by Andy Duncan
One night beside a campfire beneath a trestle, Daddy Mention held forth to a group of travelers about his many exploits: how he hacked through a prison wall with a single sharp toenail that wasn’t even his; how, one August, he swam out of a jailhouse in a river of his own sweat; how he had so many garters from grateful warden’s wives and sheriff’s daughters that he was paying a granny woman to stitch them into a quilt; how he used a singing skull to reel in Uncle Monday himself like a bream on a line and then threw him on the governor; how he escaped a chain gang by holding his breath till they declared him dead and buried him; and all such tales as that.
Finally a man just beyond the firelight said, “I God, mister. You sound like Daddy Mention himself.”
“That’s what they call me,” Daddy Mention said.
The man stepped forward, flashed a badge, and said: “Well, do you know who I am? I’m the sheriff, I’m the father of two daughters, and you are under arrest.”
Daddy Mention replied: “How do, Sheriff. Allow me to introduce myself. I am the lyingest nigger on the face of this Earth.”
Zora and the Zombie
“What is the truth?” the houngan shouted over the drums. The mambo, in response, flung open her white dress. She was naked beneath. The drummers quickened their tempo as the mambo danced among the columns in a frenzy. Her loose clothing could not keep pace with her kicks, swings, and swivels. Her belt, shawl, kerchief, dress floated free. The mambo flung herself writhing onto the ground. The first man in line shuffled forward on his knees to kiss the truth that glistened between the mambo’s thighs.
Zora’s pencil point snapped. Ah, shit. Sweat-damp and jostled on all sides by the crowd, she fumbled for her penknife and burned with futility. Zora had learned just that morning that the Broadway hoofer and self-proclaimed anthropologist Katherine Dunham, on her Rosenwald fellowship to Haiti—the one that rightfully should have been Zora’s—not only witnessed this very truth ceremony a year ago, but for good measure underwent the three-day initiation to become Mama Katherine, bride of the serpent god Damballa—the heifer!
Three nights later, another houngan knelt at another altar with a platter full of chicken. People in the back began to scream. A man with a terrible face flung himself through the crowd, careened against people, spread chaos. His eyes rolled. The tongue between his teeth drooled blood. “He is mounted!” the people cried. “A loa has made him his horse.” The houngan began to turn. The horse crashed into him. The houngan and the horse fell together, limbs entwined. The chicken was mashed into the dirt. The people moaned and sobbed. Zora sighed. She had read this in Herskovitz, and in Johnson too. Still, maybe poor fictional Tea Cake, rabid, would act like this. In the pandemonium she silently leafed to the novel section of her notebook. “Somethin’ got after me in mah sleep, Janie,” she had written. “Tried tuh choke me tuh death.”
Another night, another compound, another pencil. The dead man sat up, head nodding forward, jaw slack, eyes bulging. Women and men shrieked. The dead man lay back down and was still. The mambo pulled the blanket back over him, tucked it in. Perhaps tomorrow, Zora thought, I will go to Pont Beudet, or to Ville Bonheur. Perhaps something new is happening there.
“Miss Hurston,” a woman whispered, her heavy necklace clanking into Zora’s shoulder. “Miss Hurston. Have they shared with you what was found a month ago? Walking by daylight in the Ennery road?”
Doctor Legros, chief of staff at the hospital at Gonaives, was a good-looking mulatto of middle years with pomaded hair and a thin mustache. His three-piece suit was all sharp creases and jutting angles, like that of a paper doll, and his handshake left Zora’s palm powder dry. He poured her a belt of raw white clairin, minus the nutmeg and peppers that would make it palatable to Guede, the prancing black-clad loa of derision, but breathtaking nonetheless, and as they took dutiful medicinal sips his small talk was all big, all politics—whether Mr. Roosevelt would be true to his word that the Marines would never be back; whether Haiti’s good friend Senator King of Utah had larger ambitions; whether America would support President Vincent if the grateful Haitians were to seek to extend his second term beyond the arbitrary date technically mandated by the Constitution—but his eyes, to Zora who was older than she looked and much older than she claimed, posed an entirely different set of questions. He seemed to view Zora as a sort of plenipotentiary from Washington, and only reluctantly allowed her to steer the conversation to the delicate subject of his unusual patient.
