An Unmarked Pauper's Grave(Barry) “What exactly don’t you like about my poetry?” Flinging the sheet of paper she was reading from on the table, Samantha Edwards tilted her head at a sharp angle and glowered at me.

It was the third meeting of the Ebony Writers’ Collective, a rather grandiose name for a collection of black folk who wrote creative fiction, the focus on issues unique to the local community. “All I said,” I chose my words guardedly, “was there’s a lot of bitterness directed -”

“You’re mistaking social satire for acrimony,” Samantha blurted, “an exposé of abuses our people suffered dating back to colonial times.” Short and squat with a fleshy nose, the young black woman glanced about the room seeking moral support, but the other members simply wanted the reading to proceed.

“Zora Hurston would take issue with your attitude,” I replied, unwilling to roll over and play dead.

“And who the hell is Norah Hurston?”

“Zora,” I corrected, “was a black novelist from the early nineteen hundreds.” “‘Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey's back’... that was one of her most famous sayings.” I purposely chose something Samantha Edwards wouldn’t immediately comprehend.

“Their Eyes Were Looking at God,” Minnie Fallon interrupted before Samantha could collect her thoughts and mount a rebuttal. Minnie was a shriveled up wisp of a woman, old as Methuselah with a third-rate set of dentures that erratically wandered her mouth with a mind of their own. “In my day, Zora Hurston was one of the finest Negro writers but that didn’t last long.”

“Excuse me,” Samantha interjected.

“The poor unfortunate… she went from rags to riches and then back to bedraggled rags by end of life,” Minnie spoke in an offhand manner. “If I remember correctly, they buried Zora in an unmarked pauper’s grave.”

“A potter’s field in Fort Pierce, Florida,” I added, “where they dumped the unknown, unclaimed, criminals and indigents.”

“How awful!” someone in the rear of the room murmured, “but the library will be closing shortly and we really need to get back to the business at hand.”

* * * * *

As soon as the session ended and wanting nothing more to do with the feisty female, I bolted for the door. Inserting the key in my car door, I heard a pair of legs approaching at a rapid clip. “Learning without wisdom is a load of books on a donkey's back.” Samantha had no intentions of letting the matter rest. “It took a while but I unraveled the implication.”

“That’s nice,” I replied noncommittally.

“Learning serves no purpose if the individual lacks sufficient insight to put that knowledge to good use.”

“Yes, that’s true,” I agreed begrudgingly.

“I suppose you were referring to me.” I let the remark pass without comment. “What else did the woman who was buried in a pauper’s grave say?”

Removing the key from the car door, I thought a moment. “Suppose a black person does something really magnificent, and you glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but in the fact that the doer was Negro. Should you not also go hang your head in shame when a member of your race does something disgusting? The white race did not go into a laboratory and invent incandescent light. That was Edison. If you are under the impression that every white man is an Edison, just look around a bit.”

At a loss for words, Samantha Edwards blinked violently.

“Everyone kept reminding Zora that she was the grand-daughter of slaves, but it failed to register with her. Slavery was sixty years in the past.” Swinging the car door open, I slid into the driver’s seat. “The operation was successful and the patient was doing well, thank you.” “Injecting a smidgeon of droll humor into her world view, Zora once suggested that, if sometimes she felt discriminated against, it did not make her angry, since how could anyone deny themselves the pleasure of her company?”

* * * * *

By the weekend, temperatures crept into the lower nineties. I spent Saturday at Horseneck Beach slathered in sun tan lotion, ogling pretty girls in skimpy bikinis and putting the bothersome Samantha Edwards totally out of my mind. On the way home I stopped at a clam shack and gorged on calamari, coleslaw and clam strips slathered with tartar sauce.

Sunday morning my family went to church. The choir director, Mindy Brown, was a morbidly obese mulatto with a double chin and mole prominently displayed on her left cheek. My fantasy was that the woman was a failed, utterly tone-deaf opera singer who, crooning in a shrill falsetto, unleashed her neurosis on the Church parishioners. Shrouded in a bizarre billy goat vibrato, the singer’s intonation constantly faltered. And yet no one ever complained. Every Sunday morning Mindy Brown took center stage as though she was performing at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera. Churchgoers left the hall with a ringing in their ears and new appreciation for pristine silence.

If I was ever shipwrecked, lost at sea, and found myself marooned on an island with the likes of either the choir director or Samantha Edwards, I would take a vow of celibacy, swear off sex altogether and count my blessings!

* * * *

Later that afternoon, my mother knocked on my bedroom door. Entering with a sheepish grin, she eased the door quietly shut. “You sly dog!”

I looked up from the book I was reading. “You never said anything about a girlfriend.”

Laying the book aside, I sat up on the edge of the bed. “What girlfriend?”

“There’s a sweet thing in a paisley dress waiting to see you in the living room.”

“This girl… did she mention a name?”

My mother’s enthusiasm had reached fever pitch. “Samantha Edwards.” She tapped the side of her cheek pensively with a taut index finger. “There’s an Edwards, who owns the yarn shop off Newbury Street. You don’t suppose-”

Brushing past my mother, I found my worst nightmare perched demurely on the sofa. Samantha rose when I entered the room. “I found your address in the phone book.”

Before I could muster any coherent response, my mother blurted, “You’re not related to the Edwards who own that fashionable yarn boutique near the center of town?”

“That would be my mother,” Samantha confirmed.

“I buy all my knitting supplies there,” my mother gushed.

“Perhaps we could go somewhere and talk,” I suggested.

“Yes, that would be nice.”

As I picked my way to the door, my mother dogged our heels. “Give my regards to your lovely mother… such a gracious lady!”

