by Paula Guran
The two women chatted happily for a bouncing half-hour, Freida questioning and Zora answering—talking about her Haiti book, the sights of New York, the smell of the turpentine harvest in the Florida pines. 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 corridor between the vehicles, one finger trailing along the side of the truck, tracking the dust like a child. She passed 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, 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.
Now Zora moved the plate again, just as Felicia was licking the previous two yams off her fingers. Felicia reached for the plate, then froze, when she registered that it was out of reach. She sat there, arm suspended in the air.
“Nnnnn, nnnnn, nnnnn,” she said.
Zora sat motionless, cradling her Brownie camera in her lap.
Felicia slid forward on her buttocks and snatched up two yams—choosing to eat them where she now sat, as Zora had hoped, rather than slide backward into the shade once more. Zora took several pictures in the sunlight, though none of them, she later realized, managed to penetrate the shadows beneath Felicia’s furrowed brow, where the patient’s sightless eyes lurked.
“Zombies!” came an unearthly cry. The old man on the veranda was having a spasm, legs kicking, arms flailing. The nurse moved quickly, propelled his wheelchair toward the hospital door. “I made them all Zombies! Zombies!”
“Observe my powers,” said the mad Zombie-maker King Henri Christophe, twirling his stage mustache and leering down at the beautiful young(ish) anthropologist who squirmed against her snakeskin bonds. The mad king’s broad white face and syrupy accent suggested Budapest. At his languid gesture, black-and-white legions of Zombies both black and white shuffled into view around the papier-mâché cliff and marched single file up the steps of the balsa parapet, and over. None cried out as he fell. Flipping through his captive’s notebook, the king laughed maniacally and said, “I never knew you wrote this! Why, this is good!” As Zombies toppled behind him like ninepins, their German Expressionist shadows scudding across his face, the mad king began hammily to read aloud the opening passage of Imitation of Life.
Zora woke in a sweat.
The rain still sheeted down, a ceremonial drumming on the slate roof. Her manuscript, a white blob in the darkness, was moving sideways along the desktop. She watched as it went over the edge and dashed itself across the floor with a sound like a gust of wind. So the iguana had gotten in again. It loved messing with her manuscript. She should take the iguana to New York, get it a job at Lippincott’s. She isolated the iguana’s crouching, bowlegged shape in the drumming darkness and lay still, never sure whether iguanas jumped and how far and why.
Gradually she became aware of another sound nearer than the rain: someone crying.
Zora switched on the bedside lamp, found her slippers with her feet and reached for her robe. The top of her writing desk was empty. The manuscript must have been top-heavy, that’s all. Shaking her head at her night fancies, cinching her belt, yawning, Zora walked into the corridor and nearly stepped on the damned iguana as it scuttled just ahead of her, claws clack-clack-clacking on the hardwood. Zora tugged off her left slipper and gripped it by the toe as an unlikely weapon as she followed the iguana into the great room. Her housekeeper, Lucille, lay on the sofa, crying two-handed into a handkerchief. The window above her was open, curtains billowing, and the iguana escaped as it had arrived, scrambling up the back of the sofa and out into the hissing rain. Lucille was oblivious until Zora closed the sash, when she sat up with a start.
“Oh, Miss! You frightened me! I thought the Sect Rouge had come.”
Ah, yes, the Sect Rouge. That secret, invisible mountain-dwelling cannibal cult, their distant nocturnal drums audible only to the doomed, whose blood thirst made the Klan look like the Bethune-Cookman board of visitors, was Lucille’s most cherished night terror. Zora had never had a housekeeper before, never wanted one, but Lucille “came with the house,�
�� as the agent had put it. It was all a package: mountainside view, Sect Rouge paranoia, hot and cold running iguanas.
“Lucille, darling, whatever is the matter? Why are you crying?”
A fresh burst of tears. “It is my faithless husband, madame! My Etienne. He has forsaken me . . . for Erzulie!” She fairly spat the name, as a wronged woman in Eatonville would have spat the infamous name of Miss Delpheeny.
Zora had laid eyes on Etienne only once, when he came flushed and hatless to the back door to show off his prize catch, grinning as widely as the dead caiman he held up by the tail. For his giggling wife’s benefit, he had tied a pink ribbon around the creature’s neck, and Zora had decided then that Lucille was as lucky a woman as any.
