Zora and Me: The Summoner

by Victoria Bond

  East took Sarah’s outrage as confirmation that she and he were allies. He took one of Sarah’s hands and caressed it, as if offering her protection from Zora.

  Zora saw through East’s charade and dug in. “No. Not to him.”

  In the next moment, Zora seemed to look into the future and catch a glimpse of her sister’s possible future with East. “I am sorry,” Zora said with genuine feeling, “for you, Sarah. I really am.”

  The dismal future Zora seemed to be intimating for her sent Sarah spiraling into fragile, speechless uncertainty.

  “I need to get away from here,” Zora said to no one in particular. “Carrie, you mind going for a walk with me?”

  “Not at all,” I answered.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sarah surreptitiously remove her hand from East’s.

  “Why don’t you come with us, Sarah?” I suggested, hoping against hope she’d take the lifeline. “The house is full of people. Somebody can look after your mother for a few minutes.”

  Sarah shut down her feelings. “No. I’m fine,” she said, straightening. “Mama needs me.”

  Nothing was fine.

  Zora and I headed north on the road. I peeked in the windows of all the automobiles as we passed them. Silver gears and knobs, like the inner workings of a clock, protruded from the dashboards. I was reminded of Mr. Cools’s camera.

  “I told Teddy about us going back to Mr. Cools’s cabin,” I said. “And about what we found there.”

  “How is Teddy?” Zora asked, ignoring most of what I had just said.

  “Well, mostly he sounds like himself, but he definitely doesn’t look like himself. He’s still awfully thin. I expect he’ll improve. I hope so.”

  “He will,” Zora reassured me. “Teddy getting better is the best news we’ve had in weeks.”

  “It certainly is,” I seconded. We walked in silence for a while, but Zora couldn’t keep her feelings inside for long.

  “I can’t understand it!” she blurted out. “Sarah’s been acting like she’d happily dive into a gator swamp for a chance at a wedding ring.”

  “Looks like she fell in love,” I said.

  “More like she slipped and fell off a cliff!”

  “We walking anywhere in particular, Zora? Someplace you had in mind?”

  “Well,” she answered sulkily, “I’m itching to go talk to Joe Clarke, but I don’t imagine Mr. Clarke wants to talk to anyone named Hurston ever again.”

  “You were trying to help when you spoke your piece yesterday. He knows that.”

  “Why didn’t Joe tell us what he knew about Chester the day we were all at the cemetery? He should have. If he had,” Zora said, “I might not have made such a fool of myself yesterday and, more importantly, wouldn’t have made things that much easier for my father. . . .

  “The Terrace Side lynching and Chester’s grave robbery put a knife in the heart of this town. I helped to turn it.” She was beside herself with shame.

  “Maybe the sooner I leave Eatonville, the better off I’ll be, the better off Eatonville will be. Maybe I am a curse.”

  Zora’s self-pity made me boil over. “Seriously, Zora? Since when did you start listening to the likes of Stella Brazzle?”

  Zora had no answer for that.

  “And I’m beginning to think,” I snapped, “that you’re as bad as your father, who thinks everything is about him! Well, it’s not. You are not your father and you are not a curse and you are not responsible for every single thing that happens in Eatonville! Stop feeling sorry for yourself and just be a better you.”

  Zora looked at me in open-mouthed surprise.

  I immediately regretted my outburst. But after a moment, she simply said, “You’re right.”

  Then we walked to Joe Clarke’s, each having stunned the other into silence.

  Mr. Clarke’s porch was empty. The store was, too, but we could hear voices coming from the back of the store, where Mr. Clarke had an office. We followed the voices and Zora knocked on the door. The voices fell silent and Old Lady Bronson opened the door. Joe Clarke was the only other person in the office. He was sitting behind his desk.

  “What you two doing here?” the old woman asked, but not in any way unfriendly. “Still trying to thwart democracy?” she added with a wink.

  “Um, no,” I answered bashfully.

  “I came here to apologize to Joe,” Zora said, her eyes on Mr. Clarke. Old Lady Bronson stepped aside so the two friends could see each other. “I should have kept my mouth shut during the debate,” Zora continued. “Things were already bad and I made them worse. I’m sorry, Mr. Clarke. So sorry.”

