Zora and Me

“Everyone was eager for a story, and we all knew that nobody could tell a story better than Zora.”

Zora’s storytelling abilities foreshadow the real Zora Neale Hurston’s literary career (See: Background). Even as a child, Zora has the storytelling skills that will one day mark her as one of the most successful writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

“‘All right, don’t believe me, then,’ Zora said. ‘But when all y’all coulda been playing kickball, you were standing around like boards listening to me. That alone is proof I’m telling the truth.’”

Zora believes in the power of storytelling to confer truth. If people are willing to listen to a story, she believes that must make her story true. Later, this belief will bolster her certainty that she is right about Mr. Pendir.

“But I also couldn’t stop thinking about what Zora had said. Just because something’s good listening doesn’t necessarily make it true, and Zora didn’t have any trouble telling a fib or stretching a story for fun. I could tell that Zora herself believed the story, but the question was, did I?”

Much of the plot of Zora and Me involves Carrie having to navigate her feelings about Zora’s stories, which forms an important part of The Coming-of-Age Experience for her. The stories shape the girls’ understanding of the world around them and help them explore difficult realities, but they also have the power to hide certain truths. Carrie must decide for herself how to interpret Zora’s wild stories and slot them into her broader understanding of the world.

“Zora had a way of giving personality to everything in Eatonville. Flowers alongside the road weren’t just flowers. One day they were royal guards saluting us on our walks home. Another day they were God’s consolation to the ground for putting it underfoot.”

Carrie looks up to Zora as someone who has an unusual understanding of the world around them. Through the power of storytelling, Zora imbues their world with magic, strengthening their connection to their hometown, its ecosystem, and the people who inhabit it.

“First I thought it was a good thing, even a good sign. Until I realized that she had stopped crying because she had stopped hoping. That’s when a new kind of sadness settled on me and on our house like folks waiting for a train they know won’t come.”

As Carrie embarks on the coming-of-age experience, she is confronted with the loss of her father. Coming to terms with the idea that he is gone for good will be a long and difficult process for Carrie and for her mother. Carrie is not yet ready to stop hoping for her father’s return at this point in the story.

“Ivory was just a traveling worker with a sweet voice. But he was dead, and he wasn’t coming back. I kept sobbing, and Zora kept saying, ‘I know, I know.’”

Ivory’s death has a profound impact on Carrie, for reasons she does not quite understand yet. The similarities between Ivory and her father are obvious, but in a moment of dramatic irony, Carrie has not yet made the connection explicit. Zora, on the other hand, knows exactly why Carrie is so upset because she is uncommonly emotionally intelligent for her age.

“‘It’s not a somebody that cuts off and steals a man’s head—it’s a something.’ Only a monster could do what was done to Ivory.”

Zora touches on something true when she says that Ivory’s murder seems like something no human could do. Indeed, his murder is a monstrous act, but it is an act committed by a human being nevertheless. Coming to terms with this apparent contradiction is part of the painful process of understanding The Complications of Race and Belonging that the girls have to live with.

“‘Saying what I know and wanting answers,’ she said, ‘doesn’t make me white. I know who I am. I’m Zora.’”

Zora here rejects her father’s ideas about how she should act. Her conception of the complications of race and belonging is tied up in her own sense of identity as a curious, independent girl who is eager to know more about the world around her. She sees no contradiction in being Black and asking questions about a violent murder.

“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.”

Carrie struggles to remember the good and bad things about her father, she knows that both are necessary. Part of the coming-of-age experience for her is about understanding her father’s death and remembering him as a complete person, which means facing reality instead of shying away from it.

“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.”

Zora and Carrie know that some lies can help them maintain freedom and independence. Black people in Eatonville and Lake Maitland use these “white lies” the way that Zora uses the power of storytelling: to build and maintain a world that feels comparatively safe.

“I was puzzled. ‘Who’s that? Who are Gold’s people?’ Mrs. Hurston only answered, ‘Some folks are too dangerous to have people.’”

Mrs. Hurston believes that Gold has given up her people by choosing to pass as white. The complications of race and belonging are difficult for Gold, whose life would change dramatically if she were seen as Black. She is engaged to a white man, and she would never be able to have such a relationship if she did not pass; asking her to give up her entire life is a serious demand.