“There, there. Come to Zora. Here, blow your nose. That’s better. You needn’t tell me any more, if you don’t want to. Who is this Erzulie?”
Zora had heard much about Erzulie in Haiti, always from other women, in tones of resentment and admiration, but she was keen for more.
“Oh, madame, she is a terrible woman! She has every man she wants, all the men, and . . . and some of the women, too!” This last said in a hush of reverence. “No home in Haiti is safe from her. First she came to my Etienne in his dreams, teasing and tormenting his sleep until he cried out and spent himself in the sheets. Then she troubled his waking life, too, with frets and ill fortune, so that he was angry with himself and with me all the time. Finally I sent him to the houngan, and the houngan said, ‘Why do you ask me what this is? Any child could say to you the truth: You have been chosen as a consort of Erzulie.’ And then he embraced my Etienne, and said: ‘My son, your bed above all beds is now the one for all men to envy.’ Ah, madame, religion is a hard thing for women!”
Even as she tried to console the weeping woman, Zora felt a pang of writerly conscience. On the one hand, she genuinely wanted to help; on the other hand, everything was material.
“Whenever Erzulie pleases, she takes the form that a man most desires, to ride him as dry as a bean husk, and to rob his woman of comfort. Oh, madame! My Etienne has not come to my bed in . . . in . . . twelve days!” She collapsed into the sofa in a fresh spasm of grief, buried her head beneath a cushion and began to hiccup. Twelve whole days, Zora thought, my my, as she did her own dispiriting math, but she said nothing, only patted Lucille’s shoulder and cooed.
Later, while frying an egg for her dejected, red-eyed housekeeper, Zora sought to change the subject. “Lucille. Didn’t I hear you say the other day, when the postman ran over the rooster, something like, ‘Ah, the Zombies eat well tonight!’ ”
“Yes, madame, I think I did say this thing.”
“And last week, when you spotted that big spider web just after putting the ladder away, you said, ‘Ah bo bo, the Zombies make extra work for me today.’ When you say such things, Lucille, what do you mean? To what Zombies do you refer?”
“Oh, madame, it is just a thing to say when small things go wrong. Oh, the milk is sour, the Zombies have put their feet in it, and so on. My mother always says it, and her mother too.”
Soon Lucille was chatting merrily away about the little coffee girls and the ritual baths at Saut d’Eau, and Zora took notes and drank coffee, and all was well. Ah bo bo!
The sun was still hours from rising when Lucille’s chatter shut off mid-sentence. Zora looked up to see Lucille frozen in terror, eyes wide, face ashen.
“Madame . . . Listen!”
“Lucille, I hear nothing but the rain on the roof.”
“Madame,” Lucille whispered, “the rain has stopped.”
Zora set down her pencil and went to the window. Only a few drops pattered from the eaves and the trees. In the distance, far up the mountain, someone was beating the drums—ten drums, a hundred, who could say? The sound was like thunder sustained, never coming closer but never fading either.
Zora closed and latched the shutters and turned back to Lucille with a smile. “Honey, that’s just man-noise in the night, like the big-mouthing on the porch at Joe Clarke’s store. You mean I never told you about all the lying that men do back home? Break us another egg, Cille honey, and I’ll tell you some things.”
Box 128-B
Port-au-Prince, Haiti
November 20, 1936
Dr. Henry Allen Moe, Sec.
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
551 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y.
Dear Dr. Moe,
I regret to report that for all my knocking and ringing and dust-raising, I have found no relatives of this unfortunate Felix-Mentor woman. She is both famous and unknown. All have heard of her and know, or think they know, the two-sentence outline of her “story,” and have their own fantasies about her, but can go no further. She is the Garbo of Haiti. I would think her a made-up character had I not seen her myself, and taken her picture as . . . evidence? A photograph of the Empire State Building is evidence, too, but of what? That is for the viewer to say.
I am amused of course, as you were, to hear from some of our friends and colleagues on the Haiti beat their concerns that poor Zora has “gone native,” has thrown away the WPA and Jesse Owens and the travel trailer and all the other achievements of the motherland to break chickens and become an initiate in the mysteries of the Sect Rouge. Lord knows, Dr. Moe, I spent twenty-plus years in the Southern U.S., beneath the constant gaze of every First Abyssinian Macedonian African Methodist Episcopal Presbyterian Pentecostal Free Will Baptist Assembly of God of Christ of Jesus with Signs Following minister, mother, and deacon, all so full of the spirit they look like death eating crackers, and in all that time I never once came down with even a mild case of Christianity. I certainly won’t catch the local disease from only six months in Haiti . . .