  Old Lady Bronson heaved a sympathetic sigh. Mr. Clarke stood, went around to the front of his large, smooth desk, and sat on its edge. “You were the only one who came to my defense,” he said. Far from angry, Joe Clarke was touched. “This town has taken a lot from me. It’s also given me much more than my share. One of the best things Eatonville ever gave me, Zora, was you.”

  Zora relaxed with relief and gratitude. “I can’t believe the fool I’ve been,” she said, regret still reddening her eyes. “Today, I’ve finally woken up to the fact that every time something really bad has happened in Eatonville, the culprit hasn’t been a monster, a ghost, or a curse.” She paused. “It was a white man passing through here that murdered Ivory. It was a white man who stabbed Mr. Polk in the hopes of stealing his land. It was a mob of white men that lynched Terrace Side. And it looks likely that white folks, some of these so-called resurrection men, had a hand in the fate of Mr. Cools, too.”

  Mr. Clarke was quiet, just listening.

  “Whatever made Mr. Cools think he was a zombie?” Zora asked. “Did he ever tell you?”

  Mr. Clarke gave a sad, toothless smile: “Eighteen years ago, when I was a young man, this store was still just a shell. Afternoons, Chester lent me a hand hammering beams. I was grateful. The lumber to build my store cost so much, I ain’t have three red cents for an actual hire. I was also lonely. Evenings, we’d talk.

  “One night after our work was finished, we sat here, me drinking moonshine; Chester never touched the stuff. That night, he said he had blood on his mind. I figured he meant revenge and was gonna tell me how his mama or wife or child had been sold away from him on an auction block. But that wasn’t what he was talking about. Not at all.

  “Next thing, Chester lifted his pants leg, pulled a jack knife from his boot, and unfolded the blade. Before I knew what he was about, he slashed his own forearm. I jumped clear outta my chair. Chester bled normal at first — red, like you and me — but then the blood turned black, like ink. Chester made sure I got a good look at that strange blood before he staunched the bleeding with a rag. I was sure the moonshine had snatched or scrambled my mind. Then Chester began to tell me a story, a goddamned wretched story.”

  An icy chill gripped my chest, remembering the blotch from my nightmare. Zora looked down at her hands, I think remembering the blackness from the photograph that had bled onto her skin.

  Mr. Clarke rubbed his eyes and loosened from his brain a ghastly tale he would prefer not to have heard. He said, “When he was a boy, Chester lived in Atlanta. On the outskirts of Atlanta at that time, there was a doctor named Sumner. This Dr. Sumner ain’t own any slaves outright. Strange, especially for such a wealthy man. What he had, instead, was a distillery. From miles around, folks came to buy Sumner’s whiskey.

  “To help him with his operation, he rented young boy slaves, those who weren’t much use to their masters yet, like Chester was then. The slave owners thought they had quite a deal. Sumner was readying these boys for the real work they’d be expected to do someday. The slaves themselves started calling the doctor by a different name: the Summoner. He called children away from the world of the living to another, one consumed by death.

  “Turns out, the distillery was not the only piece of the operation. No one outside was aware that the doctor was also doing other . . . work. Sumner had become fascinated wi
th photography, with its ability to capture a likeness, a moment in time, and thus preserve it forever. He had also become obsessed with the idea of reanimation: bringing the dead back to life.” Joe paused to let that sink in for a moment. Zora was riveted; I was repulsed.

  “His experiments demanded corpses,” Joe continued. “So Chester, like most of the smallest and youngest boys, began his horrible apprenticeship by first learning how to pick locks. Eventually the doctor did away with lock picking altogether; he had cut a set of skeleton keys that could open a range of deadlocks used on crypts and cemetery gates across Georgia. Some of that same whiskey the Summoner was known for was used to preserve stolen corpses in big barrels that lined the cellar. The whiskey masked the stench of death.

  “When the Summoner began building a camera, the boys were more afraid of it than the pickled bodies. With its one big gaping eye, it seemed alive. The Summoner believed that the camera held the secret to unlocking the mystery of death itself, which further terrified the boys.”

