Zora and Me: The Summoner

by Victoria Bond

  I held out the nail. “I discovered this in East’s pocket.”

  A moment passed before Zora registered what was in my hand. “It’s a nail,” she said flatly.

  “Not just any nail,” I said bitterly.

  Zora frowned, took the nail from me, and examined it. She sat up, suddenly wide awake. “My God!” she exclaimed. “BE. Bertram Edges. Mr. Edges made this.” She stared at the nail, putting the pieces together. She looked up at me. “This was in East’s pocket?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “It’s like he kept this as a trophy,” she said. “A trophy! What kind of person does that? What kind?”

  “The grave-robbing kind,” I said, putting it bluntly.

  That nail suddenly represented for us everything that had happened in Eatonville in the last couple of months, everything that had come hammering down on us. The manhunt and the lynching; Chester Cools going crazy, then dying; the grave robbery; Teddy’s illness; the election; Lucy Hurston’s passing. Nails are meant to keep pictures on the wall, hold furniture together, and keep houses standing. This nail had helped rip our town apart.

  “We have to tell Sarah!”

  While I knew she was right, I wished more than anything right then that we could make the nail disappear, that we could erase what it undoubtedly signified.

  “She’s in the kitchen with my mother.”

  Zora took a deep breath and headed to the heart of the house, angry at the discovery of the nail but terrified, I know, by what she had to do. She entered the kitchen with me at her heels. “You come to say good-bye to your big brother?” Bob asked Zora. “East here is gonna take me to the station.”

  East stood near the back door, looking smugger than he had right to be, surrounded as he was by children who’d just lost their mother. As long as East was fine, everything was fine; it mattered very little to him that the worlds of the people around him had burned. “Your mama tells me you started my laundry,” East said to me. “Thank you.”

  “You won’t be thanking anyone in a minute,” Zora said.

  Sarah stirred in her chair. “Zora, what are you talking about?”

  Zora held out the nail on the platter of her palm and swiveled so everyone could see. “Carrie found this in East’s pocket.”

  East maintained his composure while puzzled confusion came over my mother. What was all the fuss over an ordinary nail in the pocket of a young man?

  Bob grimaced. He had been through enough already and had no patience for some new hurtful craziness from Zora. Sarah sat blankly at the table. “Zora, what’s this all about?” Bob snapped. “East needs to get me to the station.”

  Piqued, Zora said, “Before you leave, why don’t East tell us where he got this nail?”

  “I do apologize for not emptying my pockets ’fore I dropped off my things.” There was an edge to his voice that blunted his apology. “I’m always fixing one thing or another, mainly to do with my business. I must have been hammering something, had more nails than I needed in my pocket, and just forgot it was there.”

  “You didn’t fix anything with that nail!” I hissed, beside myself with his lies. “This nail is proof you helped rob Chester Cools from his grave!”

  The air in the room had turned into water. Almost everyone was drowning in disbelief.

  Zora pointed at East with righteous certainty. “This silver nail was smithed special by Bertram Edges for Mr. Cools’s coffin. We can go to Mr. Edges’s workshop this minute and ask him, but we don’t have to, do we, East? Why would you have this if you didn’t have something to do with the grave robbery?”

  “Let’s calm down,” Bob urged, still hoping his sister and I were out of our minds but sounding less dismissive. “There must be an explanation for this strange coincidence, right, East? And you should have the chance to explain.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said, trying to appear calm and composed. She struggled to say something further, but her chest was rising and falling rapidly, and she could barely catch her breath. Finally, she managed, “Please, I need you to explain.” East’s eyes grew soft, but strangely so, like an opaque rind of fat on a cut of meat.

  “I love you, Sarah,” he began. “I have since the moment I laid eyes on you at your father’s church the day of the wedding. I didn’t know that fella who tied the knot. I fibbed and said I did, but I was there for no other reason than to get a peek at Eatonville’s finest. And I did. I saw you. I want to marry you, darlin’. I do. More than anything in this world, I want to marry you.”

  As Sarah listened, her breath stabilized and her hands stopped shaking. It seemed like something true and abiding steadied her. I couldn’t tell if it was disgust or true love. “So how’d you get that nail?” she asked. “You were going to explain that.”

