Along with Stella Brazzle and a few others, we were poised to take our place as Mr. Calhoun’s most advanced pupils. Our school only went up to eighth grade. The high schools for coloreds were in cities. The nearest one to Eatonville was a boarding school in Jacksonville. No one we knew had gone. Zora’s brother Bob worked as a field hand for three years before he attended pharmacy school. After eighth grade, the Baker boys worked their family farm before starting homesteads of their own. I knew that Teddy would not follow in their footsteps. The likelier path for him was the kind Doc Brazzle had carved by attending the Meharry Medical College in Tennessee, one of the first and only black medical schools in the country.
The shape of Zora’s future was as hazy as Teddy’s was sharply focused. Mr. and Mrs. Hurston would probably allow Zora to continue her studies with Mr. Calhoun beyond eighth grade, but I doubted Lucy Hurston would let Zora go live alone in Jacksonville to attend high school. There was no doubt she wanted more education for her bright, shining girl, but she didn’t seem ready to let the world be her baby’s teacher.
“I’m aware of how old we are,” Zora said, scoffing. “What you’re not acknowledging or aware of is that growing up means something different for me and Carrie than it does for you.”
“What do you mean?” Teddy was genuinely confused.
“However much I’d like to read and study the world over under tree canopies and great minds alike, I just can’t see yet how that’s going to happen, not yet anyway, with Mama sick and my father holding all the purse strings.” Zora acknowledged her challenge but didn’t fully concede to defeat.
“Lord, Zora!” Teddy said. “You’re the smartest person at school. Not the smartest girl. The smartest person, period! You could go to high school. You could go to college, for grief’s sake! I know you could and so does everybody else in this town!”
Teddy was right. Everyone did know that Zora was capable of tackling those things. But it was up to Zora alone to figure out how to make them happen. As we got older, the way to that path would only grow tougher. What constituted a person — being mean or sweet spirited, vindictive or kind, jealous or generous — mattered little or not at all against the weight of facts out of our control. Life was decided by men being men, women being women, some folks being white, others being black, and too many souls finding themselves piss-poor instead of well fed for no good reason.
“As a man, even a colored one,” Zora told Teddy, “the world, here and there, could be your oyster. On the other hand, where Carrie and I are concerned, the world has been well primed to hand us lists of places we could prepare oysters, serve them, and clean up the shells.” Zora turned and spoke directly to me: “I hate to think of anyone, especially you, spending years —” She sighed deeply.
“Taking care of white folks, like my mama,” I finished.
“Yes.”
“There’s no shame in tending folks,” I said. “Least of all folks like you two!” I took Zora’s hand, she grabbed Teddy’s, and the three of us formed a chain. It wasn’t a chain made of silver, platinum, or gold. It was forged of a stronger mettle, mined from lifelong friendship composed of love.
Our embrace loosened and we regained our bearings. Surprisingly, not heading anywhere in particular, we were closer to the Grounds, Eatonville’s cemetery, than anything else. June through October, just a flutter beyond the boneyard, layers of vines smothered the trees and sculpted them into a sweet pig face. November through May, the foliage thinned out and the sweet pig face was replaced by a wolf snout. Though it was only August, the face leering at us was more lupine than porcine.
“Oh, Lord. Look!” Zora yelled, pointing toward the graveyard. “Oh,” she yelled again, and bolted. Teddy and I tore off after, running down a short slope, through the cemetery gate and between uneven slate markers. We caught up to her at the edge of a six-foot-deep gash in the ground.
Planted in the dirt like an upright floorboard, the coffin lid looked thin and flimsy. The coffin contained only a few clumps of earth. Otherwise it was empty.
Chester Cools had been stolen from his grave.
Zora was dumbstruck. Teddy doubled over and heaved. My skin crawled with gooseflesh. Disbelief threatened to swallow us whole. Maybe all nightmares are really one single, continuous nightmare, I thought. And the nightmare was about one thing: emptiness.
A black automobile came sailing down the road and stopped at the cemetery gate. It was Mr. Ambrose driving his horseless. Mr. Clarke rode beside him.
“Snidlets,” Mr. Ambrose called, using his nickname for Zora, which he had given her on the day she was born.