  “During the war and after,” Old Lady Bronson added, “I remember spiritualist photographers popping up everywhere. They made fortunes selling folks supposed portraits of their dead loved ones from the other side, claiming that the camera could see what the naked eye couldn’t: spirits. This Summoner was a little different. He was trying to instill spirit himself. He fancied himself a god.”

  Joe Clarke nodded and went on. “When Chester outgrew his use to the Summoner, he was replaced by someone younger and smaller. Chester went back to being a house slave. But the passing years eventually brought the war, and many slaves escaped and fled to join the Union’s campaign: women and girls to be wartime domestics, tending to laundry and preparing gruel, men and boys to be soldiers. On his own way to join the fight for freedom, Chester was caught by a group of Confederate soldiers and lynched.”

  Zora gasped. I trembled.

  “And that’s when Chester was reunited with the Summoner,” said Joe Clarke. “The Summoner had heard that Chester was going to be lynched and arrived to photograph Chester while he was still hanging from the tree. Then he cut Chester down, claimed the body, which nobody else wanted, and laid it on a cooling board in his cellar.

  “There, Chester began to breathe again. He was alive. The Summoner, convinced that he had resurrected Chester, tended to Chester’s wounds, set his bones, and nursed him back to health, which took months. Chester was to be the Summoner’s trophy, proof that his experiment had finally worked: that his camera could bring a man back to life. It was the tale the Summoner told Chester again and again — and anyone else who would listen. And why wouldn’t Chester, who remembered the noose tightening around his neck, the rope cutting into his throat from the weight of his own body, believe him?”

  I shivered. We had been right. Chester was the lynched man in the picture.

  After a moment, Zora asked, “Whatever happened to the Summoner?”

  “Buildings in Atlanta that had not been outright destroyed by cannon fire in the war were greatly compromised by Sherman,” Joe said. “Chester told me that the Summoner was killed in the collapse of his own place. Chester even buried the doctor himself.”

  I could almost see the wheels in Zora’s mind turning and turning. “In a trunk back at Chester’s,” she cried, “we found a camera, and we found tintypes, too! I think it must be the Summoner’s camera! Why else would it be there in Chester’s house? And we saw the stuff you saw Chester bleed, Mr. Clarke. It got on my hand! That stuff is real. It got on my hand from one of the pictures, one of those awful pictures!”

  “God, Chester had that man’s camera? I wish I’d known.” Shame shook Mr. Clarke to the core. “I could have changed Chester’s mind.”

  “That wasn’t your burden, Joe,” Old Lady Bronson consoled. “Do you actually think you could have changed Chester’s mind after all these years?”

  A faithfulness to mystery, to strange unknowable symmetries, vibrated Zora. “Chester Cools really was a zombie,” she said.

  Joe Clarke scowled. “Have you been listening to a single thing we’ve been saying, Zora?”

  “Yes, and it sounded a lot to me like Chester was lynched, then brought back to life by this Summoner and his evil camera, and that he had black blood flowing through his veins as proof, proof you saw yourself.”

  Mr. Clarke looked at Zora with a certainty that pained him. “Chester Cools was not a zombie. He survived that lynching, accidentally cut down before he was completely dead. The Summoner lied to Chester, maybe he even lied to himself. He did not resurrect Chester. A lynching got Chester in the end, just not his own and not in the way you’d think. The horror of what happened to Terrace Side is what killed Chester. Like it was happening all over again.

  “I didn’t see it that day on the porch when Chester lost his wits, but I see it now.” Joe Clarke looked sadder than I’d ever seen.

  A horrible thought came to me. I believed Mr. Clarke and Old Lady Bronson that Chester Cools had survived his own lynching, but is merely surviving the same as living? I think Chester Cools understood perfectly what he had become: a zombie, which by another name meant the victim of trauma who’d never really healed.

  One look at Zora, and I could see that she had yet to be convinced. Recognizing this, Old Lady Bronson took Zora’s hand and said, “Come back to my place with me, Zora. I’ve got a book for you. That book might have enough truth in it for you, dear girl, even for you.”

