Zora and Me

by Victoria Bond

  “You gonna sit down and help me with this?” I asked. “I can’t eat it all myself.”

  “Yeah.” He smiled shyly. He dug his hand into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out something I couldn’t see. “And this is from me,” he said. “Put out your hand.”

  Into my hand he placed something the size of my palm. It was a turtle shell, empty, dry, and beautiful — ebony black with bright yellow dots on it. It was his spotted turtle shell, the star of his windowsill.

  “Teddy . . .” I kept staring at it. “You can’t . . .”

  He sat down, right next to me on the step. “I want you to have it.” He took the peanut brittle, held the towel tight around it, and whapped it hard on the ground so that it cracked into pieces we could eat. He took out a piece and gave it to me. Then he took out another piece and held it up. “I will help you with this, though.”

  We chomped for a few minutes, not talking except to say how good it was. When Teddy stopped chewing, he stretched his legs out and asked, “How’s your arm?”

  “Itches.”

  “Don’t hurt?”

  “Not too much if I don’t move it real quick. Or roll over on it at night.”

  Teddy nodded. He was looking around everywhere, except at me. “My daddy said we should never have been out there. And I keep thinking that since we was, I should have protected you.”

  “What could you have done? I bolted.” I suddenly felt embarrassed. “I thought I heard a voice.”

  “Yeah, me too. We all did. It was Mr. Pendir. You know that, right?”

  “No. I mean I do now, but I heard . . . The voice I thought I heard . . . I thought it was Ivory.”

  Teddy looked at me and solemnly said, “Maybe it was. Maybe we freed Ivory’s soul after all.”

  I met his gaze. “Do you think so, Teddy? Really?”

  “We did everything the book said, and there was . . . something strange blowing through the swamp that night. We all felt it!”

  “Only I can’t imagine Mr. Pendir being the gator king anymore,” I confessed.

  Teddy shook his head. “No,” he agreed. “I’ve been thinking on it a lot, and I don’t reckon he could be. He saved your life. Way I figure it, gator kings are in the business of taking lives, not saving them.”

  Some things still worried me. “But Zora said she saw Mr. Pendir with a gator snout. And he did escape from that gator attack without a scratch, way back when. If he isn’t the gator king, who is?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Teddy chewed his lip. “I keep thinking maybe there isn’t even a gator king at all. But then I keep thinking . . .”

  “What?”

  “If there isn’t a gator king, then what killed Ivory?”

  I’d hoped we could keep thinking on these questions with Zora, but she was late and Teddy had to get back to do his chores. When Zora finally showed up a half hour later, I hadn’t gotten any further in my figuring on Ivory, and the peanut brittle was gone.

  Zora walked up to the front step like she had lead in both shoes. She sat down beside me. “Why you so late?” I asked. “Where you been? You missed Teddy!”

  Then she spoke quietly and completely unlike herself. “I was at the Loving Pine.”

  “By yourself? Why? What happened?”

  “I thought I was there by myself.”

  I got a chill right then. “What you mean, Zora? You were either there by yourself or you weren’t.”

  “I was at the Loving Pine, Carrie, feeling down, real down, wishing it was me got hurt instead of you. I was thinking about how maybe I was wrong about Mr. Pendir being the gator king. Then I heard something. . . .”

  “What?” I was about ready to jump out of my skin, sure she was going to say she had heard Ivory’s soul singin’, just like I thought I had.

  I had never spoken the word believer in my life, but that’s what I was: a believer . . . in ghosts.

  “You hear Ivory?”

  “No, Carrie,” Zora said slowly. “I didn’t hear Ivory, but I heard all about him. Joe Clarke was in the woods by the Loving Pine.”

  “Joe Clarke? Talked to you about Ivory?”

  Zora shook her head. “No, not me. Remember that lady we saw in Lake Maitland? Gold?”

  “Of course,” I answered. “How’s she know Mr. Clarke?”

  “I don’t know, but she does. And what’s more, Joe Clarke knew Ivory, too. And what’s more . . .” She took a deep breath. “Ivory was Gold’s brother.”

