Zora and Me

by Victoria Bond

  My favorite thing to chew on from the treasure box was the singing. Maybe it was because my eyes had always been closed when he sang to me that it was easy for me to pretend to myself that he was still right there. He never sang the blues — mostly hymns and lullabies and songs he just made up — but suddenly I felt like I was remembering that he did. I could even hear his voice.

  But good things alone don’t make up a person who’s real. For someone to be real in my heart and my head, I have to take the good about them with the bad. I knew my father used to do things that bothered me, or make me do chores I didn’t feel like doing, but one day I realized I just couldn’t remember them. I think he didn’t like me to track mud in from outside . . . but that’s all I could think of. That’s when I knew he wasn’t real to me anymore, that he had been gone too long — when the things that got on my nerves about him faded from my memory.

  Not for my mama, though. She was different. I always knew when she thought about my father, good parts and bad, because she would clean up our little house even when it didn’t need it — when our three tiny rooms couldn’t stand another scrubbing. What Mama couldn’t put away in her heart, she always found a place for in a drawer or a cupboard.

  Saturdays, my mama’s cleaning was at its most fevered. It was the only day she didn’t work or go to church. It was a time devoted to absence — my father’s, and dirt’s. But not even cleaning could ruin my Saturday morning, because it was the only day of the week I didn’t have to wake up and be somewhere straightaway. I never minded school, and church always felt like what church should be. It was just that being with my own mama in our own little home for a day held a special magic for me. Bleach and soap and starch, ironed clothes and piney floors, all smell like Mama to me, even to this day.

  By the early afternoon, the cleaning was all done, and I was sitting with my mama on the front step. She was resting after hanging out the wash to dry, and I was tucked up under her arm, soaking up the fact that she was sitting still at all. Then right when Mama stood up to finish chores, the creaking in her back loud as a rusty hinge, Zora and Mrs. Hurston strolled up.

  After what had happened at supper the night before, I didn’t know when I might see Zora again. So seeing her right then was an unexpected treat. Mama seemed surprised, too.

  “Etta,” said Mrs. Hurston, “I’m sorry for just showing up on a Saturday like this when I know you got things to tend, but I was wondering if I could take Carrie with me and Zora over to Lake Maitland. Sarah’s home practicing piano for church and minding the baby, and we have some guests coming next week I got to buy some towels for. And our girls should have some kind of fun that don’t need staining up their clothes something awful.”

  I looked at my mama real hard while Mrs. Hurston stated her case. She didn’t have Mama until she mentioned stained clothes. If Mama hadn’t just finished laundry, I don’t think I would have been allowed to go. Mama’s knuckles were still raw from the steaming water. She looked at her hands before she spoke.

  “You know, Lucy, I ain’t never thought of that before. If Carrie here became a little more ladylike, I’d have less trouble scrubbing clothes. Indeed you can take my girl with you. She need a little civilizing.”

  “Same here for this one.” Mrs. Hurston smiled at Zora, who was nearly her mother’s height. “Same here.”

  Zora and I held Mrs. Hurston’s hands the whole way to Lake Maitland, just the three of us. I figured our trip was like a bandage on the wound Mr. Hurston had delivered to Zora the previous night. During our walk, Mrs. Hurston kept asking, “How y’all feeling?” Without fail, both of us responded, “Fine.” But I could tell Zora wasn’t fine so much as better. And Mrs. Hurston knew that the fastest way to heal Zora was for her to spend time with people she loved. That afternoon I was a patch on a healing blanket.

  The town of Lake Maitland was a pretty busy place, even back then. Between the pine forests and the orange groves and the packing house and the ice factory and the stables, there was thousands of people living and working there — half the people in Eatonville went there for work, like my mama. It was a fancy place, too, maybe not as swanky as Winter Park, but folks from cold places all over — even presidents! — thought it was worth the trip to spend the winter in Lake Maitland.

