In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (14 page)

“She had high blood pressure. Her health wasn't good.… She used to live in one of my houses—on School Court Street. It's a block house. … I don't recall the number. But my wife and I used to invite her over to the house for dinner.
She always ate well,
” he says emphatically.

“That's comforting to know,” I say, wondering where Zora ate when she wasn't with the Bentons.

“Sometimes she would run out of groceries—after she got sick—and she'd call me. ‘Come over here and see 'bout me,' she'd say. And I'd take her shopping and buy her groceries.

“She was always studying. Her mind—before the stroke—just worked all the time. She was always going somewhere, too. She once went to Honduras to study something. And when she died, she was working on that book about Herod the Great. She was so intelligent! And really had perfect expressions. Her English was beautiful.” (I suspect this is a clever way to let me know Zora herself didn't speak in the “black English” her characters used.)

“I used to read all of her books,” Dr. Benton continues, “but it was a long time ago. I remember one about… it was called, I think, ‘The Children of God'
[Their Eyes Were Watching God],
and I remember Janie and Teapot [Teacake] and the mad dog riding on the cow in that hurricane and bit old Teapot on the cheek… .”

I am delighted that he remembers even this much of the story, even if the names are wrong, but seeing his affection for Zora I feel I must ask him about her burial. “Did she
really
have a pauper's funeral?”

“She
didn't
have a pauper's funeral!” he says with great heat. “Everybody around here
loved
Zora.”

“We just came back from ordering a headstone,” I say quietly, because he
is
an old man and the color is coming and going on his face, “but to tell the truth, I can't be positive what I found is the grave. All I know is the spot I found was the only grave-size hole in the area.”

“I remember it wasn't near the road,” says Dr. Benton, more calmly. “Some other lady came by here and we went out looking for the grave and I took a long iron stick and poked all over that part of the cemetery but we didn't find anything. She took some pictures of the general area. Do the weeds still come up to your knees?”

“And beyond,” I murmur. This time there isn't any doubt Dr. Benton feels ashamed.

As he walks us to our car, he continues to talk about Zora. “She couldn't really write much near the end. She had the stroke and it left her weak; her mind was affected. She couldn't think about anything for long.

“She came here from Daytona, I think. She owned a houseboat over there. When she came here, she sold it. She lived on that money, then she worked as a maid—for an article on maids she was writing—and she worked for the
Chronicle
writing the horoscope column.

“I think black people here in Florida got mad at her because she was for some politician they were against. She said this politician
built
schools for blacks while the one they wanted just talked about it. And although Zora wasn't egotistical, what she thought, she thought; and generally what she thought, she said.”

When we leave Dr. Benton's office I realize I have missed my plane back home to Jackson, Mississippi. That being so, Charlotte and I decide to find the house Zora lived in before she was taken to the county welfare home to die. From among her many notes, Charlotte locates a letter of Zora's she has copied that carries the address: 1734 School Court Street. We ask several people for directions. Finally, two old gentlemen in a dusty gray Plymouth offer to lead us there. School Court Street is not paved, and the road is full of mud puddles. It is dismal and squalid, redeemed only by the brightness of the late afternoon sun. Now I can understand what a “block” house is. It is a house shaped like a block, for one thing, surrounded by others just like it. Some houses are blue and some are green or yellow. Zora's is light green. They are tiny—about fifty by fifty feet, squatty with flat roofs. The house Zora lived in looks worse than the others, but that is its only distinction. It also has three ragged and dirty children sitting on the steps.

“Is this where y'all live?” I ask, aiming my camera.

“No, ma'am” they say in unison, looking at me earnestly. “We live over yonder. This Miss So-and-So's house; but she in the horspital.”

We chatter inconsequentially while I take more pictures. A car drives up with a young black couple in it. They scowl fiercely at Charlotte and don't look at me with friendliness, either. They get out and stand in their doorway across the street. I go up to them to explain. “Did you know Zora Hurston used to live right across from you?” I ask.

“Who?” They stare at me blankly, then become curiously attentive, as if they think I made the name up. They are both Afroed and he is somberly dashikied.

I suddenly feel frail and exhausted. “It's too long a story,” I say, “but tell me something: is there anybody on this street who's lived here for more than thirteen years?”

“That old man down there,” the young man says, pointing. Sure enough, there is a man sitting on his steps three houses down. He has graying hair and is very neat, but there is a weakness about him. He reminds me of Mrs. Turner's husband in
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
He's rather “vanishing”-looking, as if his features have been sanded down. In the old days, before black was beautiful, he was probably considered attractive, because he has wavy hair and light-brown skin; but now, well, light skin has ceased to be its own reward.

After the preliminaries, there is only one thing I want to know: “Tell me something,” I begin, looking down at Zora's house. “Did Zora like flowers?”

He looks at me queerly. “As a matter of fact,” he says, looking regretfully at the bare, rough yard that surrounds her former house, “she was crazy about them. And she was a great gardener. She loved azaleas, and that running and blooming vine [morning-glories], and she really loved that night-smelling flower [gardenia]. She kept a vegetable garden year-round, too. She raised collards and tomatoes and things like that.

“Everyone in this community thought well of Miss Hurston. When she died, people all up and down this street took up a collection for her burial. We put her away nice.”

“Why didn't somebody put up a headstone?”

“Well, you know, one was never requested. Her and her family didn't get along. They didn't even come to the funeral.”

“And did she live down there by herself?”

