Zora! Read online

  Grandma Potts was angry when she heard about Zora asking white people for rides. She had once been a slave, and to her way of thinking, it was dangerous for a black person to act "forward" with white people. "Looking white folks right in the face!" Grandma Potts scolded. "They're going to lynch you yet. And don't stand in the doorway gazing out at them, neither. You're too brazen to live long."

  Although her parents punished Zora whenever they discovered that she had ridden with strangers, her mother insisted that she didn't want to "squinch her spirit" lest she "turn out to be a mealy-mouthed rag doll by the time she gets grown." Lucy had another saying that she imparted to Zora and her other children. "Jump at the sun," she told them. "You might not land on the sun, but at least you will get off the ground."

  Zora's parents knew that education was the key to jumping at the sun. Both of them could read and write well, which was unusual among African Americans at the time. Back in Alabama, Lucy had worked for a while as a country schoolteacher. Every night she gathered her young daughters and sons around her and taught them to read, write, and do arithmetic problems. The result was that by the time Zora entered Eatonville's Hungerford School she was far ahead of her classmates.

  A highlight of her childhood occurred when Zora was in the fifth grade. Now and then white people from the North visited the Hungerford School to observe the students. One day two young white women from Minnesota came to hear Zora's class read aloud. The students were reading a story about Pluto, the ancient god of the underworld who kidnapped the beautiful goddess Persephone and carried her down to his dismal kingdom.

  The story was difficult, and Mr. Calhoun, the teacher, squirmed as one child after another stumbled on the words. Finally it was Zora's turn. She had read and reread the myth of Pluto and Persephone in her reader, for it was one of her favorite stories. In fact, she had read the entire reader from cover to cover the first week of school. She read her paragraph aloud flawlessly, bringing a relieved smile to the face of Mr. Calhoun, who told her to continue reading the rest of the story.

  After the class was dismissed, Zora was asked to remain in the room while the visitors conferred with Mr. Calhoun. The two young women from Minnesota were very impressed by Zora. They wanted her to visit them at the Park House hotel in nearby Maitland the next afternoon because they had a surprise for her. Zora generally went around barefoot, even to school, but Mr. Calhoun informed her that she must wear shoes and stockings, and be spotless from head to toe, when she went to meet the ladies.

  As a child, Zora attended Hungerford School in Eatonville, Florida.

  The next afternoon Zora was sent home from school an hour early. Her mother stood her in a tub filled with soapsuds and gave her a good scrubbing, then dressed her in her Sunday best—her red and white checked gingham dress, stockings, shoes, and a red ribbon in her hair. Her older brother, John Cornelius, then drove Zora by horse and buggy to the Park House in Maitland and waited outside while she visited with the two ladies.

  The women, Miss Hurd and Mrs. Johnstone, gave Zora stuffed dates, preserved ginger, and other treats to eat. Then they asked her to read aloud from an issue of Scribner's Magazine. Zora read a passage from that adult magazine, drawing praise and smiles from the two women. After visiting with Zora for a few more minutes they sent her off with a gift—a heavy cylinder wrapped in fancy paper that they told her not to open until she reached home.

  As soon as she and her brother entered their house, Zora opened her present. More than forty years later she still recalled the moment she saw what was inside:

  Perhaps I shall never experience such joy again. The nearest thing to that moment was the telegram accepting my first book. One hundred goldy-new pennies rolled out of the cylinder. Their gleam lit up the world. It was not avarice that moved me. It was the beauty of the thing. I stood on the mountain. Mama let me play with my pennies for a while, then put them away for me to keep.

  The one hundred shiny pennies would be equal to about thirty dollars in today's money, but, as Zora wrote, it wasn't the value of the money that thrilled her. It was that the ladies thought she was special because of something she loved to do: read.