Once out in the street, Samantha pulled up short. “After the last meeting of our writers’ group I couldn’t stop thinking about that woman.”

“Zora Hurston,” I noted.

“I’ve already read through a collection of her short stories.” Samantha stared wistfully across the street at a clump of paper birch tree with their delicately thin, pearlescent bark. “The woman had a reverence for language, as though words were a cherished gift from God.”

The observation caught me totally off guard. “There’s a coffee shop two blocks down where we can talk.”

I led the way and when we were properly situated with our drinks and pastries, Samantha said, “Zora Hurston was one of the major literary figures of her day but died in obscurity and was buried in anonymity.” While the intensity in the woman’s walnut colored eyes remained, the residual anger had seeped from her face. “What happened?”

“It’s a rather long story.”

Sipping her coffee, Samantha settled back in the chair. “Tell me how a gifted black woman with celebrity status one minute could be consigned to an artistic junk heap the next.”

A young girl came out from the back of the store with a metal rack of fresh-baked muffins, steam still rising off the golden brown pastries. I turned my attention back to the woman sitting opposite. “Hurston was the fifth of eight children. All four of her grandparents had been born into slavery. Her father was a Baptist preacher and sharecropper, who later worked as a carpenter; her mother was a school teacher. She was born in Alabama but when she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida. In 1887, Eatonville was one of the first all-black towns incorporated in the United States. Sometimes she claimed it as her birthplace.”

“A few years later, her father was elected mayor of the town, and in 1902 he was called to serve as minister of its largest church, Macedonia Missionary Baptist.” “When Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was at its zenith, and she soon became one of the writers at its center.”

“Then she would have been surrounded by the cultural crème-de-la-crème… people like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Wallace Thurman.” Samantha, who was nibbling on a blueberry muffin, looked up from her food. “How wonderful!”

“Not so!” I brought her up short, flinging the contradiction like a fistful of dirt in her face. “It proved her undoing,”

The café door opened and a family wandered in. The children were well dressed and equally well behaved. The father ordered a selection of pastries, several éclairs, and they drifted back out into the street.

“‘All my skinfolk ain't kinfolk… that was another one of her cryptic sayings.”

Samantha turned the phrase over in her mind as though it was a precious coin. “She certainly had a magical way with words.”

“For sure, but several of Hurston's literary contemporaries disparage her use of dialect, saying that it was a caricature of African-American culture rooted in a post-Civil War, white racist tradition. These writers, associated with the Harlem Renaissance, criticized Hurston's later work as not advancing their movement. Richard Wright, in his review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, said the novel carried no Negro message. In the main, her novel was not addressed to blacks, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knew how to satisfy.”

“She could have fought back,” Samantha protested, “stood her ground.”

I shook my head. “Zora seldom complained. She never felt that she was tragically colored. There was no great sorrow dammed up in her soul, no private misery lurking behind her eyes. She never belonged to the sobbing school of Negrohood which held that nature somehow had given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that was her literary life, the black woman saw that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. “

Splaying her fingers across her face in an attitude of despondency, Samantha groaned. “Her own kind turned against her.”

“In the end, yes,” I confirmed. “Hurston's work slid into obscurity for decades. The use of African-American dialect in her novels became less popular, because younger writers felt that it was demeaning, given the racially charged history in American literature. Also, Hurston had made stylistic choices in dialogue influenced by her academic studies. Thinking like a folklorist, she wanted to represent speech patterns of the period.”

“Toward the end of her downward spiral she moved to Fort Pierce, Florida, taking jobs where she could find them. At age 60, Hurston struggled to make ends meet with the help of public assistance. At one point she even worked as a maid on Miami Beach's Rivo Alto Island.”

“Dogged by financial and medical difficulties, Zora entered St. Lucie County Welfare Home, where she had a stroke. She died on January 28, 1960, and was buried at the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida. In 1973, when the novelist Alice Walker found an unmarked grave in the general area where Hurston had been buried; they decided to mark it as hers.”

* * * * *

As we left the coffee shop, I placed a hand on Samantha Edward’s shoulders, pulled her close and, in hushed tones, whispered, “That’s the way with people ... If they do you wrong, they invent a bad name for you, a good name for their acts and then destroy you in the name of virtue.”

“Another Zora Hurston maxim?”

“What else?”

* * * * *

Later that night my cell phone rang. An emotionally distraught Samantha Edwards was tripping over her words. “I stayed up all night reading Their Eyes Were Looking At God.”

I reached for the bedside lamp, trying to clear the cobwebs. It was four in the morning. My brain was non-functional, on automatic pilot. “It’s rather early.”

“I need a favor.”

I glanced out the window. The front yard was pitch dark, the only brightness coming from a street light at the far end of the street. “What sort of favor.’

“I’m going to make a brief visit to Fort Pierce, Florida… a pilgrimage of sorts, to place flowers on Zora’s grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest Cemetery.”

“Okay.” I had no idea what she was talking about.

“We could leave Friday afternoon after work and fly home Saturday morning.”

“We… you said we.”

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable travelling alone and was wondering if you might accompany me.”

Somewhere in the neighborhood a car backfired, setting off a cacophony of dogs barking and howling their canine indignation. “Yes, of course,” I replied, “but only if I can place my own flowers on Zora’s grave.”



Postscript

While this story is essentially creative fiction, Zora Hurston and the details surrounding her tragic downfall are well-documented, historical fact. As noted in the story, Zora was a rising star among the black literati, until several influential figures decided that she no longer suited their social/political agenda. One might ask how that differs from what is going on presently in contemporary, American society. Barry Rachin

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