The Cursed Ground Read online

  Prologue

  Eatonville 1903

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Westin 1855

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Eatonville 1903

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Westin 1855

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Eatonville 1903

  Chapter Twelve

  Westin 1855

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Eatonville 1903

  Chapter Fifteen

  Westin 1855

  Chapter Sixteen

  Eatonville 1903

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography

  A Time Line of Zora Neale Hurston’s Life

  Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography

  Children’s Books Adapted from Folktales Collected by Zora Neale Hurston

  Acknowledgments

  There are two kinds of memory. One is the ordinary kind, rooted in things that happened, people you knew, and places you went. I remember my father this way: laughing, picking me up, singing lullabies in his gentle bass. I see him swinging my mother in a half circle, the hem of her blue skirt flying up to show the rough white thread she used for mending, like a bed of stars along a ridge.

  The second kind of memory is rooted in the things you live with, the land you live on, the history of where you belong. You tend not to notice it, much less think about it, but it seeps into you, grows its long roots down into the richest soil of your living mind. Because most of us pay this second kind of memory no mind, the people who do talk about it seem to us superstitious or even crazy. But they aren’t. The power of that memory is equal to any of the memories we make ourselves, because it represents our collective being, the soul of a place.

  After losing my father, after nursing myself to sleep nights on end with glimpses of the past with him, I was well enough acquainted with the first kind of memory. But by twelve I was still too young to pay much mind to the memories held by the town we lived in, by Eatonville itself.

  That all changed the night we found Mr. Polk, his blood soaking into the earth. When I look back, I wonder how it had never before occurred to me that Eatonville, America’s first incorporated colored town, might have a history that stretched back beyond its name and my twelve years. How could I have thought our town began with Teddy, Zora, and me, that it had just opened into the infinite present of our young lives? In fact, we were living out Eatonville’s history as blindly as pawns in a century-old chess game. We were no more new or free than the land itself, but like all young people, we confused our youth with beginning and our experience with knowledge. It wasn’t until that night — when we heard the town mute speak to the town conjure woman — that Zora and I began to forge a real connection with the land, a connection that let us know ourselves through a past we hadn’t lived but was inside us all the same.

  I lay wide-awake in the dark, watching the flares of faraway lightning light up the hand-hewn beams of my best friend’s bedroom. It was well past midnight. Light rain drummed gently on the tin roof, nervous fingers anticipating the storm that hadn’t quite reached us yet. Zora was next to me in the narrow bed, deep asleep.

  I was staying with Zora’s family for the week while my mama tended her employer’s sick baby over in Lake Maitland. After Daddy died, there was just me and Mama. I was an only child. Alone with Mama I might have felt lonely in the world, but I had Zora, my best friend, my secret keeper, and my talisman against sorrow. From the time I was old enough to have a conversation, Mama always liked to tell how my three-year-old self toddled over to Zora, who was squirming and fussing one pew away from us in her father’s church, grabbed her hand, and didn’t let go for the next hour. Zora took a long look at me, tried once to shake me loose, then settled right down to the idea of us being joined. Zora’s mother liked to say that after I took a hold of Zora, Sunday morning service once again became a place of worship and peace for her. I don’t remember that at all. In fact, my own first memory of Zora has the roles reversed: instead of me grabbing her, she’s grabbing me and pulling me with her as she scrambles after a lizard that turns out to be a baby diamondback rattler. My screams brought our parents running, and Zora was praised for saving me. Only, I knew there would have been no need to save me if she hadn’t taken hold of me in the first place. But I never held the scrapes against Zora. She made life in a town no bigger than a teacup feel like it held the whole world.

  Thunder cracked softly in the distance. I had just closed my eyes when the shrieking began. It came from right outside — high-pitched and truncated. A shiver ran through me before I recognized the sound: horses!

  I slipped out of bed and went to the window. Two horses were in the yard below. One whinnied again and they both galloped away, jumping the low garden fence almost abreast.