  Those glittering pennies were just the beginning. The next day the ladies sent Zora a collection of fairy tales, a book of hymns, and a copy of The Swiss Family Robinson. A few weeks after returning to Minnesota, they sent Zora a large box filled with more books, including Gulliver's Travels, Grimms Fairy Tales, a story about Dick Whittington and his cat, a book of Greek and Roman myths, and a collection of Norse tales. Zora eagerly read the books and fell in love with the myths and folktales.

  Reading wasn't the only way that Zora was exposed to stories. Her mother sent her on errands to Joe Clarke's general store, where the adults of Eatonville often sat out on the porch, holding what they called "lying sessions"—what today we would call storytelling. Holding the bag of sugar or spools of thread that she had been sent to buy, Zora would listen to the adults talk. She heard stories about God and the devil, about how black people got their color, and about High John the Conqueror, Brer Fox, and Sis Snail—some of which went back to slavery days. She also heard some old African American sayings, like "I got a rainbow wrapped and tied around my shoulder" to express happiness, and "I have been in sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots" to express sadness.

  Many years later, Zora recalled that when she became moody as a child she would "go hide under the house away from the rest of the family and mood away." For the most part, though, Zora in her early years was "wrapped in rainbows." She played baseball, "holding down first base on the team" with her brothers and their friends, she later wrote. She felt an attachment to the woods, flowers, and people of her hometown. She had a close family, a warm home life, and books to read.

  But when Zora was thirteen years old, her pleasant childhood would come to an abrupt end.

  3. "In Sorrow's Kitchen"

  BY LATE SUMMER OF 1904, Zora's mother was very ill. "I knew that Mama was sick," Zora wrote in her autobiography. "She kept getting thinner and thinner and her chest cold never got any better. Finally, she took to bed." Lucy Potts Hurston may have been suffering from tuberculosis, a lung disease.

  On September 19, 1904, Lucy called Zora to her bedside. She had an important request to make of her younger daughter. When a bedridden person was about to die, the people of Eatonville followed some old southern superstitions. For one thing, they removed the pillow from under the patient's head, in the belief that its false comfort would only prolong the agony of dying. For another, the bed containing the patient was turned toward the east, so that the dying person would awaken in the afterlife facing the rising sun. Clocks in the room were covered, because—it was thought—any timepiece looked upon by the dying person wouldn't work anymore. Mirrors were also covered. Some claimed this was to prevent the dying person's ghost from attaching itself to the looking glass. It was also believed that anyone who saw his or her reflection in the mirror at the instant the sick person died would be death's next victim.

  Barely able to talk, Lucy Potts Hurston rasped out her last request to Zora. She didn't believe in the old superstitions, she said. When the time came for her to die, she didn't want the pillow taken from beneath her head. She didn't want the clock or the looking glass in her room covered. Neither did she want her bed moved to face the east.

  "I promised her as solemnly as nine years could do, that I would see to it," Zora wrote in her autobiography. Actually, Zora was thirteen years old at the time, but this was still an enormous responsibility for a girl so young.

  Zora left Mama's bedside for a little while and was playing outside when she noticed a number of her mother's friends entering the house. She ran back into the room and saw people crowded around the bed as her mother struggled to breathe. Before Zora could do anything about it, her father and some others lifted the bed and turned it toward the east. Zora tried in vain to prevent them from following the old customs.

  "Don't take the pillow
from under Mama's head!" Zora cried. "She said she didn't want it moved! Don't cover up that clock! Leave that looking glass like it is!"

  But John held Zora back so that the usual customs could be carried out. A little while later Lucy tried to say something—Zora thought her mother was trying to speak to her—and a few minutes after that, she took her last breath.

  "Mama died at sundown and changed a world," Zora later recalled.

  Her father had always seemed so strong to Zora, but without Lucy, he was a lost soul. For days he walked aimlessly around the house saying, "Poor thing! She suffered so much." Zora was suffering, too. Besides having to deal with her loss, she felt guilty for failing to keep her promise to her mother. "I was to agonize over that for years to come," she confessed in her autobiography. "In the midst of play, in wakeful moments after midnight, on the way home from parties, and even in the classroom during lectures."