“Yes, until they took her away. She lived with—just her and her companion, Sport.”

My ears perk up. “Who?”

“Sport, you know, her dog. He was her only companion. He was a big brown-and-white dog.”

When I walk back to the car, Charlotte is talking to the young couple on their porch. They are relaxed and smiling.

“I told them about the famous lady who used to live across the street from them,” says Charlotte as we drive off. “Of course they had no idea Zora ever lived, let alone that she lived across the street. I think I'll send some of her books to them.”

“That's real kind of you,” I say.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it… No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

—Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels To Be Colored Me,”
World Tomorrow
, 1928

There are times—and finding Zora Hurston's grave was one of them—when normal responses of grief, horror, and so on do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of the emotion one feels. It was impossible for me to cry when I saw the field full of weeds where Zora is. Partly this is because I have come to know Zora through her books and she was not a teary sort of person herself; but partly, too, it is because there is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.

It is only later, when the pain is not so direct a threat to one's own existence, that what was learned in that moment of comical lunacy is understood. Such moments rob us of both youth and vanity. But perhaps they are also times when greater disciplines are born.

1975

If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.

—Jesus,
The Gnostic Gospels,
Elaine Pagels, ed.

[I wrote the following essay in the winter of 1966-67 while sharing one room above Washington Square Park in New York with a struggling young Jewish law student who became my husband. It was my first published essay and won the three-hundred-dollar first prize in the annual
American Scholar
essay contest. The money was almost magically reassuring to us in those days of disaffected parents, outraged friends, and one-item meals, and kept us in tulips, peonies, daisies, and lamb chops for several months.]

S
OMEONE SAID RECENTLY
to an old black lady from Mississippi, whose legs had been badly mangled by local police who arrested her for “disturbing the peace,” that the Civil Rights Movement was dead, and asked, since it was dead, what she thought about it. The old lady replied, hobbling out of his presence on her cane, that the Civil Rights Movement was like herself, “if it's dead, it shore ain't ready to lay down!”

This old lady is a legendary freedom fighter in her small town in the Delta. She has been severely mistreated for insisting on her rights as an American citizen. She has been beaten for singing Movement songs, placed in solitary confinement in prisons for talking about freedom, and placed on bread and water for praying aloud to God for her jailers' deliverance. For such a woman the Civil Rights Movement will never be over as long as her skin is black. It also will never be over for twenty million others with the same “affliction,” for whom the Movement can never “lay down,” no matter how it is killed by the press and made dead and buried by the white American public. As long as one black American survives, the struggle for equality with other Americans must also survive. This is a debt we owe to those blameless hostages we leave to the future, our children.

Still, white liberals and deserting Civil Rights sponsors are quick to justify their disaffection from the Movement by claiming that it is all over. “And since it is over,” they will ask, “would someone kindly tell me what has been gained by it?” They then list statistics supposedly showing how much more advanced segregation is now than ten years ago—in schools, housing, jobs. They point to a gain in conservative politicians during the last few years. They speak of ghetto riots and of the survey that shows that most policemen are admittedly too anti-Negro to do their jobs in ghetto areas fairly and effectively. They speak of every area that has been touched by the Civil Rights Movement as somehow or other going to pieces

They rarely talk, however, about human attitudes among Negroes that have undergone terrific changes just during the past seven to ten years (not to mention all those years when there was a Movement and only the Negroes knew about it). They seldom speak of changes in personal lives because of the influence of people in the Movement. They see general failure and few, if any, individual gains.

They do not understand what it is that keeps the Movement from “laying down” and Negroes from reverting to their former
silent
second-class status. They have apparently never stopped to wonder why it is always the white man—on his radio and in his newspaper and on his television—who says that the Movement is dead. If a Negro were audacious enough to make such a claim, his fellows might hanker to see him shot. The Movement is dead to the white man because it no longer interests him. And it no longer interests him because he can afford to be uninterested: he does not have to live by it, with it, or for it, as Negroes must. He can take a rest from the news of beatings, killings, and arrests that reach him from North and South—if his skin is white. Negroes cannot now and will never be able to take a rest from the injustices that plague them, for they—not the white man—are the target.

Perhaps it is naïve to be thankful that the Movement “saved” a large number of individuals and gave them something to live for, even if it did not provide them with everything they wanted. (Materially, it provided them with precious little that they wanted.) When a movement awakens people to the possibilities of life, it seems unfair to frustrate them by then denying what they had thought was offered. But what was offered? What was promised? What was it all about? What good did it do? Would it have been better, as some have suggested, to leave the Negro people as they were, unawakened, unallied with one another, unhopeful about what to expect for their children in some future world?

I do not think so. If knowledge of my condition is all the freedom I get from a “freedom movement,” it is better than unawareness, forgottenness, and hopelessness, the existence that is like the existence of a beast. Man only truly lives by knowing; otherwise he simply performs, copying the daily habits of others, but conceiving nothing of his creative possibilities as a man, and accepting someone else's superiority and his own misery.

When we are children, growing up in our parents' care, we await the spark from the outside world. Sometimes our parents provide it—if we are lucky—sometimes it comes from another source far from home. We sit, paralyzed, surrounded by our anxiety and dread, hoping we will not have to grow up into the narrow world and ways we see about us. We are hungry for a life that turns us on; we yearn for a knowledge of living that will save us from our innocuous lives that resemble death. We look for signs in every strange event; we search for heroes in every unknown face.