Mama don’t want no peas no rice
She don’t want no coconut oil
All she wants is brandy
Handy all the time
but wasn’t. At the sound of his humming, the woman—for woman she was; Zora would resist labeling her as all Haiti had done—sprang forward into the wall with a fleshy smack, as if trying to fling herself face first through the stones, then sprang backward with a half-turn that set her arms to swinging without volition, like pendulums. Her eyes were beads of clouded glass. The broad lumpish face around them might have been attractive had its muscles displayed any of the tension common to animal life.
In her first brush with theater, years before, Zora had spent months scrubbing bustles and darning epaulets during a tour of that damned Mikado, may Gilbert and Sullivan both lose their heads, and there she learned that putty cheeks and false noses slide into grotesquerie by the final act. This woman’s face likewise seemed to have been sweated beneath too long.
All this Zora registered in a second, as she would a face from an elevated train. The woman immediately turned away again, snatched down a slim hourglass branch and slashed the ground, back and forth, as a machete slashes through cane. The three attached fruits blew up, bang bang bang, seeds clouding outward, as she flailed the branch in the dirt.
“What is she doing?”
“She sweeps,” the doctor said. “She fears being caught idle, for idle servants are beaten. In some quarters.” He tried to reach around the suddenly nimble woman and take the branch.
“Nnnnn,” she said, twisting away, still slashing the dirt.
“Behave yourself, Felicia. This visitor wants to speak with you.”
“Please leave her be,” Zora said, ashamed because the name Felicia jarred when applied to this wretch. “I didn’t mean to disturb her.”
Ignoring this, the doctor, eyes shining, stopped the slashing movements by seizing the woman’s skinny wrist and holding it aloft. The patient froze, knees bent in a half-crouch, head averted as if awaiting a blow. With his free hand, the doctor, still humming, still watching the woman’s face, pried her fingers from the branch one by one, then flung it aside, nearly swatting Zora. The patient continued saying, “Nnnnn, nnnnn, nnnnn,” at metronomic intervals. The sound lacked any note of panic or protest, any communicative tonality whatsoever, was instead a simple emission, like the whistle of a turpentine cooker.
“Felicia?” Zora asked.
“Nnnnn, nnnnn, nnnnn.”
“My name is Zora, and I come from Florida, in the United States.”
“Nnnnn, nnnnn, nnnnn.”
“I have heard her make one other noise only,” said the doctor, still holding up her arm as if she were Joe Louis, “and that is when she is bathed or touched with water—a sound like a mouse that is trod upon. I will demonstrate. Where is that hose?”
“No need for that!” Zora cried. “Release her, please.”
The doctor did so. Felicia scuttled away, clutched and lifted the hem of her gown until her face was covered and her buttocks bared. Zora thought of her mother’s wake, where her aunts and cousins had greeted each fresh burst of tears by flipping their aprons over their heads and rushing into the kitchen to mewl together like nestlings. Thank God for aprons, Zora thought. Felicia’s legs, to Zora’s surprise, were ropy with muscle.
“Such strength,” the doctor murmured, “and so untamed. You realize, Miss Hurston, that when she was found squatting in the road, she was as naked as all mankind.”
A horsefly droned past.
The doctor cleared his throat, clasped his hands behind his back, and began to orate, as if addressing a medical society at Columbia. “It is interesting to speculate on the drugs used to rob a sentient being of her reason, of her will. The ingredients, even the means of administration, are most jealously guarded secrets.”
He paced toward the hospital, not looking at Zora, and did not raise his voice as he spoke of herbs and powders, salves and cucumbers, as if certain she walked alongside him, unbidden. Instead she stooped and hefted the branch Felicia had wielded. It was much heavier than she had assumed, so lightly had Felicia snatched it down. Zora tugged at one of its twigs and found the dense, rubbery wood quite resistant. Lucky for the doctor that anger seemed to be among the emotions cooked away. What emotions were left? Fear remained, certainly. And what else?
Zora dropped the branch next to a gouge in the dirt that, as she glanced at it, seemed to resolve itself into the letter M.
“Miss Hurston?” called the doctor from halfway across the yard. “I beg your pardon. You have seen enough, have you not?”