“It is important for your countrymen and your sponsors to understand, Miss Hurston, that the beliefs of which you speak are not the beliefs of civilized men, in Haiti or elsewhere. These are Negro beliefs, embarrassing to the rest of us, and confined to the canaille—to the, what is the phrase, the backwater areas, such as your American South. These beliefs belong to Haiti’s past, not her future.”
Zora mentally placed the good doctor waistcoat-deep in a backwater area of Eatonville, Florida, and set gators upon him. “I understand, Doctor Legros, but I assure you I’m here for the full picture of your country, not just the Broadway version, the tomtoms and the shouting. But in every ministry, veranda and salon I visit, why, even in the office of the director-general of the Health Service, what is all educated Haiti talking about but your patient, this unfortunate woman Felicia Felix-Mentor? Would you stuff my ears, shelter me from the topic of the day?”
He laughed, his teeth white and perfect and artificial. Zora, self-conscious of her own teeth, smiled with her lips closed, chin down. This often passed for flirtation. Zora wondered what the bright-eyed Doctor Legros thought of the seductive man-eater Erzulie, the most “uncivilized” loa of all. As she slowly crossed her legs, she thought: Huh! What’s Erzulie got on Zora, got on me?
“Well, you are right to be interested in the poor creature,” the doctor said, pinching a fresh cigarette into his holder while looking neither at it nor at Zora’s eyes. “I plan to write a monograph on the subject myself, when the press of duty allows me. Perhaps I should apply for my own Guggenheim, eh? Clement!” He clapped his hands. “Clement! More clairin for our guest, if you please, and mangoes when we return from the yard.”
As the doctor led her down the central corridor of the gingerbread Victorian hospital, he steered her around patients in creeping wicker wheelchairs, spat volleys of French at cowed black women in white, and told her the story she already knew, raising his voice whenever passing a doorway through which moans were unusually loud.
“In 1907, a young wife and mother in Ennery town died after a brief illness. She had a Christian burial. Her widower and son grieved for a time, then moved on with their lives, as men must do. Empty this basin immediately! Do you hear me, woman? This is a hospital, not a chickenhouse! My pardon. Now we come to a month ago. The Haitian Guard received reports of a madwoman accosting travelers near Ennery. She made her way to a farm and refused to leave, became violently agitated by all attempts to dislodge her. The owner of this family farm was summoned. He took one look at this poor creature and said, ‘My God, it is my sister, dead and buried nearly 30 years.’ Watch your step, please.”
He held open a French door and ushered her onto a flagstone veranda, out of the hot, close, blood-smelling hospital into the hot, close outdoors, scented with hibiscus, goats, charcoal, and tobacco in bloom. “And all the other family members, too, including her husband and son, have identified her. And so one mystery was solved, and in the process, another took its place.”
In the far corner of the dusty, enclosed yard, in the sallow shade of an hourglass grove, a sexless figure in a white hospital gown stood huddled against the wall, shoulders hunched and back turned, like a child chosen It and counting.
“That’s her,” said the doctor.
As they approached, one of the hourglass fruits dropped onto the stony ground and burst with a report like a pistol firing, not three feet behind the huddled figure. She didn’t budge.
�
�It is best not to surprise her,” the doctor murmured, hot clairin breath in Zora’s ear, hand in the small of her back. “Her movements are . . . unpredictable.” As yours are not, Zora thought, stepping away.
The doctor began to hum a tune that sounded like
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 Dumballa 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 vera
nda, 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 wedged 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 LaFerrieré.