  A hand touched my back and I jumped.

  “Shh,” whispered Zora. She was just behind me, staring after the retreating horses.

  Still spooked, I gave her arm a squeeze. “You about scared me out of my skin!” Zora held a finger to her lips and pointed to her older sister, Sarah, and her little brother, Everett, who shared the bedroom with her. She took my hand and pulled me out of the room.

  “Those are Mr. Polk’s horses. How you reckon they got loose?” she whispered.

  “Something scared them.”

  We crept down the stairs, careful to avoid the tattletale creaking spots. Zora motioned for me to keep following her. At the front door she cloaked her nightgown with her brother John’s work jacket and handed me her father’s work shirt.

  “Something’s wrong if those horses are loose. Maybe we should go see.” Her worried whisper didn’t match the glint of excitement in her eye — the one that spelled adventure and trouble all at the same time.

  I hesitated. Zora’s plans often led me to do things that went against my inclination, not to mention my better judgment. Tonight had trouble written all over it, and nothing in me ever caught a thrill from courting trouble.

  “Wait,” I said. “Let’s wake your daddy. He’ll know what to do.”

  Zora shot me a scathing look. “Daddy will tell us to go back to bed.” I sank back on my heels and crossed my arms. Zora shook her head. She knew my posture meant that I was closed for business.

  “Carrie, you sitting at the feast of knowledge, but you don’t want to eat. Now, I want to pull up a chair and have a heaping plate — only I don’t like to eat alone. Come on, don’t make me go over to Mr. Polk’s by myself.”

  Her sorrowful pleading was weakening my resolve, but I still shook my head.

  Unfortunately, Zora had caught the split second of my ambivalence and used it as a shortcut across the field of my will to the junction of our compromise.

  “OK, let’s make a deal. If there’s any trouble, we’ll get help.” She hooked her arm through mine, but I didn’t budge.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise! I promise! Now, come on.”

  Oh, how I wished Zora couldn’t lasso me so easily with her words! But before I could add another condition to her promise, she was opening the front door and yanking me through.

  The night was surprisingly cool for late June. The storm clouds hovered over Eatonville but didn’t break, sending down a bleak drizzle instead. Not even the moon had gumption enough to peek out from behind the thick curtain of indigo clouds as we carefully picked our way through the dark.

  I followe
d Zora, as close as her own shadow.

  “Scaredy-cat,” Zora mocked. From behind her back, I could feel her smiling.

  “Am not. And don’t laugh at me.”

  Zora snorted. “Are too.”

  “Am — OK, you know what? Not everybody thinks trouble is an invitation. Some of us think it’s a skull and crossbones sign, saying, Keep away if you don’t want to get hurt. And then we go anyway, even if we are scared.”

  Zora glanced back at me with a smile. “I know you do. I know you go anyway, even though you’re scared. And you’re right — watch that root sticking out — it doesn’t make you a scaredy-cat. It makes you brave.”

  “Hm!” I doubted that, but it was nice to hear her say so.

  “But you think I’m never scared, and that ain’t true neither.”

  “You scared? I’d like to see that!”

  “I’m scared plenty. It’s just not that important to me, being scared.”

  We reached the towering canebrake that marked the southernish boundary of Mr. Polk’s land. Mr. Polk was the town mute, and our friend. No one knew how old he was, but it wasn’t a day under sixty. He lived alone with his horses. And he took a pride in them same as most other folks took pride in their children. People came from all around with their horse troubles, donkey troubles, mule troubles, and Mr. Polk helped them, one by one. He didn’t talk with hand signs except to raise his palm for Stop! whenever someone tried to explain to him what the problem was. Most folks knew better than to try. They just brought their animal in, let Mr. Polk take it, and came back in a few days to pay — money, for some folks, but mostly whatever they could pay in, chickens, salt meat, vittles, what have you.