One January morning, the way Mr. Ambrose told it, he was chopping pork on a table John Hurston had built when the wealthy old-timer recollected the carpenter was up in Jacksonville on a job while Lucy remained at home heavy with child. Mr. Ambrose went by the house to see how Lucy was doing and discovered the exhausted and elated woman cradling a mint-new baby girl. Fate had assigned Jude Ambrose the honor of cutting Zora’s belly cord. From that day forward, he called her Snidlets.
“Mr. Cools’s grave!” Zora cried.
“Yes, I know,” Mr. Ambrose said simply, sadly, climbing out of his car.
Mr. Clarke got out of the car, too, then pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. He removed his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow. His expression was jagged and grim. “Why are y’all here?” he asked.
“We were just wandering,” Teddy answered flatly. When I think back on it now, Teddy had already started looking pale then.
“The thought settled on me to pay my respects to Chester this afternoon, and I ain’t got the slightest idea why,” Mr. Ambrose explained. “Other than some things play angel whistles and some other things blow demon whistles.”
“Which whistle you suppose called you out here?” Zora asked. “The angel one or the demon one?”
Some men are above being questioned by women and children, let alone a colored girl child. Mr. Ambrose had too much respect for intelligence to be such a man.
“Whichever call it was, I imagine it’s the same one that you heard, too.”
“Jude, why don’t you carry these kids home,” Mr. Clarke ordered gently. “I’m going to look around here a bit.”
“I’ll drive them on and come back for you,” Mr. Ambrose answered.
“Don’t bother. After you drop the kids, would you go by Bertram Edges’s place and tell him to bring my horse out here? That will do me just fine.”
Zora erupted. “Mr. Clarke, you can’t stay here alone!”
“The gang of resurrection men already took what they came for: the body,” Mr. Clarke said, sounding exhausted, even defeated. “The only other things of value here were the silver coffin nails.” He paused to look at the coffin. “The resurrection men got those, too. They not coming back.”
I had only heard the term resurrection men a few times, but I knew it meant grave robbers. On starless nights, resurrection men gripped shovels, clenched lanterns, and disturbed the dead to steal valuables or to purloin corpses and sell them to scientists and medical schools. Mr. Cools had died once. It felt like the resurrection men had killed him again.
“It’s surprising that something like this hasn’t happened before, with the laws on the books outlawing medical schools from using white folks as cadavers,” Mr. Clarke said. “Chances are Chester’s body is on ice in a train car by now, headed for a fancy medical school up north. There’s nothing I can do about it. At this point, no one can.”
Teddy winced, seeming genuinely confused as he parsed out the absurd paradox of ranking people on the basis of skin color, even after they were dead. “Doctors cut into our bodies, our black bodies, because they don’t consider us people,” he said. “But then we come to define in their books and manuals,” Teddy finished, “what’s human.”
“That day Mr. Cools threatened Carrie and me”— Zora stopped —“Mr. Cools told us something, something about not being human, that makes sense to me now. I don’t thin
k his grave was robbed.”
“What are you talking about?” Mr. Clarke said slowly in a low voice, the muscles in his jaw working.
“That he was a zombie! We should have said something on that day,” Zora professed. “But you weren’t at the store, and then I figured it was just another crazy Chester thing. But now it doesn’t seem so crazy anymore, his empty grave and all.”
“Tell us, Zora,” Mr. Ambrose said gently, patiently. “What did Chester Cools say to you and Carrie?”
“That he was — and has been for a long time — not himself. That he was a zombie.”
For a full ten seconds, there was stricken silence. Then, “You’re speaking ill of the dead,” Mr. Clarke charged, his voice hard. “Chester Cools was no monster, Zora. He was a man, plain and simple.”
“The desecration of this grave is what is monstrous here,” Mr. Ambrose broke in. “Zora, we owe Chester Cools our respect; he deserves dignity.”
“If folks heard that Chester said he was a zombie,” Mr. Clarke said, exasperated, “no matter how ridiculous that is or how crazy Chester was, some people could use that against us. I wouldn’t put it past white folks to accuse Eatonville of black magic. I wouldn’t put it past them to burn the place down in the name of religion or safety or some other madness.”