  This particular Saturday, the town was crawling with folks who cared about more things than I could count. A great many of them were concerned with looking sharp as tacks. Others couldn’t see what was right in front of them for how busy they were trying to get where they were going. The sun was hot, but that was the least of Lake Maitland’s heat. The rattle of wagon wheels, the hollow clatter of horseshoes, and the rumble of an occasional automobile engine created a warmth on the ground that might as well have been baking our feet. We hopped and skipped like coal embers were grazing our toes right through our shoes. When we ran into Mrs. Eunice Jefferson in the linen store, she also seemed jumpy, but in a different way. She had springs in her jaws.

  Mrs. Jefferson was in the back of the store where the towels were stacked. The shop was lovely and cool. Fabric for bed sheets was on big spools in the store window. Beaded pillows trimmed with all colors of lace lined the shelves. Some were velvet. Others were silk. I wanted to touch my face to each one. I wanted to rub luxury on my skin, and I wanted a little luxury to rub off on me. I didn’t know otherwise how to take any home to my mama.

  Zora wasn’t nearly as interested in what I considered to be the store’s treasures as she was in sticking her nose in grown folks’ business.

  “A murder in Eatonville got the white folks over here awful nervous,” Mrs. Jefferson whispered. “I know what gets under they skin better than most. Being in someone’s house, cleaning up they slop, you can’t help but get they thoughts rubbed off on you. No matter how down deep they think they got ’em locked up, either. If there’s one person it’s hard to hide a thought from, it sure is a maid.”

  “That ain’t no kind of talk for children,” Mrs. Hurston whispered back, but Mrs. Jefferson must not have heard her, because she just kept on.

  “’Course white folks don’t care who it was. Not that anybody know — he wasn’t kin to anybody in these parts or we’d have heard by now. Probably one of them turpentine workers riding a freight train and fell off, like a fool.” Mrs. Jefferson clucked.

  Mrs. Hurston leaned over and shooed us out. “Wait for me outside, you two.”

  “But that ain’t none of my business,” we heard Mrs. Jefferson say, and she started in on another topic. “Now, if you want to hear something . . .”

  Zora grabbed my hand and pulled me behind a large bale of fabric, where we could go on listening. Zora wasn’t about to let any grown folks’ talk slip through her fingers.

  Mrs. Jefferson was off to the races. “. . . call herself Gold. Gold! Now, what kind of a name is that? Who call theyself Gold?” Mrs. Jefferson clicked her tongue — or maybe it was Mrs. Hurston. “But that ain’t the best part. You know white folks can’t see like we do,” Mrs. Jefferson said. “You had to see this girl! If you would have seen her, Lucy, you couldn’t have missed her.”

  “Is she that pretty?”

  “I guess some folks would say she is. Now the stack of new tablecloths she left here with,” Mrs. Jefferson whispered, “they sure was pretty!”

  Mrs. Jefferson didn’t stop there.

  “But that ain’t the best part! Just yesterday, I was at the butcher for the Joneses’ Sunday dinner when Gold done traipsed her way in proud as she want to be. Lucy, this girl done had a white man accompany her to the butcher! But that ain’t the best part!”

  “Then what is?” Mrs. Hurston asked, her words bubbling with curious, amused laughter.

  There was a pause. I guessed that Mrs. Jefferson was looking over her shoulder. Then she spoke in the loudest whisper I ever heard: “Her and the white man engaged to get married!”

  Mrs. Hurston gasped. And Zora had finally had her fill of silence and invisibility. She popped up from behind the
bale like a weasel. “What y’all talking about? Who’s getting married?”

  Suddenly the fun was over.

  “What are y’all doing here?” Mrs. Hurston was more irritated than angry. “Didn’t I tell you both to wait for me outside?” Zora didn’t have a chance to answer. The owner of the store, a white woman named Mrs. Walcott, suddenly appeared from behind the counter.

  “What’s all this ruckus?” Her voice was sharp.

  “Just children, ma’am. Just children,” Mrs. Jefferson answered. “I’m done with Mrs. Jones’s picking out for the afternoon. These dish towels will be all.”

  Mrs. Walcott also eyed the two ivory towels draped over Mrs. Hurston’s arm. They looked the same to me as clouds. The way the white woman stared at them, they might as well have been.

  “What are those towels for?”