  In terms of sheer acreage, Mr. Polk was the biggest landowner in town. His little cabin, the paddock and stables, and the big pasture behind them took up maybe four or five acres at least, and behind them sat a few hundred acres of overgrown woodland that went all the way to the resort town of Winter Park, and it all belonged to Mr. Polk. Folks in Eatonville gave the land no never-mind, since, thick with giant cane, all manner of pines, and knotty scrub brush, it offered nothing and enticed no one.

  As we neared the cabin, we saw a shape crouched on the ground. Zora sprinted over, me at her heels.

  There, right in front of his cabin door, doubled in half, was Mr. Polk. We knelt beside him, and the smell of burning cedar reached my nose.

  “Mr. Polk,” I cried, “something’s burning in your cabin!”

  I ran into his one-room abode. A small eating table was overturned, and a kerosene lantern, lying on its side, had begun to burn the straw mat that covered his earthen floor.

  I couldn’t stamp out the fire barefoot, so I grabbed the quilt from his bed and smothered the flames. Within a minute, all that was left of the small fire was smoke strong enough to burn my eyes.

  I pushed open the door and the single window and went back outside. Zora had helped Mr. Polk prop himself against the cabin wall. He was holding his left arm, and even in the dark we could see it was bleeding through his shirt, the blood pooling onto the fabric of his pants. He tried to stand but sank down again.

  “Hold his hurt arm,” Zora commanded.

  In a heartbeat I was on his other side. I put my hand flat on his chest. “Mr. Polk, we’re here.” He was so thin I could feel his heart flutter like a butterfly wing under my palm. He nodded to me.

  Zora offered him her shoulder and he pulled himself to his feet, with her supporting him under his good arm and me helping him cradle the wounded one. He stepped toward the cabin door. A last flicker of lightning lit up his face, making invisible all the wrinkles of age for a fraction of a second and revealing the face of a troubled boy.

  “It’s still smoky in there,” I said, but Mr. Polk shook his head and we all went inside.

  He sat on his bed while we found and lit a lantern. Its light revealed a long, jagged wound running down the side of Mr. Polk’s left arm. The fabric of his shirt was torn the length of the wound. All three of us stared. I couldn’t imagine how he could have hurt himself so badly.

  Zora suffered no such limits of the imagination. “You’ve been cut, Mr. Polk. Someone cut you.” As she uttered the words, their truth was undeniable. Now that I knew it was intentional, his wound looked worse.

  A shadow fell across the doorway. We looked up to see Old Lady Bronson. She was wrapped in a dark-gray shawl, her giant black cowhide bag hung against her right hip. With soldier boots that stopped below her knees and the dissipating smoke rising around her, the town conjure woman looked every bit the part of a witch. The steel-gray hair I’d only ever seen her wear in a single tight braid down her back blew wild behind her, gleaming with droplets of rain. Her freckled skin glowed in the lamplight. Silhouetted against the lightning-filled sky, Old Lady Bronson looked electrified.

  She took in the situation with one sweep of her piercing black eyes, set her giant bag on the ground, and started pulling things from it.

  “Carrie Brown and Zora Neale Hurston, don’t just stand there. Fetch me a basin of water and some rags.”

  The presence of a grown woman, especially one with healing power, pushed away some of my fear. Zora and I set about collecting what she needed. I set the basin of clean water beside her, and Zora handed her a white shirt made of rough linen, the only cloth we could find in the little home.

  Old Lady Bronson’s wrinkled and arthritic hands belied their strength: she ripped the shirt as easy as shucking corn.

  We watched her clean the wound and tie it closed with the strips of cloth. Then she pulled out of her bag a spool of silk thread and a crescent-shaped needle, which she quickly threaded and ran in circles over the gash faster than my eyes could follow, undoing each cloth strip as she reached it with a flick of her finger. It was clearly not the first time she had tended to such a stark wound. Mr. Polk watched her work. Other than the slightest wince as she pulled the thread taut, his face showed Old Lady Bronson nothing but tenderness. After tying off the last stitch and covering the wound in the last of the linen, Old Lady Bronson wiped the sweat from Mr. Polk’s brow and placed a pillow stuffed with Spanish moss behind his back.