Zora knelt, her hands outstretched as if to encompass, to contain, the scratches that Felicia Felix-Mentor had slashed with the branch. Yes, that was definitely an M, and that vertical slash could be an I, and that next one—
MI HAUT MI BAS
Half high, half low?
Doctor Boas at Barnard liked to say that one began to understand a people only when one began to think in their language. Now, as she knelt in the hospital yard, staring at the words Felicia Felix-Mentor had left in the dirt, a phrase welled from her lips that she had heard often in Haiti but never felt before, a Creole phrase used to mean “So be it,” to mean “Amen,” to mean “There you have it,” to mean whatever one chose it to mean but always conveying a more or less resigned acquiescence to the world and all its marvels.
“Ah bo bo,” Zora said.
“Miss Hurston?” The doctor’s dusty wingtips entered her vision, stood on the delicate pattern Zora had teased from the dirt, a pattern that began to disintegrate outward from the shoes, as if they produced a breeze or tidal eddy. “Are you suffering perhaps the digestion? Often the peasant spices can disrupt refined systems. Might I have Clement bring you a soda? Or”—and here his voice took on new excitement—“could this be perhaps a feminine complaint?”
“No, thank you, Doctor,” Zora said as she stood, ignoring his outstretched hand. “May I please, do you think, return tomorrow with my camera?”
She intended the request to sound casual but failed. Not in Damballa Calls, not in The White King of La Gonave, not in The Magic Island, not in any best-seller ever served up to the Haiti-loving American public had anyone ever included a photograph of a Zombie.
As she held her breath, the doctor squinted and glanced from Zora to the patient and back, as if suspecting the two women of collusion. He loudly sucked a tooth. “It is impossible, madame,” he said. “Tomorrow I must away to Port-de-Paix, leaving at dawn and not returning for—”
“It must be tomorrow!” Zora blurted, hastily adding, “because the next day I have an appointment in… Petionville.” To obscure that slightest of pauses, she gushed, “Oh, Doctor Legros,” and dimpled his tailored shoulder with her forefinger. “Until we have the pleasure of meeting again, surely you won’t deny me this one small token of your regard?”
Since she was a sprat of thirteen sashaying around the gatepost in Eatonville, slowing Yankees aboil for Winter Park or Sunken Gardens or the Weeki Wachee with a wink and a wave, Zora had viewed sexuality, like other talents, as a bank of backstage switches to be flipped separately or together to achieve specific effects—a spotlight glare, a thunderstorm, the slow, seeping warmth of dawn. Few switches were needed for everyday use, and certainly not for Doctor Legros, who was the most everyday of men.
“But of course,” the doctor said, his body ready and still. “Doctor Belfong will expect you, and I will ensure that he extend you every courtesy. And then, Miss Hurston, we will compare travel notes on another day, n’est-ce pas?”
As she stepped onto the veranda, Zora looked back. Felicia Felix-Mentor stood in the middle of the yard, arms wrapped across her torso as if chilled, rocking on the balls of her calloused feet. She was looking at Zora, if at anything. Behind her, a dusty flamingo high-stepped across the yard.
Zora found signboards in Haiti fairly easy to understand in French, but the English ones were a different story. As she w
edged herself into a seat in the crowded tap-tap that rattled twice a day between Gonaives and Port-au-Prince, Felicia Felix-Mentor an hour planted and taking root in her mind, she found herself facing a stern injunction above the grimy, cracked windshield: “Passengers Are Not Permitted To Stand Forward While the Bus Is Either at a Standstill or Approaching in Motion.”
As the bus lurched forward, tires spinning, gears grinding, the driver loudly recited: “Dear clients, let us pray to the Good God and to all the most merciful martyrs in heaven that we may be delivered safely unto our chosen destination. Amen.”
Amen, Zora thought despite herself, already jotting in her notebook. The beautiful woman in the window seat beside her shifted sideways to give Zora’s elbow more room, and Zora absently flashed her a smile. At the top of the page she wrote, “Felicia Felix-Mentor,” the hyphen jagging upward from a pothole. Then she added a question mark and tapped the pencil against her teeth.