“Zora’s story about Mr. Pendir wasn’t a lie. It was her way of making things make sense, explaining our lives through a story.”

Zora uses the power of storytelling to contextualize and understand the world around her. Despite their young age, she and Carrie are grappling with the painful reality of violent racism, and they need to use stories to come to terms with that reality.

“I tell stories, and one of these days, all y’all are going to find out they true! My stories are true!”

Zora’s words foreshadow the illustrious career of the real Zora Neale Hurston. Zora’s sense of self in this book is already strong, allowing readers to see how the power of storytelling allowed Zora to become an influential writer.

“‘That don’t mean they can’t be related,’ Teddy said. ‘Look at Hennie Clarke’s mother. She real light-skinned while Hennie is chocolate brown. Color difference don’t mean folks ain’t related.’”

Teddy’s insight here foreshadows Zora and Carrie’s later discovery about Ivory and Gold. Though they do not look alike, they are siblings who share the same heritage and history. Gold has chosen a different way of understanding the complications of race and belonging that separates her from her brother.

“To have a home to go to, a real one, you got to be unafraid to be who you are.”

Mr. Clarke talks to Gold about the complications of race and belonging, refusing to let her live in Eatonville because he sees her behavior as a deep betrayal. She has denied herself and her community, so now she cannot belong anywhere.

“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.”

Carrie has progressed through the coming-of-age experience to the point where she can no longer rely on stories to understand reality. The truth, however, is painful and confusing. It is easier to believe that a monster killed Ivory than it is to know that human beings are capable of acting monstrously.

“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.”

Zora’s insatiable curiosity and thirst for knowledge meant that she was on a quest to understand something that the adults in her life thought was too painful for children to know. The power of storytelling allowed her to engage with and speculate about the mystery of Ivory’s death, until the truth was too visible for even her vivid storytelling and imagination to hide.

“My mama said fooling white folks was never a sin if it brought us what we needed.”

Gold grew up with the same mentality that Carrie and Zora have: “White lies” are okay because they allow Black people to live freer, better lives. Gold has taken this mentality to the extreme: To her, lying about her identity is a “white lie” that gives her access to a much better life than she would otherwise have.

“I couldn’t shake the feeling, though, that Gold was just as dangerous as her white man. Her whole life, whether she knew it or not, Gold had been courting death. A white man may have killed and buried Gold’s brother, Gold’s keeper, but letting white folks believe the lie of her looks had made it possible.”

In Carrie’s view, Gold’s choice to pass as white is not just about the complications of race and belonging; it makes Gold ultimately responsible for her own brother’s murder. By blaming Gold, Carrie is minimizing the actions of the actual murderer who enacted a violent racist hate crime against Ivory.

“We were up against a force more powerful than white folks and more lethal than a gator king. The color of a person’s skin alone could make one woman worth protecting, while it made another man fit to die.”

Carrie and Zora realize that the danger they face is not as trivial as a mythical monster, or even the individual racism of white people. The power of institutionalized racism puts all Black people in real and immediate danger. Recognizing racism as a system is part of the coming-of-age experience for them.

“When Mr. Pendir and Gold could have chosen connection, they chose solitude; when they could have brought loving themselves to loving someone else, they wore masks instead and shunned love’s power. You can’t hide from life’s pain, and folks that love you would never expect you to.”

Both Mr. Pendir and Gold were hiding parts of themselves, which only heightened their isolation and pain. Carrie believes that people must choose connection, community, and love in the face of pain and suffering. Hiding behind a mask is not protection; true protection comes from belonging to a community.

“I got up the nerve to take a peek into my heart, and to my surprise I didn’t find that lonely picture of myself. What I found there was much bigger. I found all of Eatonville.”

By recognizing her connection to Eatonville, Carrie completes the coming-of-age experience. She used to feel alone, especially after her father’s disappearance, but she now recognizes that she has a big community that she can embrace.

“No one thought her mixed blood was the problem; the problem was that she saw her own people as a liability.”

Gold faces an impossible choice as a woman with both Black and white heritage. Choosing to live with Black people would force her to experience racism and would impose strict limits on her life, while choosing to pass as white means leaving behind her community and disavowing her sense of the complications of race and belonging.