  At the time of their mother's death, Zora's siblings ranged in age from twenty-two-year-old Bob to six-year-old Everett. John decided that the best thing for Zora would be to enroll her in the Florida Baptist Academy, a boarding school in Jacksonville that Zora's fifteen-year-old sister, Sarah, attended. So, two weeks after her mother's funeral, Zora packed a few clothes into an old trunk and was driven to Maitland by her brother Dick. There she boarded the midnight train. "I was on my way from the village, never to return to it as a real part of the town," she later wrote. By morning she had completed the 135-mile journey.

  Zora learned something in Jacksonville: The rest of the world was not like Eatonville. "Jacksonville made me know that I was a little colored girl," she later recalled. Like other black people, she was not welcome in certain stores. She was expected to go to the back of streetcars. She heard white people call African Americans insulting names, and she was probably called those names herself.

  Except for arithmetic, Zora did well in her classes during her year at the Florida Baptist Academy. She earned good grades, and when the city of Jacksonville held a spelling bee for its "Negro schools," Zora came in first place. As Jacksonville's "Negro spelling champion," Zora was presented with a world atlas, a Bible, and so much cake and lemonade that she thought she could feel it coming out of her skin.

  But other aspects of school life were disheartening for Zora. She was one of the youngest students at the academy, and the other girls who had lived for a time in the growing city poked fun at her country way of speaking and old-fashioned style of dress. Events 135 miles away in her hometown also contributed to Zora's unhappiness in Jacksonville.

  On February 14, 1905—one month after Zora's fourteenth birthday—John Hurston remarried. His new bride, Mattie Moge Hurston, was only twenty years old, making her just six years older than Zora and three years younger than Zora's oldest brother, Bob. The Hurston children were upset that John had remarried just five months after their mother's death to a woman less than half his age.

  Zora's sister, Sarah, was the first to voice her resentment. Around the time of John's remarriage, Sarah became ill and returned home to recuperate. Enraged at finding that she had a new stepmother, Sarah made some remarks about the marriage coming too soon after Lucy's death. Mattie Moge Hurston convinced her husband to whip sixteen-year-old Sarah for her comments. Furthermore, Sarah was not allowed to continue at the Florida Baptist Academy and her father threw her out of the house. Soon after, Sarah married and settled in another Florida town, taking the youngest child in the family, seven-year-old Everett, with her.

  When Lucy was alive, John Hurston had made it clear that Sarah was his favorite child. He had always given Sarah everything she wanted, whether it was toys, clothes, or music lessons. Whipping Sarah and evicting her from the family home was so out of character for John that his children all blamed his new wife for putting him up to it.

  This may be the earliest known photo of Zora Neale Hurston, taken, perhaps, soon after she arrived in Jacksonville. It is not known when or where this picture was taken, but Zora looks quite young, doesn't she?

  Zora also blamed Mattie at least partly for what happened to her. One day the assistant principal of the Florida Baptist Academy called Zora into her office and told her some troubling news. Her father had not sent the money to pay her room and board. If he didn't pay soon, Zora would have to leave the academy. Every few days after that, the assistant principal cornered Zora and spoke to her about the unpaid bill. Several times Zora was outside in the schoolyard with her friends when the assistant principal yelled out the window about her father's debt to the school.

  Zora was afraid that she would be kicked out of the academy, but the school found another way for her to work off the debt. She was put to work cleaning up the school's kitchen and pantry every day after classes. On Saturdays, she had to scrub the school's staircases.

  When the school year ended in the springtime, Zora received another terrible shock. Her father didn't come to pick her up, and neither did he send money for Zora to pay her own way home. This time the assistant principal felt sorry for Zora. She lent her a dollar and a half so that she could travel home by steamboat and train.