Who had Felicia been, and what life had she led? Where was her family? Of these matters, Doctor Legros refused to speak. Maybe the family had abandoned its feeble relative, or worse. The poor woman may have been brutalized into her present state. Such things happened at the hands of family members, Zora knew.
Zora found herself doodling a shambling figure, arms outstretched. Nothing like Felicia, she conceded. More like Mr. Karloff’s monster. Several years before, in New York to put together a Broadway production that came to nothing, Zora had wandered, depressed and whimsical, into a Times Square movie theater to see a foolish horror movie titled White Zombie. The swaying sugar cane on the poster (“She was not dead… She was not alive… WHAT WAS SHE?”) suggested, however spuriously, Haiti, which even then Zora hoped to visit one day. Bela Lugosi in Mephistophelean whiskers proved about as Haitian as Fannie Hurst, and his Zombies, stalking bug-eyed and stiff-legged around the tatty sets, all looked white to Zora, so she couldn’t grasp the urgency of the title, whatever Lugosi’s designs on the heroine. Raising Zombies just to staff a sugar mill, moreover, struck her as wasted effort, since many a live Haitian (or Floridian) would work a full Depression day for as little pay as any Zombie and do a better job too. Still, she admired how the movie Zombies walked mindlessly to their doom off the parapet of Lugosi’s castle, just as the fanatic soldiers of the mad Haitian King Henri Christophe were supposed to have done from the heights of the Citadel Laferriere.
But suppose Felicia were a Zombie—in Haitian terms, anyway? Not a supernaturally revived corpse, but a sort of combined kidnap and poisoning victim, released or abandoned by her captor, her bocor, after three decades.
Supposedly, the bocor stole a victim’s soul by mounting a horse backward, facing the tail, and riding by night to her house. There he knelt on the doorstep, pressed his face against the crack beneath the door, bared his teeth, and sssssssst! He inhaled the soul of the sleeping woman, breathed her right into his lungs. And then the bocor would have marched Felicia (so the tales went) past her house the next night, her first night as a Zombie, to prevent her ever recognizing it or seeking it again.
Yet Felicia had sought out the family farm, however late. Maybe something had gone wrong with the spell. Maybe someone had fed her salt—the hair-of-the-dog remedy for years-long zombie hangovers. Where, then, was Felicia’s bocor? Why hold her prisoner all this time, but no longer? Had he died, setting his charge free to wander? Had he other charges, other Zombies? How had Felicia become both victim and escapee?
“And how do you like your Zombie, Miss Hurston?”
Zora started. The beautiful passenger beside her had spoken.
“I beg your pardon!” Zora instinctively shut her notebook. “I do not believe we have met, Miss…?”
The wide-mouthed stranger laughed merrily, her opalescent earrings shimmering on her high cheekbones. One ringlet of brown hair spilled onto her forehead from beneath her kerchief, which like her tight-fitting, high-necked dress was an ever-swirling riot of color. Her heavy gold necklace was nearly lost in it. Her skin was two parts cream to one part coffee. Antebellum New Orleans would have been at this woman’s feet, once the shutters were latched.
“Ah, I knew you did not recognize me, Miss Hurston.” Her accent made the first syllable of “Hurston” a prolonged purr. “We met in Arcahaie, in the hounfort of Dieu Donnez St. Leger, during the rite of the fishhook of the dead.” She bulged her eyes and sat forward slack-jawed, then fell back, clapping her hands with delight, ruby ring flashing, at her passable imitation of a dead man.
“You may call me Freida. It is I, Miss Hurston, who first told you of the Zombie Felix-Mentor.”
Their exchange in the sweltering crowd had been brief and confused, but Zora could have sworn that her informant that night had been an older, plainer woman. Still, Zora probably hadn’t looked her best, either. The deacons and mothers back home would deny it, but many a worshipper looked better outside church than in.
Zora apologized for her absent-mindedness, thanked this, Freida? for her tip, and told her some of her hospital visit. She left out the message in the dirt, if message it was, but mused aloud:
“Today we lock the poor woman away, but who knows? Once she may have had a place of honor, as a messenger touched by the gods.”
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” said Freida in a forceful singsong. “No! The gods did not take her powers away.” She leaned in, became conspiratorial. “Some man, and only a man, did that. You saw. You know.”