Zora, for the time, accepted Joe Clarke’s admonition, but she also challenged him to execute justice. “So, are you going to go after the men who took Chester?” she asked. “If you recover Mr. Cools’s body and put it back in the ground, where it belongs, folks will know exactly what happened and everyone can rest in peace.”
“Oh, Zora,” Mr. Clarke said, disappointment in his voice. “You know very well that a colored law man can’t pursue white men or expect justice from them. Besides, while desecration is an abomination, it’s not murder. What matters is that Chester departed this world in his own time.
“So you three promise me something?” Mr. Clarke asked.
I looked at Zora while Teddy and Zora looked at Mr. Clarke.
“Promise you what?” Zora asked.
“Promise you will not mention Chester’s talk about zombies to anyone.”
Like Mr. Clarke, I believed that in the grips of some fit or fever dream, Chester Cools had told us a strange lie that, to him, was truth. Unlike Mr. Clarke, however, I still believed in magic, too. Maybe the most magical thing in life is how extraordinarily awful things, like grave robberies and lynchings, can exist alongside ordinary things like working, shopping, or just walking and talking. Maybe the true magic in this life is that even after facing and experiencing horror, we can still carry on with the ordinary. That’s what Mr. Clarke was asking us to do: to help prop up ordinary life, itself a magical and wondrous thing, with silence and a secret.
“Yes,” I pledged.
“Me too,” Teddy said.
“Zora?” Mr. Clarke needed to hear from her. She covered her face with her hands so she could think. When she finished thinking, she looked up, the color drained from her face. She looked sick to her stomach.
“Zora?” Mr. Clarke entreated.
I suspect she found the federation of a secret more palatable than the exile of a tattler. “Yes,” she answered.
Mr. Ambrose placed his hand on Zora’s arm. “Come on, now. I’m taking y’all home.”
Most people in town believed that, in all likelihood, resurrection men had taken Chester’s body, motivated by nothing more than greed. Still, a few other theories circulated.
Some folks whispered that Joe Clarke’s ambition to expand an all-colored town had inspired devilish white men to chase a fugitive across our border, then capture and kill him as a warning to us and others. First, that we were too ambitious. Second, that not even Eatonville was completely safe from the white man’s cruel power. Their greatest hope, perhaps, was that we would pack up our experiment of self-government.
Nature wasn’t being too welcoming Herself. A mini-drought had taken hold between Lake Catherine and Blue Sink. The goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace shriveled. The palmettos at the bases of the trees had shrunk and grown jaundiced, exposing nests of snake eggs to owls and the frying sun. Withered and matted, the Bermuda grass smelled of kindling. At the same time, over in Blue Bay, hard rains had driven up the water in the lake and several families had been flooded out. Clouds of mosquitoes and gnats hovered over them like clouds of fine mesh. The simultaneity of the extremes was more than unsettling.
Three days to the hour after the discovery of Chester Cools’s empty grave, Zora and I were walking to Blue Sink, still trying to make sense of it all.
“For years in school, from our readers,” she said, “we’ve learned about Greek gods, Roman gods, and Norse gods. And in church, we get an earful ’bout the Christian God. About how Jesus Christ died on the cross, then rose again. That basically boils down to one thing,” Zora said. “Jesus Christ was a zombie.”
At first, I bristled at the way she dared to challenge orthodoxy. But then my affection for Zora and my confidence in our intellects tempered my outrage. I didn’t have to agree, but I could certainly listen.
“Yet folks will never come out and call Christ a zombie. Why? Because zombie stuff is voodoo stuff and voodoo stuff is not Christian stuff. But both are supernatural stuff,” she continued. “Mr. Clarke thinks the grave robbery is about plain old natural folks — black folks and white folks here on Earth — nothing else. I respect Mr. Clarke, but I think what happened to Chester is about something else and other worlds.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t go as far to Heaven or Hades with it,” Old Lady Bronson intoned, startling both Zora and me out of our respective skins, which I’m sure tickled the age-old power. Her trusted fishing pole at her side, she stepped out of the westerly palm grove.
