44 pages • 1 hour read
Zora and Me
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Chapters 8-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary
After school, Carrie and Zora walk Teddy home. Teddy’s older brothers greet them and tease Teddy, while Teddy’s mother gives them buttered bread and fresh milk. Neither of Teddy’s brothers were able to attend high school, though they do not hold Teddy’s education against him. Carrie and Zora continue on their way to Joe Clarke’s store to run errands for Mrs. Hurston. Zora likes to listen to the talk of the adults at the store. Mr. Clarke commends the girls for helping to rescue Old Lady Bronson, and Zora asks if he really believes that she fell. She believes that an alligator knocked Bronson down with its tail. She tells a politely disbelieving Clarke that she has seen Mr. Pendir turn into an alligator with her own eyes.
Mr. Clarke warns the girls that it is not nice to spread stories about people, especially lonely people. He believes that Mr. Pendir has nothing to hide. Mr. Clarke gives Carrie and Zora licorice to reward them for helping Bronson. Before they leave, a man arrives to tell Mr. Clarke that something terrible has happened.
Chapter 9 Summary
A man’s decapitated body has been found near the train tracks. Since the body is missing its head, it is hard to identify. A shattered guitar was also found close to the body. Mr. Clarke hurries away to see the body. Zora tells Carrie that the dead man must be Ivory. Carrie is in shock; she sits down and starts sobbing. Ivory’s death has hurt her deeply, though she does not know why, as she barely knew him. Zora reminds Carrie that Ivory had said that he was going to go swimming at the Blue Sink. She insists that only a monster could have killed Ivory so horribly.
Chapter 10 Summary
News of Ivory’s death spreads through Eatonville and the nearby town of Lake Maitland. Mr. Hurston is about to leave to go preaching in Orlando; he does not want his last night with his family to be ruined by the incident. Carrie joins the Hurstons for dinner.
Mr. Hurston tells his children that they can each ask for one gift from Orlando. Zora, who is her father’s least-favorite child, does not want a gift; she wants to talk about Ivory. Mr. Hurston is enraged by Zora’s talk of death at the dinner table. He tells her that she is talking like a white person. Zora insists that she is not white for wanting answers. Mr. Hurston is so angry that he threatens to beat Zora. He only stops because Mrs. Hurston intervenes. Mr. Hurston tells Zora that being white means “wanting things that are out of your reach” (53) and using Black people to get them.
Chapter 11 Summary
Carrie thinks about her own father and how much she misses him. She reflects that when a person is gone, it is easy to remember only the good things about them. She loved how he used to sing her hymns and lullabies. Having only good memories of him makes him feel unreal. Carrie knows that real people are both good and bad, and it is important to remember everything.
Carrie and her mother clean their house together. Zora and her mother arrive and ask if Carrie can accompany them to Lake Maitland. Mrs. Hurston needs to buy some new linens. Carrie’s mother agrees. Mrs. Hurston asks how the girls are. They say they are fine, though Zora is still upset after the fight with her father. Mrs. Hurston invited Carrie along to cheer Zora up.
Chapter 12 Summary
Lake Maitland is a much bigger town than Eatonville. Many people from Eatonville, including Carrie’s mother, work there. Mrs. Hurston and the girls run into a friend, Mrs. Jefferson, in a linen shop. Mrs. Jefferson tells them that the white people in Lake Maitland are nervous at the news of the murder in Eatonville. Mrs. Hurston tries to avoid discussing something so gruesome in front of the children, but the girls eavesdrop anyway. They hear Mrs. Jefferson talk about a beautiful woman named Gold who is engaged to a white man. Mrs. Hurston is shocked to hear this.
Zora interrupts the women to ask who is getting married; Mrs. Hurston scolds her for eavesdropping. The store owner, a white woman, asks Mrs. Hurston who the linens she is buying are for. Mrs. Hurston lies and tells her that they are for her employers. This is what Carrie and Zora think of as a “white lie”: a lie to appease white people, who do not need to know the details of Black people’s lives. Carrie is upset that white people are more comfortable imagining Black people running errands for white employers than buying things for themselves.