  “Like I said, I’m set on marrying you, but I’m not from means. And I’d have to work a long, long time carrying folks all around the state before I earn enough money for a fine house like this. I’m saving, though, pinching every penny, and I’m working hard. One day I reckon, with your help, I’ll become a big man like your daddy. With God’s help, hopefully here in Eatonville, I’ll become a prosperous man.

  “I’m strong and I ain’t afraid of getting dirty, of doing things other folks won’t. A week or two before I even came here to these parts, I heard that the medical college in Tallahassee was looking for resurrection men and that they’d pay two hundred dollars for a cadaver. Two hundred whole dollars! Oh, what I could do with that money, I thought. I could get a motor carriage. I could grow my business. And then I met you, Sarah. I couldn’t stop thinking about you, ’bout all the things I could do for you with the money, for us.” East was nearly finished, his eyes softer than before. “So when this Cools fella kicked it, it was like I ain’t have a choice. I dug him up and turned him in.”

  I felt sorry for East and hated him at the same time. He was a fool. He thought he had to buy Sarah with money when her affection for him had been rich enough to win her.

  He held his hand out toward Sarah. “So, will you marry me?”

  Zora leaped across the kitchen at East, but before she had a chance to strike him, Bob pulled her away. The commotion woke Everett from his nest in the front room. The little boy wandered into the melee, confused, sleep crusting the ends of his eyelashes like salt crystals. Mama pulled him to her waist. Sarah pounded her fist on the table. The stacks of dishes and platters jumped and we all startled.

  “If you came here for the first time right now,” Sarah said, “with my mother just buried in that same cemetery where Chester Cools was lying, would you have dug her up and sold her?” East opened his mouth to answer. Sarah held up her hand. “Stop!” she commanded. “I already know the answer. I have no doubt you would have sold my sweet mother’s body to butchers! And here you are, standing in my mother’s house, asking me if I’ll marry you! A monster! I’d rather be struck dead this very minute and join Mama in the grave than be the wife of a monster.” Sarah stood tall and resolute. “Rot in Hell, East. It’s where you belong.”

  East stepped toward Sarah, still wrapped in shameless, impossible confidence. Bob stepped in front of him. “You heard my sister! Get outta here!”

  East ignored Bob and knelt on the floor. He almost bared his teeth. “Not without this,” he said, and picked up the silver nail that had dropped on the floor at some point in the confrontation. Mama’s knees buckled, and with Everett on one side and me on the other, we caught her. Zora tried to go after East again. Bob could barely hold her back.

  “It’s the one thing in this house that’s mine, and I’m taking it with me. Don’t worry, Sarah,” East said flatly. “I won’t bother you again.” We watched East depart with the nail. He stopped at the washing barrel, picked up his hat, dusted it off, placed it on his head, and doffed it at us. The devil had impeccable manners. Bob released Zora, who bolted to the door and slammed it shut.

  Pale as cotton, Sarah collapsed into a chair. Everett went to her first. Then Zora, and final
ly, Bob. The four of them clutched one another and wept over the mountain of their shared grief. It was the last time all of Lucy Hurston’s children would be together under the same roof.

  In spite of being busier than he had ever been with Eatonville’s and his church’s affairs, John Hurston cut loose and found time to have affairs with women in public. The evening he brought his first woman home — a buxom lady called Mattie Andrews who was just a flutter older than Sarah — Sarah sat down straightaway and wrote a letter to her grandmother. In it, she announced that she, Zora, and Everett were coming to live with her and the rest of the Pottses in Alabama. Zora thanked Sarah for including her but refused to go. Everett didn’t have a choice; his mother was dead and the woman who mothered him now was Sarah, so he obeyed her.

  John Hurston could never deny his favorite child anything, but one evening Zora and I were sitting on the porch and overheard him from outside, pleading with Sarah to stay.

  “That evil young nigger is gone!” he said, referring to East. “I went to where he was staying in Lake Catherine, and it ain’t no hoax. He’s packed up and left these parts for good. He’s gone. So there’s no reason for you to leave. Why you wanna go so badly, huh? Why?”

  “There are too many memories here,” Sarah answered. “How things are now threatens to destroy them.” Her meaning was unmistakable.

  “How things are now?” he asked, pretending not to understand. “How things are now, your mama gone, is why I need you more than ever.”

