo Wilson took that as an improvement upon the situation. Sleep, he decided, had stepped in to do Chester a favor and prevent an accident from occurring with the gun. Relieved, Bo Wilson went back to the store and closed at the customary time, six o’clock.
Mr. Clarke returned to Eatonville around midnight. The first he had heard of any trouble with Chester was the following morning when Mr. Wilson went by the porch to hear how things had gone in Tallahassee.
Nearly twenty-four hours after Zora had tried to persuade Mr. Cools that Mr. Clarke could help him, Mr. Clarke finally arrived on the small farm with Doc Brazzle in tow. Smashing down the door after knocking got them no answer, the two men found Mr. Cools where Bo Wilson had last seen him, in bed. No blood. No gunshot wound. Just Chester Cools: stiff, dead, gone. Doc Brazzle examined the body. Chester Cools had died of a heart attack.
Mr. Clarke had known Chester longer than anyone else in town had, and to the best of his knowledge, Chester Cools had no family, so Mr. Clarke handled the funeral arrangements. He asked Doc Brazzle to prepare the body for burial, and Teddy assisted. Mr. Clarke asked Bertram Edges to smith silver funerary spikes for the coffin. The bl
acksmith dutifully carried out the request. And Mr. Clarke asked John Hurston, who rarely did carpentry work anymore, to build the box and officiate at the service. John Hurston did both.
John Hurston and Joe Clarke were men linked by historical circumstance, men who chose to live in the same place for the same reasons: a conviction that black people have the right to live freely and to own their own things. Other than that, there was no personal tie. They were friendly but not friends. They didn’t share a bottle of spirits an evening or two a week like Mr. Clarke and Mr. Edges did, or hunt together, or visit each other, ever.
Mr. Cools had not been a churchgoing man. John Hurston respected that. He led the Lord’s Prayer at the grave, nothing more. Except for Lucy Hurston, who wasn’t feeling up to it, the whole town attended, as was custom with every funeral of an Eatonville resident. The solemn mood, though, never gave way to grief, tears. Standing between Teddy and Zora at the cemetery, I couldn’t help but chide myself for feeling so much sadder after Fanny’s wedding than I did at Mr. Cools’s funeral.
A few days after the funeral, Zora, Teddy, and I met at the Loving Pine and wandered south from there, where we discovered that a morning downpour must have swamped up the fields. Mosquitoes and no-see-ums whirred and buzzed above the murky puddles of standing water. I hardly looked up I was so busy swatting and slapping the bloodsuckers and mud flecks on my ankles and shins.
“Tonight, we gonna need pounds of baking soda paste for these bites!” Teddy prescribed. “This is as bad as it’s been all summer!”
“It’s worse than it’s been all summer,” I corrected.
“At the end of summer, it’s always bad,” Zora said. Then, as if considering what else the season held, she reminded us: “When we start school in a week, we’ll be the oldest kids. The oldest! Can you believe it?”
“We’re not one hundred, Zora. We’re fourteen,” Teddy shot back. “We’re not dying! We’re growing up!”
Zora and Me: The Summoner Page 3