  The next time I visited Teddy, he already had company. Zora sat in his desk chair with a book open in her lap while Teddy occupied the nook at his bedside; from opposite sides of the room, the two faced off. I felt like a referee as soon as I plunked down on the bed.

  Teddy shifted in his chair, into the sunlight. His sunken chest had a bowl curve, beautiful and frail. He asked Zora, “Have you told Carrie any of what you just told me?”

  “No,” she answered. “I thought I’d bring it to you first since you’re the scientist.”

  “Bring what?” I inquired.

  “This.” She held up the book. “It’s what Old Lady Bronson wanted to show me.”

  I squinted at the spine. The gold leaf script had too many curves and curlicues for me to make out the words.

  “It’s called The Transformation Philosophorum,” she said. “It’s about alchemy.”

  “Alka-what?”

  “Alchemy,” Teddy said, “the process of changing metals into gold. Nowadays folks call it hoodoo chemistry, on account of the fact that no one has ever managed to make it work.”

  “A lot of folks think a good deal of science is hoodoo,” Zora objected. “Some of the folks my father preaches to don’t trust a word that comes out of any book other than the Bible. Those folks are afraid of hoodoo and of science because those might offer more sensible explanations for things they don’t or can’t understand. But what makes turning ordinary metal into gold any less possible than turning water into wine? Ever see anybody make that work? Now, take this stuff that got on me from the pictures in Mr. Cools’s trunk,” Zora continued. “I believe it’s the exact same stuff that Mr. Clarke saw bleeding from Chester’s arm. And this book here tells me it’s called nigredo. Why shouldn’t I believe this book just as much as I’m told to believe the Bible?”

  Zora stood, stomped across Teddy’s room with the tome, and dropped it in his lap. “Here,” she said. “I’m open-minded, Mr. Science. Are you? Read.”

  “From the beginning?”

  “Yes,” Zora commanded.

  Teddy read:

  “The science of alchemy consists of three independent operations. The colors of these operations represent and embody the rainbow of transformative capabilities possible for the trained alchemist to achieve. The pigments of the subterranean world are nigredo, the black; albedo, the white; and rubedo, the red. Nigredo is of particular interest to the alchemist set on perfecting the act of creation or resurrection.

  The properties of nigredo belong to the chemical process of mortifactio, the p
rogram of death. Birth, new life, cannot emerge without first undergoing mortifactio. The sleep of death, the darkness of death, is the only habitat, the only process, truly suitable for the awakening of a new life. It is said that God separated darkness from light. Nigredo is the descendent of the original darkness, god-matter. If the maker, the God, if you will, is good, then the nigredo is good, a balm. If the maker is evil, then the nigredo is the water of evil. The embodiment of the nothing that is everything, nigredo can never be destroyed.”

  My skin crawled. The idea that mere mortals could have at their fingertips the primordial and unendingly flexible source of life and the ability to control it, frightened me. People already had free will. People had already created versions of Heaven and Hell right here on Earth. Wasn’t that more than enough?

  Teddy stopped reading but didn’t lift his eyes from the page. Something in these strange words had gotten to him. Recognition came over his face. He might have lacked the imagination that brilliantly colored Zora’s world, but Teddy’s commonsense worldview was far from impoverished. “The stuff you got on your hand, Zora,” he said thoughtfully. “You know what it sounds like to me?”

  “Nigredo,” Zora offered stubbornly.

  “Black mercury,” he said, ignoring her sass.

  Zora was suddenly all ears. Black mercury sounded as tantalizing as nigredo.

  “I can’t believe I’m just remembering this now,” Teddy said. “The photographer who came to our house to take Micah and Daisy’s wedding portrait — I asked him about the chemical process used to transfer images, and he said that he used black mercury. It’s an element, a heavy metal. It doesn’t evaporate like water. The dark trunk probably provided ideal conditions for preserving the chemical. It would make sense that traces of it would still be on the tintypes.”

  “Even after all these years?” Zora did not sound convinced by Teddy’s scientific explanation.

  “Is black mercury dangerous?” I worried.