  Mrs. Hurston didn’t hesitate. “I’ve started doing some housework for some folks here in town. They’re having guests arrive tomorrow. These are for them.”

  Zora got a strange look in her eye, but she knew better than to blurt out the truth, as her mother told the kind of lie we’d all heard plenty of times before. Eatonville’s motto might as well have been: no need for white folks to know our business; best to let them think they got the upper hand.

  Since folks always called these kinds of answers “white lies,” Zora and I reckoned it was because white folks required lies from us. That’s not to say that we thought of our business, our lives, as particularly colored or Negro. We just didn’t think white people needed to be privy to everything that was ours. Our lives and our selves weren’t simply anyone’s for the taking.

  “Well, I’ll ring it all up now,” Mrs. Walcott said, satisfied, and took both sets of towels to the register. Mrs. Jefferson and Mrs. Hurston followed behind her, and we followed behind them. We were all silent.

  When we got outside, I looked at the two women holding their packages — Mrs. Jefferson’s for her employer, and Mrs. Hurston’s for her own household — and I couldn’t see any difference between the two women. It picked at my spirit that the surest way for Negroes to get along was to pretend we were only ever running errands for white folks. Didn’t people like Mrs. Walcott think anything belonged to us?

  But a different lie suddenly took center stage.

  The first time I saw Gold, I realized there’s no such thing as good-looking people or bad-looking people. There’s just people you see and people you don’t.

  Folks couldn’t help but see Gold. They couldn’t take their eyes off her. She was the sun.

  Mrs. Jefferson and us were saying our good-byes in front of the linen store when Gold appeared arm in arm with her man. She wore a beautiful flower-print dress, fancier than Sunday clothes but worn with an easy grace that said she didn’t think the dress was special. She held a matching parasol and walked with a light music in her step. She might have been a spirit. She seemed more beautiful than any living person I had ever seen.

  Mrs. Hurston and Mrs. Jefferson stopped dead in their tracks. But they didn’t eye Gold nearly as carefully as they did the man she was with. I don’t know why. Next to her, he wasn’t much to look at.

  The man was tall as Joe Clarke, and walked with his chest poked out. He was sweaty. Stains darkened both sides of his white morning coat from the armpits almost to his waist. I wasn’t surprised, either. It could have been the flame in Gold’s shining brown eyes that got him running water so.

  I had never seen anything like Gold. Her face was round and soft. Her hair was blond and fell around her face in loose waves and midway down her back. Her lips held the shape of a smile. Ease was just her natural expression. And under the entire surface of her peach-fuzz skin there was the glow of candlelight.

  Gazing at her, drinking her in, I imagined that if a disagreeable moment had tapped her on the shoulder, Gold wouldn’t have recognized it. I couldn’t picture a world where her kind of person knew trouble.

  A window full of horseshoes got the man’s attention, and he wandered off for a closer look. Gold continued walking straight ahead on her own, and now Mrs. Jefferson and Mrs. Hurston were trying to ignore her. They couldn’t. Not only was Gold walking in our direction; she was walking straight toward us. To be exact, I think she was drawn straight to Zora. She must have recognized a familiar light beaming from inside my friend.

  “Good afternoon, ladies,” she said.

  Mrs. Jefferson got full of huffs and puffs, and Mrs. Hurston stood up straighter. Gold spoke respectfully, but she wasn’t looking at the older women. Zora and I were her intended audience.

  The beautiful lady was talking directly to us. Whatever it was that made her so beautiful must have been inside of us, too. We were pleased as punch, and nervous.

  Neither Mrs. Jefferson nor Mrs. Hurston said a word. Their shared expression said it all. They flashed her the fake smiles of caution, of good sense.

  “Afternoon! My name is Zora!” Zora’s words were bouncier than a ball. “What’s yours?”

  “It’s not polite to ask strangers questions, Zora,” Mrs. Hurston interrupted.

  “It’s quite all right,” the woman said. “Hello, Zora. My name is Gold.” Then she looked at me. “And what’s your name?”

  “Carrie. Ma’am.” I felt the urge to curtsy, or bow, but I didn’t know how to do either one, so I just bobbed my head a second.