Obligations, travel, and illness—“suffering perhaps the digestion,” thank you, Dr. Legros—kept Zora away from the hospital at Gonaives for some weeks. When she finally did return, she walked onto the veranda to see Felicia, as before, standing all alone in the quiet yard, her face toward the high wall. Today Felicia had chosen to stand on the sole visible spot of green grass, a plot of soft imprisoned turf about the diameter of an Easter hat. Zora felt a deep satisfaction upon seeing her—this self-contained, fixed point in her traveler’s life.
To reach the steps, she had to walk past the mad old man in the wheelchair, whose nurse was not in sight today. Despite his sunken cheeks, his matted eyelashes, his patchy tufts of white hair, Zora could see he must have been handsome in his day. She smiled as she approached.
He blinked and spoke in a thoughtful voice. “I will be a Zombie soon,” he said.
That stopped her. “Excuse me?”
“Death came for me many years ago,” said the old man, eyes bright, “and I said, No, not me, take my wife instead. And so I gave her up as a Zombie. That gained me five years, you see. A good bargain. And then, five years later, I gave our oldest son. Then our daughter. Then our youngest. And more loved ones, too, now all Zombies, all. There is no one left. No one but me.” His hands plucked at the coverlet that draped his legs. He peered all around the yard. “I will be a Zombie soon,” he said, and wept.
Shaking her head, Zora descended the steps. Approaching Felicia from behind, as Dr. Legros had said that first day, was always a delicate maneuver. One had to be loud enough to be heard but quiet enough not to panic her.
“Hello, Felicia,” Zora said.
The huddled figure didn’t turn, didn’t budge, and Zora, emboldened by long absence, repeated the name, reached out, touched Felicia’s shoulder with her fingertips. As she made contact, a tingling shiver ran up her arm and down her spine to her feet. Without turning, Felicia emerged from her crouch. She stood up straight, flexed her shoulders, stretched her neck, and spoke.
“Zora, my friend!”
Felicia turned and was not Felicia at all, but a tall, beautiful woman in a short white dress. Freida registered the look on Zora’s face and laughed.
“Did I not tell you that yo
u would find me? Do you not even know your friend Freida?”
Zora’s breath returned. “I know you,” she retorted, “and I know that was a cruel trick. Where is Felicia? What have you done with her?”
“Whatever do you mean? Felicia was not mine to give you, and she is not mine to take away. No one is owned by anyone.”
“Why is Felicia not in the yard? Is she ill? And why are you here? Are you ill as well?”
Freida sighed. “So many questions. Is this how a book gets written? If Felicia were not ill, silly, she would not have been here in the first place. Besides.” She squared her shoulders. “Why do you care so about this . . . powerless woman? This woman who let some man lead her soul astray, like a starving cat behind an eel-barrel?” She stepped close, the heat of the day coalescing around. “Tell a woman of power your book. Tell me your book,” she murmured. “Tell me of the mule’s funeral, and the rising waters, and the buzzing pear-tree, and young Janie’s secret sigh.”
Zora had two simultaneous thoughts, like a moan and a breath interlaced: Get out of my book! and My God, she’s jealous!
“Why bother?” Zora bit off, flush with anger. “You think you know it by heart already. And besides,” Zora continued, stepping forward, nose to nose, “there are powers other than yours.”
Freida hissed, stepped back as if pattered with stove-grease.
Zora put her nose in the air and said, airily, “I’ll have you know that Felicia is a writer, too.”
Her mouth a thin line, Freida turned and strode toward the hospital, thighs long and taut beneath her gown. Without thought, Zora walked, too, and kept pace.
“If you must know,” Freida said, “your writer friend is now in the care of her family. Her son came for her. Do you find this so remarkable? Perhaps the son should have notified you, hmm?” She winked at Zora. “He is quite a muscular young man, with a taste for older women. Much, much older women. I could show you where he lives. I have been there often. I have been there more than he knows.”