  “Say what, now?” I nearly shouted. “Ivory was colored like us! And Gold — she’s white. Ain’t she?”

  “I don’t know what she is,” Zora said. “But she’s not the same as other white folks.”

  “I don’t get it. White folks think she’s one of them, don’t they?”

  “Yeah. But from what Mr. Clarke said to her, Gold don’t know who she is and don’t nobody else know, either. Anyway, she said she couldn’t find Ivory anywhere, and Mr. Clarke said, ‘There’s a reason you can’t find your brother. It’s because he’s dead.’ She freezes: ‘No! No! No! He can’t be dead! He can’t be!’ and Mr. Clarke, standing with his hands on his hips and looking real angry, says, ‘Well, he can be, because he is, and I seen the body. Somebody made real sure he was dead, because they went and killed him — took his head clean off to make sure.’”

  My rickety front step became a stage. Zora deepened her voice when she spoke Joe Clarke’s words. She whimpered when she transformed into Gold, and clear as day I saw the beautiful woman in my mind’s eye.

  “Now Gold falls all to pieces —‘Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God!’” Zora was walking in a circle, wringing her hands and looking up to heaven. Then she spun around to face Joe Clarke: “‘I have to take him home! I have to take him home!’

  “But Joe Clarke ain’t havin’ none of it. ‘Home? What home? You can’t take that boy home ’cause you ain’t got no home to take him to — mixed up with white folks as you is! To have a home to go to, a real one, you got to be unafraid to be who you are. And who you gonna take him to? That man I seen you with? I’m pretty sure you haven’t told him who you really are!’

  “And Gold gets this crazy look and starts saying, ‘No, I — no, I — no, I . . .’

  “And Mr. Clarke, he don’t budge. He says, ‘Your only pain comes from playing pretend with white folks.’” Then Zora-as-Joe got a real hard look, almost like hate but not, like equal parts pity and cold fury. “‘Pity of it is, all that damage of pretending done run off you like rainwater only to soak poor Ivory to the bone.’

  “Then she starts into wailing —‘What do I do now? What do I do without Ivory?’” Zora-as-Gold’s eyes were wild, like she was seeing a ghost and couldn’t look away. Then Zora-as-Joe shook his head.

  “‘You were already living without him, so you’ll just go on doing that.’” Zora-as-Gold slumped down against the copper beech in front of our porch. “‘Ivory . . . Ivory . . .’

  “Then she set to crying hard. And Joe Clarke just stared at her for I don’t know how long. Didn’t say a word. And Gold looks up at him like she’s pleading for her life. ‘I can’t,’ she says, wailing. ‘Please let me stay here in Eatonville with you.’

  “‘We Eatonville folks ain’t got the fear of whites in us, and I won’t allow anyone to bring that fear here. Eatonville is our home.’

  “Finally he says, ‘Go back to Maitland.’ That’s all. But he says it in this voice like the voice of Judgment Day.

  “‘Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe Ivory’s not dead,’ she says. ‘I have to stay here where he can find me!’

  “Joe shakes his head. ‘There ain’t no one looking to find you now. No one worth a plugged nickel.’ Then he turned and walked back in the direction of town. I expected her to get herself up and go back to Lake Maitland, but she just sat there, staring and wailing. I think she’s still there crying right now. . . .”

  Zora got up from the tree and sat back down next to me, breathless from her performance. I couldn’t b
elieve my ears. Gold must have been the one Ivory was looking to find. The somebody who didn’t know she was lost.

  Then Zora said something that spun me like a top.

  “Every time I try to explain to myself what probably happened, what really happened outgrows my explanation.”

  I had never before seen Zora unable to fold new information into her own telling of a thing. Her doubts, coming right on top of Teddy’s doubts about the gator king, shook me.

  I found myself pacing in a little line, back and forth, holding my sling-bound arm against my side.

  Mr. Pendir, who’d fixed my broken arm, wasn’t a gator, let alone a gator king; he never was. It was impossible now to imagine that shy, gentle man killing Ivory. And if Mr. Pendir wasn’t the gator king — maybe there wasn’t ever even a gator king at all, like Teddy said. But that thought didn’t relieve me. Instead, it filled me with a strange kind of fury. The things that before were painful were suddenly unbearable.