  Mr. Polk took her hands in his worn and wrinkled ones. Then he turned his crinkled face to her and did the impossible: the town mute began to speak. Just like that, he opened his mouth and sound came out of it. Except that the sounds that flew out of his mouth made no sense to me. At first I didn’t even recognize them as words; they were light as birds and so full of feeling. As he spoke, tears ran down the creases of his face.

  Old Lady Bronson nodded as if she understood his sounds perfectly, as if he were speaking in plain English. Were we witnessing a miracle? It was as if Mr. Polk’s wound had given him the gift of speech, but he spoke in a secret language only Old Lady Bronson could understand. Zora must have felt the same way, because she reached for my hand and held it tight. Neither of us uttered a word.

  And then the conjure woman did something that surprised us as much as Mr. Polk’s suddenly gaining the power of speech: she spoke back to him in that same strange tongue. She spoke slowly, each word weighted with what I took for sorrow, and her words seemed to calm him. He nodded, and then he looked deep into her eyes, his soul bared. I shivered.

  Old Lady Bronson patted Polk’s leg and stood up. “I’ll be back with salve after daybreak. Rest up till I get back.” Speaking English again seemed to remind her that Zora and I were still there, and she turned her stern gaze on us.

  “Since you two little pitchers have the biggest ears in Eatonville, I’m sure you’ve taken this all in.” Her words were a statement of fact, not a question. “And since you’re grown enough to find yourselves here, I expect you to be grown enough to keep this to yourselves. All of it.”

  My lips parted in protest, and she silenced me with a gesture of her hand, but Zora would never oblige so easily.

  Old Lady Bronson was a small woman with a big presence, and Zora stood only half a head shorter than her. Raising hersel
f up to her full height, she looked almost eye to eye at the witch. Old Lady Bronson extended her hand and perched her slim fingers on Zora’s shoulder. I would have screamed to have her touch me, but Zora didn’t even flinch. She just went on looking her in the eye.

  “How did you two come to be here, anyway? I know it wasn’t Carrie Brown’s idea to come strolling out way past midnight — and with a storm threatening, no less.”

  I bobbed my head in agreement, eager to get Zora out of the conjure woman’s clutches and both of us back on the road toward home.

  “Two of Mr. Polk’s horses ran through my yard,” Zora answered calmly. “We knew something was wrong.”

  Old Lady Bronson raised her eyebrows. “I always tell folks that twelve is a changeling year, and it looks like you starting to have some sense with your twelve years. You did right to come and check on Mr. Polk, but now it’s time for you to go home and forget about all this.”

  “So who attacked him?” Zora acted as if she hadn’t heard a word.

  Old Lady Bronson tightened her grip on Zora’s shoulder and leaned in. “Child, you are nobody’s fool. And you tell a tall tale better than half the grown men in this town.” She smiled just a little. “But this ain’t no tale I want told.”

  There wasn’t a grown-up alive who could stay Zora’s curiosity once it had been piqued, not even Mr. Hurston with a fresh-cut peach hickory in his hand. Old Lady Bronson was no exception.

  “Miz Bronson, I don’t want to tell nothing you don’t want told, but Mr. Polk is our friend and I want to know what happened to him. How can he talk all of a sudden?”

  I practically swallowed my tongue to hear Zora speak like that to the scariest person we knew, but she was as nonchalant as if she had just asked the time.

  Old Lady Bronson’s eyes flashed fire. “Child, you have mistaken me for someone who is bound by the everyday. Folks far and wide would travel a long way to avoid courting my temper.”

  Her tone made me ready to abide by any command she made. Not Zora. She stood there cool as a July cucumber.

  “I just want to know the truth!” said Zora.