Zora, teasing, said, “Ah, so you have experience with men.”
“None more,” Freida stated. Then she smiled. “Ah bo bo. That is night talk. Let us speak instead of daylight things.”
The two women chatted happily for a bouncing half-hour, Freida questioning and Zora answering—talking about her Haiti book, turpentine camps, the sights of New York. It was good to be questioned herself for a change, after collecting from others all the time. The tap-tap jolted along, ladling dust equally onto all who shared the road: mounted columns of Haitian Guards, shelf-hipped laundresses, half-dead donkeys laden with guinea-grass. The day’s shadows lengthened.
“This is my stop,” said Freida at length, though the tap-tap showed no signs of slowing, and no stop was visible through the windows, just dense palm groves to either side. Where a less graceful creature would merely have stood, Freida rose, then turned and edged toward the aisle, facing not the front but, oddly, the back of the bus. Zora swiveled in her seat to give her more room, but Freida pressed against her anyway, thrust her pelvis forward against the older woman’s bosom. Zora felt Freida’s heat through the thin material. Above, Freida flashed a smile, nipped her own lower lip, and chuckled as the pluck of skin fell back into place.
“I look forward to our next visit, Miss Hurston.”
“And where might I call on you?” Zora asked, determined to follow the conventions.
Freida edged past and swayed down the aisle, not reaching for the handgrips. “You’ll find me,” she said, over her shoulder.
Zora opened her mouth to say something but forgot what. Directly in front of the bus, visible through the windshield past Freida’s shoulder, a charcoal truck roared into the roadway at right angles. Zora braced herself for the crash. The tap-tap driver screamed with everyone else, stamped the brakes and spun the wheel. With a hellish screech, the bus slewed about in a cloud of dirt and dust that darkened the sunlight, crusted Zora’s tongue, and hid the charcoal truck from view. For one long, delirious, nearly sexual moment the bus tipped sideways. Then it righted itself with a tooth-loosening slam that shattered the windshield. In the silence, Zora heard someone sobbing, heard the engine’s last faltering cough, heard the front door slide open with its usual clatter. She righted her hat in order to see. The tap-tap and the charcoal truck had come to rest a foot away from one another, side by side and facing opposite directions. Freida, smiling, unscathed, kerchief still angled just so, sauntered down the aisle between the vehicles, one finger trailing along the side of the truck, tracking the dust like a child. She pass
ed Zora’s window without looking up, and was gone.
“She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
Mouth dry, head aching from the heat and from the effort of reading her own chicken-scratch, Zora turned the last page of the manuscript, squared the stack and looked up at her audience. Felicia sat on an hourglass root, a baked yam in each hand, gnawing first one, then the other.
“That’s the end,” Zora said, in the same soft, non-threatening voice with which she had read her novel thus far. “I’m still unsure of the middle,” she continued, setting down the manuscript and picking up the Brownie camera, “but I know this is the end, all right, and that’s something.”
As yam after yam disappeared, skins and all, Felicia’s eyes registered nothing. No matter. Zora always liked to read her work aloud as she was writing, and Felicia was as good an audience as anybody. She was, in fact, the first audience this particular book had had.
While Zora had no concerns whatsoever about sharing her novel with Felicia, she was uncomfortably aware of the narrow Victorian casements above, and felt the attentive eyes of the dying and the mad. On the veranda, a bent old man in a wheelchair mumbled to himself, half-watched by a nurse with a magazine.
In a spasm of experiment, Zora had salted the yams, to no visible effect. This Zombie took salt like an editor took whiskey.
“I’m not in your country to write a novel,” Zora told her chewing companion. “Not officially. I’m being paid just to do folklore on this trip. Why, this novel isn’t even set in Haiti, ha! So I can’t tell the foundation about this quite yet. It’s our secret, right, Felicia?”
The hospital matron had refused Zora any of her good china, grudgingly piling bribe-yams onto a scarred gourd-plate instead. Now, only two were left. The plate sat on the ground, just inside Felicia’s reach. Chapter by chapter, yam by yam, Zora had been reaching out and dragging the plate just a bit nearer herself, a bit farther away from Felicia. So far, Felicia had not seemed to mind.
The Living Dead Page 51