  Zora had made me a story out of events that were too huge and too frightening for me to hold. She had put them neatly into places that let me step back and see them, name them, understand them, and do something about them.

  Now she was taking that away from me, not because she was selfish or mean, but because she had a relentless curiosity. Zora’s only real crime was wanting to know what we shouldn’t have known, and then not knowing until it was too late that we shouldn’t have known it.

  I was shattered. My faith in the magic that holds the world on its axis had broken.

  I wanted to cry, but I had no tears. I wanted to shout and scream instead, to tear things apart on the outside so that they looked like how I felt on the inside.

  I spun on my heels and pointed my stick at Zora. “You know what? It’s your fault! It’s your fault, all of it! First you made up the gator king — no, first you took Ghost and made him into the gator king. Then every time you talked about it, the evil got kicked up higher in the air, and bad things started to happen — to Ivory and Old Lady Bronson and me! It was you who made it happen! Your words brought evil to life! It didn’t have no power before you conjured it!”

  I meant every word of it — even if it didn’t make sense, even if I didn’t believe it, any of it, an hour later.

  Only years later did I understand why the death of Ivory, a man I barely knew, had rocked me like an earthquake. It seems obvious now. Any grown person with a heart would have seen it long before.

  That was the day that in my gut, I finally realized that my father was gone for good. He wasn’t coming back, and we weren’t going to save him, any more than we could have saved Ivory.

  That was the day I finally began mourning him, the day I finally allowed myself to believe that he was dead, along with all the songs and smiles and warm words that should have supported me as I grew, that should have fought off hurts that wounded me, that should have held me and cradled me and crooned in my ear, Sleep, little pretty one, hush now, hush . . . My daddy’s love could have made Ivory’s death less terrifying. It would still have been sad, even horrible, but it wouldn’t have pitched all sense out of my ten-year-old world.

  But that wisdom only showed itself to me in hindsight. That afternoon, as I paced back and forth in my short line, faster and faster, kicking up the dry dirt in little brown clouds around my ankles, rage shot through me. Rage. And it was all aimed at Zora.

  But she didn’t respond in kind. Instead of being angry back at me, instead of telling me how and why I was wrong, she looked up at me from the front step, nodded slowly, and stood. Maybe she understood what was really in my thoughts, or maybe she was having thoughts of her own. Either way, she took my hand and said, “Let’s go see Gold.”

  At the crossroads that led either to Lake Maitland or to the woods that held the Loving Pine, Zora practically ran ahead of me. Maybe she took off because she wanted the whole business to be over with as fast as possible. I know I did, but the feeling didn’t put a fire under me. It pulled at my bones with dread.

  Approaching the Loving Pine, we could smell and then see a little fire in the clearing just in front of the tree, but no sign of Gold. The canopy was so thick that the light of the fire made the deep shade surrounding it look like artificial night. Zora looked around and then started whistling the tune Ivory had sung to us.

  There was a rustling in the trees, and Gold flew out. It was unmistakably Gold, and yet I could hardly recognize her in the flickering firelight.

  Her tear-streaked face struck me most. The eyes that had seemed dark amber and round on Maitland Avenue were now hazel and catlike. Her hair wasn’t just unkempt — it was ropy and heavy. She was wearing clothes I could only imagine on a rich woman — a dress made of thick brocade that rustled when she moved, and boots that looked softer than kid leather and must have been creamy white once — but they were ruined by rents and gashes and the clayey marks of the forest floor. The bridge of Gold’s nose was like that of Rose Cousin, a girl in the year behind us whose whole family was so Indian, there was no point pretending. Her skin took on the warm tones of the fire, and I could see that what I had thought was a glow from within this woman was really a golden undercoat. Gold may have looked white the first time we saw her, but here by the fire, afraid, she was more colored than white — and yet not colored like us.

  I recognized bits and pieces of us on her face and in her bearing, but even in the copper of the firelight, tan and all, she looked like she had been wiped down with chalk dust.