  “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet both of you,” Gold said. And a beat later the man came up from behind and grabbed her hand. I didn’t know if he was done looking at the horseshoes or not, but he had certainly been in a rush to get to Gold. In only a few feet, he had nearly gotten clear out of breath.

  “Why are you talking to . . . these . . . people?” His voice was loud, with a nervous, strained authority. Then his eyes shifted, checking to see if anyone was watching us. Once he established that no one was — too many people streaming past all around us — he tugged firmly at Gold’s wrist.

  She didn’t budge; she stood her ground — sort of. She placed her hand on top of his, as if she took his gesture for affection. “Just a moment, William, dear. I’m saying good-bye to my friends Zora and Carrie.” She spoke in the same sugary calm tone, though without looking at him. Then she said, “Bye-bye, ladies,” like she had been chatting with old friends and the conversation had come to a natural end. “It was lovely to chat with you. You take care, now.”

  Zora waved to her, and I did the same. As the couple walked away, we could hear the man asking Gold in a fevered whisper, “Who are those people? How do you know them?” She kept her hand on his and turned her smile to the opposite side of the street. I don’t know if she answered him.

  “Can you believe the nerve of that woman?” Mrs. Jefferson practically hissed.

  “I surely cannot,” Mrs. Hurston shot back. “And that man doesn’t want to let her out of his sight. She best be careful.”

  “About what?” Zora chimed.

  Mrs. Hurston met Zora’s eyes. “She best be careful about being too friendly with people she gave up her place with.”

  I was puzzled. “Who’s that? Who are Gold’s people?”

  Mrs. Hurston only answered, “Some folks are too dangerous to have people.”

  Mrs. Jefferson sucked her teeth in agreement, then left us without a word, strolling in what just happened to be the same direction as Gold and her William.

  Mrs. Hurston shook her head. “I suppose Mrs. Jefferson wants to find out if that ain’t the best part.” With the little parcel of towels under her arm, she took our hands again and resumed our journey, which I suspected was more about seeing than buying in the first place.

  Not much could have had the power to pull Zora’s attention away from what we had just seen, but amazingly, moments later we stumbled onto something that did.

  Of all the shops on Maitland Avenue, Lake Maitland’s main street, it was always the bookseller that drew Zora in like a fish hooked on a line. I wasn’t half the reader she was, but today something in the plate-glass w
indow made us both stop. Propped up center stage was a thick green book, its linen cover greener for the black-inked words pressed into its surface: The Myth and Lore of Gator Country.

  We couldn’t believe our eyes. A whole book — a majestic book — consecrated to the monster at the heart of our mystery. Was it a dusty dry cyclopedia of facts? Or was it the answer to our prayers — a book of revelation, a key to secrets? The cover drawing etched in black told us everything: a gator emerging from a curtain of swamp grass was headed right at us, turning its head just a little so we could see its vicious grin.

  We pressed our hands and noses against the glass. You could hear us breathe.

  Mrs. Hurston had been watching us. I knew it pleased her that her daughter was moved by books and words, that Zora had eyes to see the world and the wits to express what she saw. So when Zora turned to her mother, Mrs. Hurston already recognized the pleading in her eyes.

  “Honey, you know we’re blessed in a lot of ways, but we only have just so much money. And that book —” She stared at the paper tag on a string that trailed from the spine. “That book costs more than these towels. I’m sorry.”

  “I know, Mama,” Zora answered, looking down to hide the disappointment in her eyes. “I understand.”

  Mrs. Hurston tenderly smoothed her daughter’s hair and took hold of both our hands for the walk home.

  When we got back to the Hurstons’ yard, we climbed the chinaberry tree and just sat up there awhile thinking about the book. After that we climbed down and chased each other around the tree until we got dizzy. I plopped down on the ground. Zora plopped down beside me. A monarch butterfly fluttered in our wake, the black outlines on its white-and-bright-orange wings like shards of stained glass.

  “You think that butterfly could be a fairy?” Zora asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wanna follow it.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, I do. Come on, Carrie. You got legs to run on, don’t you?”