Chapter 13 Summary
Outside the linen store, Zora and Carrie see Gold for the first time. She is beautiful, with blonde hair and fancy clothes. She is arm-in-arm with her fiancé, who is tall and sweaty. Carrie is enthralled by Gold’s beauty. Gold’s fiancé wanders off, and Gold approaches Carrie and Zora, to Mrs. Hurston and Mrs. Jefferson’s disapproval. Gold talks to Carrie and Zora briefly before her fiancé returns. He seems uncomfortable that she is talking to Black people.
Mrs. Jefferson and Mrs. Hurston express their disapproval of Gold and her fiancé; Mrs. Hurston remarks that Gold should be careful since she gave up her people to be with him. Zora is puzzled and wants to know who Gold’s “people” are, but her mother brushes off the question. They pass a bookstore with a book in the front window titled The Myth and Lore of Gator Country. Zora and Carrie are excited to have found a book that might answer their questions about Mr. Pendir, but it is too expensive for Mrs. Hurston to afford.
Chapters 8-13 Analysis
For Carrie, Zora, and Teddy, The Coming-of-Age Experience means different things. Their family situations and skills dictate their futures, at least to some extent. Zora’s family is the most financially stable of the three, with her father able to provide for many children and her mother staying at home. Zora has big dreams about traveling the world, and she is the only one of the three children with anything close to the resources to make those dreams a reality. Since her father’s disappearance, Carrie only has her mother, who now has to work hard to support herself and her only daughter. The Hurstons often take care of Carrie to make things easier for her mother. Despite her precarious financial situation, Carrie’s education is never in doubt. Teddy, on the other hand, is the first of his brothers who will be able to attend high school at all. The others had to stop school early to help out on the farm. The characters are all still too young to fully reckon with what their family situations will mean for their futures.
As violence in Eatonville escalates, Carrie and Zora continue to rely on The Power of Storytelling to make sense of things. None of the adults in their lives believe them about Mr. Pendir or an alligator-human hybrid, but none of them explain in clear terms why their story must be false. There is a prevailing notion that discussing the details of Ivory’s murder with or near children is inappropriate. That means that while Zora and Carrie have a lot of questions, the only way they can get answers is by making up their own stories. Ivory’s death gets folded into the story, with both girls firmly believing that a human could not have killed him so brutally. By believing in a monster, Carrie and Zora can create a framework of understanding that makes sense to them. They can also protect themselves from the horrifying truth of racism.
It does not occur to Carrie or Zora that Ivory could have been lynched. Such a thing is entirely outside their conception of The Complications of Race and Belonging. Of course, the girls are aware of racism, and it does impact their lives. They are aware of the uncomfortable but unavoidable calculus that Black people have to do to keep the peace with white people. They think of this practice as telling “white lies,” a pun or misunderstanding of the actual phrase, which refers to a harmless lie. Mr. Hurston makes it clear that it is bad for Black people to behave like white people; it prevents them from belonging and makes them seem selfish. It is a way of betraying their people.
Mr. Hurston’s statements about race also foreshadow the truth about Gold. Carrie and Zora assume that Gold is white because she has blonde hair and a white fiancé. They maintain that assumption all the way through this section of the book. However, Mrs. Hurston and Mrs. Jefferson are aware that Gold is actually a Black woman who is passing as white. They imply as much in their discussion, but they do not explain the situation to Carrie and Zora.
Carrie does not understand why she has such a strong reaction to learning about Ivory’s death. One reason is simply that learning about a decapitation is extremely upsetting, especially for a child. The other reason is that Ivory reminds Carrie of her father. They look alike and have similar voices and manners. Learning that he is dead reminds Carrie of her own father’s mysterious disappearance; she does not know if she will ever see him again, and she has no way of learning what happened to him.
Carrie had a strong relationship with her father before he disappeared, in contrast to Zora. Carrie notes that Mr. Hurston is glad to have sons. He also likes his first daughter, Zora’s older sister, who adores him in return. She thinks that Mr. Hurston “couldn’t forgive Zora” for being born a girl and thus proving that “not even the affairs of his own home were totally under his control” (53). This relationship is relatively true to Zora Neale Hurston’s real life: Her father did not prefer her, which became increasingly clear after her mother died in 1904.
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