  “Ivory!” she called out, staring desperately in our direction. When we stepped into the clearing, her face fell, and she crumpled to the ground like a dropped marionette.

  “I thought you were someone else.” She spoke to the fire, not to us.

  Zora swallowed hard, then said, “You thought it was your brother.”

  Gold leaped up like she’d sat on a porcupine, startling us both. I put my hand to my heart.

  “You know Ivory? Do you know where he is? Have you seen him?”

  Zora glanced at me and then cleared her throat. “We came to talk to you because Ivory was our friend.”

  She looked at us incredulously. “Ivory . . . your friend?”

  We nodded. “Do you mind if we set down?” Zora asked. Gold, we knew, wasn’t going to be hospitable like regular folks because she wasn’t in a regular folks frame of mind.

  Gold didn’t say anything, but gestured to the pine needles. It was like someone telling you to make yourself comfortable in your own parlor. I couldn’t help but notice the fire dying, and just when I thought I couldn’t fight the impulse to stir some life back into it, she picked up a stick and poked it, turning the one big piece dry-side-down. I don’t know who I thought would have made the fire for her, but up until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that she herself would know how.

  Gold listened calmly as Zora told her about overhearing her conversation with Joe Clarke and about our meeting Ivory before that.

  Gold smiled a little, and a flash of the copper in her skin blew away a speck or two of the chalk dust. “I gave him that guitar when I was eighteen. Somebody gave it to me, and I gave it to him.” Her voice no longer had the measured and ladylike confidence it had in Lake Maitland. Rather, it sounded like an echo of her carefree self. Instead of following Gold down the path of nostalgia, Zora pressed on. “Miss Gold, why did Ivory come to Eatonville looking for you?”

  I didn’t expect the question any more than Gold did. She took a deep breath. Her eyes were looking across the fire at us, but in her mind she was looking right into her past.

  “The first thing I remember is moving day. I was three years old, and we moved into a boardinghouse on a colored street, across from Joe Clarke’s family. The Clarkes owned the boardinghouse. Joe’s daddy was a stonemason, and a good one, and I guess he knew what to do with the money he made.

  “That’s maybe when my mama started to get sick. I’m not sure. I know that the only thing that did her any good when she got in the grip of one of her s
pells was Ivory’s singing.

  “I was fairer than my mama, and much fairer than Ivory. Sometimes she would take me downtown and pretend to be my mammy so we could buy things in stores where colored folks weren’t welcome. My mama said fooling white folks was never a sin if it brought us what we needed. Ivory never liked it, but I thought it was the top! I loved bringing my mama gifts, and that’s what it felt like when we got to shop where we wanted. It was like I was a skeleton key unlocking another world just for my mama.”

  My heart felt heavy trying to imagine folks not knowing my mama was my mama. I couldn’t think of a single thing in the world I could want more than my pride in being my mama’s daughter, and I felt a flush of shame for Gold.

  “After my mama passed, we stayed on at the Clarkes’ boardinghouse, and Ivory got work picking and hauling and doing all kinds of things. While he was working, I would go over to Silver Springs. Some white kids took a liking to me and invited me with them to things. When Ivory found out, he was angry. I wanted to explore the world — the whole world, not just the colored world — but he would have none of it. I did it anyway. One day one of the white kids saw Ivory talking to me and thought he was an uppity nigger. So he got some boys together and beat Ivory almost senseless. Ivory got away and hid in the woods. I didn’t know what to do. I ran back home and found Joe Clarke. He came with me and helped tend to Ivory’s wounds.” In my mind’s eye, I saw a young Ivory broken and battered and curled up like a baby on the forest floor. I was glad the Ivory of the past had Joe Clarke there to help him. “After that Joe helped us out whenever he could, and sort of watched over us.”

  Zora put Gold’s problem bluntly into words. “Why would you want to be like white folks?”

  Gold looked down and spread her hands out in front of her.

  “I get tired of being colored. I get tired of seeing everything the world has to offer and settling for a bowl of nothing. With Will, nothing is off-limits. . . .”