Old Lady Bronson wore a long brown shift dress with two large pockets. Her long, silver braid was pinned into a spiral at the nape of her neck. When I was very young, I feared the ancient woman. When I learned that she had been young once, and a newcomer to America itself, my fear became fascination. My fascination morphed into respect and admiration.
Zora’s eyes were aflame and her skin red, flushed.
Zora gave the midwife and healer a hug. “How long have you been back?” she asked.
Old Lady Bronson sighed. “Long enough.” Old Lady Bronson wasn’t the kind of woman who had to be told things to have knowledge of them. What could we tell her that she didn’t already know, about Chester, about anything?
All of Old Lady Bronson’s children lived up north. For the better part of the summer, Old Lady Bronson had been visiting her granddaughter Billie in Cape May, New Jersey. Billie and her husband owned and ran a boardinghouse and had two young children besides. So Old Lady Bronson had traveled north to lend a hand until school started back up.
“While you were in New Jersey, did you go to New York City?” Zora asked. “Did you?” She was about ready to pop.
“No.” Old Lady Bronson laughed, knowing Zora wouldn’t forgive her for missing such an opportunity. “What interest you have in anything new, anyways? By the sound of it, you more taken with the old places and ways. . . .”
“By the sound of what?” Zora asked.
Old Lady Bronson crowed. “You talking with Carrie about gods like you know a few. I’ll tell you one thing. This ain’t how folks talk up in Jersey. I’m glad to be home in the company of your awfully fine mind, Zora. Glad to be home.”
“We’re awfully glad you’re home, too,” I said, with so much feeling that I surprised myself a little.
“Now, about that conversation you were having: God is pure spirit. Jesus is spirit made flesh. People are flesh blessed with spirit. Zombies are cursed flesh with no spirit at all.” Old Lady Bronson informed us matter-of-factly. “Heaven ain’t on their itinerary.”
The spiraled braid at the base of Old Lady Bronson’s neck came loose and uncoiled like a gray serpent stretching its spine.
“In my village, when I was a mere girl — younger than the t
wo of you,” Old Lady Bronson began, “the fate of the living dead was thought to have befallen a bride-to-be called Novelette. I have never heard another story like it. It’s not a story I’ve ever told before or will ever tell again.”
We sat with bated breath. Time travelers are real and everywhere. The most experienced ones are called old people. A hostage of history as a young woman, the length of Old Lady Bronson’s years had transformed her into a caretaker of the past.
Old Lady Bronson continued: “Novelette was engaged to a merchant from Port-au-Prince. Three days before the ceremony, the wedding party journeyed to a mountain spring for a picnic celebration. A mixed-blood named Jacques Callier owned the coffee plantation on which the spring was situated and attended the gathering. The village below listened to the revelers sing for hours to the drumbeat of happiness. It was a beautiful song of anticipation and light. That light was quickly extinguished. The party over, Novelette, her fiancé, and the entire wedding party set out on their return to our village, but just steps from the village well, Novelette fell ill. The next afternoon, on what would have been the eve of her wedding day, she died. On the morning she was to sail to France with her merchant from Port-au-Prince as a wife, the young beauty was buried.
“Months later, while Novelette’s family and fiancé were still mourning, a well digger in our village, Jean, received a letter from Jacques Callier. Callier was requesting the well digger’s help in devising a new irrigation plan for his crops. The mountain spring Callier’s plantation relied upon had dried up. This was the same spring where Novelette’s wedding party had enjoyed their picnic.
“Jean the well digger set out one morning for what we all thought would be a month away of work. By supper of the same day, Jean returned to the village. Shaking with terror, he claimed to have seen Novelette on Callier’s plantation. But the Novelette he saw, he told us, smelled like rotten meat and her eyes had been sewn shut. Jean recognized that it was Novelette because she had a pink wing-shaped birthmark near her ear. Jean begged her to speak to him. She could only make droning, clicking sounds. Jean saw others there with their eyes sewn shut — men, women, and children. Some had grown scales, like armor, where burns had healed and scarred. None could speak — could only make those noises, like a machine.
Zora and Me: The Summoner Page 4