  Sarah took no prisoners: “It seems like the only one ’round here you need, Daddy, is Mattie.”

  The thundering slap came hard and fast. Our eyes widened, and Zora grabbed my wrist. Sarah whimpered, like a songbird that had been stoned out of a tree. A door slammed, and we weren’t sure who had fled the scene. When Sarah came out on the porch, her face red, her eyes redder, we knew.

  Something in John Hurston did not recover from striking Sarah. For days afterward, he hardly spoke. Mattie Andrews, however, couldn’t stop yakking all over town that she was taking a room at the Hurston house as a live-in domestic.

  A few days later, Sarah and Everett left. Zora could not bear to see them off at the train so bade them farewell at the front gate. A sullen and defeated John Hurston drove Sarah and Everett to the station in Maitland.

  At first Mattie Andrews did actually do some housekeeping. But it wasn’t long before she was focusing all her energies on simply “keeping” John Hurston.

  Zora could not tolerate Mattie’s presence, so she began to spend nights at my house — or at the Bakers’, who had a spare room and enjoyed hosting her. Other times, she’d stay late at school and Mr. Calhoun would take her home to have supper with him and his wife. Zora spent many an evening with Joe Clarke, as well, and, of course, she read away more nights than I could count at Old Lady Bronson’s. It wasn’t really safe to sleep outdoors, but Zora did that, too, under the Loving Pine, convinced that the force of the tree would guard her against predators of all kinds.

  It was dizzying just how quickly our lives had turned. My mother had spent most of my life leaving early for work, staying on late, and boarding with sick white folks as a nursemaid for a week or two at a time. What made it possible for her to earn that living was the fact that I could eat, sleep, and experience the love of a family at the Hurston house. But with the death of Lucy Hurston and the unraveling of the Hurston family, that home away from home no longer existed.

  Folks fret and they prepare mightily for the loss of the man of the house, the breadwinner. No people anywhere have ever counted on life insurance more than the cohort of colored folks I knew. We scrimped and saved and denied ourselves niceties in the present so that our kin could have a chance at grandness in the future. We set them up to survive without us because it crushed us to think of them share-cropping a piece, or serving white folks one minute and running from them through the woods the next because something came up missing or the coffee was too hot. But there is no insurance against a family losing their soul. There is no insurance against the loosening of the ties that bind and their withering in the cold wind.

  If John Hurston had died, the family would have been forced to make sacrifices. Sarah would have had to work. Bob would have had to send money home; furniture would have been sold. But the family would have remained together. The family would have remained intact, unified in their love. Though John Hurston had learned how to support a family, that didn’t make him a family man. Because he had wandering dust in his gut instead of roots, the family disintegrated. Ahead of schedule, Zora had to go out in the world and start becoming who she was meant to be. But, dear Lord, it was not a cakewalk. It was a trial by fire.

  After school one afternoon, I accompanied Zora home. We had planned on finishing Kipling’s Kim under the Loving Pine, but she had left the novel back at the house. It had been a month of Sundays since either of us had cracked it open. It also had been a long while since I had greased her scalp and brushed and braided her hair. I still wore a glove on my left hand, but both sets of my fingertips were hungry for the feel of hair besides my own to sculpt, handle, and care for. After months of upheaval and pain, we yearned for the normalcy of a book and a hairdo. One thing, among so many that sadden me, is that we didn’t get to finish the book that day at the Loving Pine. We never would.

  From as far as a quarter mile from the front gate, Zora would decide whether she was going home. If she spied her father’s automobile, she’d stay away. If it was gone, John was out. Mattie, too, trailing John Hurston to keep his roving eye still. In which case, Zora’d see to her errands in the house and leave. On this day, the horseless gone, we sprinted our last leg of the journey to fetch the book from the house. Though it was warm, it was still winter and we wanted to soak up as much of the crisp afternoon light as possible. The house was perfectly quiet. Zora checked the cabinet under the window seat for the book; it wasn’t there. We went to the bedroom she had once shared with Sarah and searched under the bed and on the shelf: nothing. I went to the dining room and looked around the buffets. Zora even hunted for it under the table. Dust bunnies, nothing more. So much for Mattie Andrews’s housekeeping.