  Zora's homecoming was not a happy one. "So I came back to my father's house which was no longer home," she recalled in her autobiography. "The very walls were gummy with gloom. Papa's children were in his way, because they were too much trouble to his wife."

  It didn't take long for Zora to have an argument with her stepmother. Upon her marriage, Lucy had taken her prize possession, a feather bed, from her parents' home. She had promised Zora that her special bed would one day be hers. When Zora returned home to find that Mattie was sleeping in this bed, it was more than she could bear. To prevent their stepmother from sleeping in the feather bed any longer, Zora and her younger brother Clifford Joel removed and hid the mattress.

  Mattie discovered that Zora was behind this prank and tried to convince John to whip her for what she had done. Zora's father didn't seem to know what to do. He probably felt deeply wounded that his whole family was turning against him, for Zora's siblings all took her side as she continued to defiantly lay claim to the feather bed. In fact, Zora's brother John Cornelius and their father nearly got into a fistfight over the matter.

  After that, the other children moved out of the family home and had little to do with their father for the rest of his life. John Cornelius rented a room in a boardinghouse in Jacksonville and went to work in a fish processing plant. Bob moved into the same boardinghouse and obtained a job as a nurse at a "Negro hospital." Zora's brother Dick married and settled in Sanford, Florida. Zora, Clifford Joel, and Benjamin were sent to live with various friends of their mother's.

  For the next seven years—starting with her leaving home in 1905 all the way until 1912—we know few details about Zora's activities. No known letters from this segment of her life have been found. Without providing specific information, Zora's autobiography makes it clear that she was "in sorrow's kitchen" during these years. "I was shifted from house to house of relatives and friends and found comfort nowhere," she wrote. "I was miserable. I was in school off and on."

  In 1905, about five months after Lucy Hurston died, John Hurston married twenty-year-old Mattie. Zora was fourteen at the time.

  We do know that during this period Zora sometimes worked as a maid for white families in various Florida towns. Heartbroken that her formal schooling seemed to be over at age fourteen, she did what she could to educate herself by reading her employers' books at every opportunity. As a result, she wasn't a very good maid. "No matter how I resolved, I'd get tangled up with their reading matter, and lose my job," she later revealed. "It was not that I was lazy, I just was not interested in dusting and dishwashing."

  We also know about a memorable incident that occurred around 1911, when Zora was about twenty years old. At the time, she was back in Eatonville, temporarily living with her father and stepmother. John Hurston apparently hoped that his daughter and wife would make a truce. That was not possible, though, for Zora still hated M
attie and blamed her for splitting her family apart.

  One Monday morning Zora said something that Mattie found insulting. Mattie tried to convince John to punish Zora for what she had said, but he refused to take sides between his wife and daughter. Mattie struck back. Calling Zora a "sassy, impudent heifer," Mattie picked up a bottle and threw it toward Zora's head. "She never should have missed," Zora later wrote.

  Zora flew into a tremendous rage. She slammed Mattie against the wall and began pounding her stepmother's face with her fists. Mattie tried to defend herself by yanking her stepdaughter's hair and clawing at her neck and arms, but Zora had grown up fighting with her brothers and their friends, and the scratching and hair-pulling hardly fazed her. As Zora continued to punch her, Mattie begged her husband for help, but he was so disturbed by the fight that he just stood by the doorway and wept. Finally, Mattie fell helplessly to the floor and John pulled Zora away before she could beat her any further.

  Upon regaining consciousness, Mattie asked John Hurston to have Zora arrested. He refused to do that, too. Soon after, John and Mattie Moge Hurston were divorced. Not even thirty years later when she was an accomplished author and anthropologist did Zora show any regret for having beaten up her stepmother. She was only sorry, she wrote, that she hadn't "finished the job." And although she later confessed to feeling "sorry for him," Zora never forgave her father for his role in the breakup of the Hurston family.

  4. "The Golden Stairs"