  Finally, Zora said, “It must be in Mama’s room.” I nodded and Zora darted off. The next thing I knew, Zora was screaming. “HOW DARE YOU! HOW DARE YOU!”

  I hurried to the bedroom, where I found Zora pulling Mattie Andrews out of her mother’s feather bed by the hair. Mattie yelped, her eyes stretched to slits, and attempted to free herself from Zora’s grip. Mattie’s bottom hit the floor, and she still hadn’t gotten loose from Zora. I got out of the way. Zora dragged the squirming woman past me, out of her mother’s bedroom, and into the foyer.

  “AND YOU’RE IN YOUR STREET CLOTHES!” Zora screamed. “IN MAMA’S BED IN YOUR DIRTY STREET CLOTHES!” Mattie managed to grab one of Zora’s ankles. Zora lost her balance and, in an effort to break her fall, released Mattie’s hair. Mattie tried to stand, but the tangle of sheets around her feet snared her. Zora pounced at the opportunity. She straddled Mattie and slapped her in the face, once, twice. Then Zora put her hands around Mattie’s neck and began to choke her. That’s when I finally found my wits. I leaped toward the two and tried to pull Zora off of Mattie. Will and wild grief had made Zora more solid than that damned well cap.

  “STOP! YOU’LL KILL HER!” I shouted.

  THUMP, THUMP, THUMP! Three gaveling thuds stopped my heart. I turned. It was Mr. Ambrose, banging his cane on the floor. I rocked backward, letting Zora go.

  “Leave that woman be!” he commanded. “Zora, you leave her be!”

  It took a moment before Zora could even register his presence, let alone his words. “Zora!” I said, bending to pull her hands away from Mattie’s throat. “She’s not worth all this, and you know it.”

  Zora stopped strangling Mattie but didn’t completely release her throat or get off of her. Mattie gasped for air and began to cry.

  Mr. Ambrose touched Zora on the shoulder. “Come on,
now,” he coaxed. “Stand up for me.”

  “But Mama’s bed,” Zora keened, her spirit in shards. “The place we were born. The place I was born. The place Mama died. She made filthy my mama’s bed.”

  “Snidlets,” Mr. Ambrose said, “this gal can’t do no such thing. You know better than that.”

  Mr. Ambrose rapped his cane on the floor again a single time. Zora rose now, stepped away from Mattie, only to fall into Mr. Ambrose’s ancient arms. He held my friend the way a father should hold a daughter, with love, tenderness, and forgiveness. Mattie scrambled to her feet, ran from the foyer, and clear out the front door.

  “I’m gonna help you outta this here fix,” Mr. Ambrose told Zora. I’m gonna help you git what you deserve in this life. Do you hear me, Zora Neale?”

  “Yes,” Zora answered, her voice surprisingly clear. “I hear you.”

  John Hurston put Zora out for good for nearly murdering the woman he said he was going to make his wife, though he never did make good on that promise.

  Zora stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Calhoun for the few days it took for Mr. Ambrose to arrange for Zora to attend boarding school in Jacksonville. The girl who had feared she wouldn’t be able to attend high school at all was heading for high school six months early. This was a new and big beginning for Zora. For me, it felt like a dreaded ending, almost the end of my world.

  Seven years earlier, when my father didn’t return home from seasonal work like he was supposed to, the days became defined by that missing piece, by his absence. The loss of my father taught me that sometimes our loved ones disappear. I understood that Zora wasn’t dying, but what her life would be like in Jacksonville, a real city, one hundred forty miles away, I hadn’t one clue. What did exist for me was the very real likelihood that I might never see her again.

  Zora’s last days in Eatonville were a flurry of nice meals and parting gifts. Mr. Calhoun cooked, which was very rare for men then, and he made his special for us: stewed chicken and dumplings. I set the table while Mrs. Calhoun took Zora’s measurements in the front room. The schoolmaster’s wife and my mother had a plan. Mrs. Calhoun was going to purchase Zora two store-bought dresses and have them sent to the school. Receiving something nice in the mail would buttress Zora’s reputation among the girls, Mrs. Calhoun thought. Meanwhile Mama prepared an excellent sewing kit for Zora to take with her, complete with a rainbow of threads, needles with eyes enough to get a rich man into Heaven, fabric for nice patches, and, of course, ribbon.