On days when the Florida sky was the right shade of blue and the wind breathed softly on the nape of her neck, Zora would retreat into the woods near her house for a bit of solitude. Embraced by the forest, she’d nibble on sweet oat stalks and listen to the lofty, long-leaf pine trees whispering among themselves.
Over the years, she became especially friendly with one tall tree. “I named it ‘the loving pine,’” Zora Hurston would remember. “Finally all of my playmates called it that too. I used to take a seat at the foot of that tree and play for hours without any other toys. We talked about everything in my world.”
Zora might have been sitting at the foot of the loving pine on September 18, 1904, when she noticed a buzz of activity at her house. “I noted a number of women going inside Mama’s room and staying. It looked strange,” Zora recalled. “So I went on in.”
Even before she made her way to the door, Zora, at age thirteen, could sense that the buzz was not one of excitement, but of melancholy and fear. Something else was in the air that day, too—something unfamiliar, elusive, and hard to identify.
When Zora pushed her way into Lucy’s room, she was able to call this elusive something by its name: Death.
On this day, Hurston wrote many years later, “Death stirred from his platform in his secret place in our yard, and came inside the house.”
Zora knew her mother had been sick. “She kept getting thinner and thinner and her chest cold never got any better,” Hurston would recall. “I knew she was ailing, but she was always frail, so I did not take it too much to heart. … Finally, she took to bed.”
Lucy Hurston’s persistent sickness had followed her home from a recent visit to Alabama. She had gone there, according to Zora’s memory, to be with her dying sister during her sister’s last days. Lucy only had one sister, as far as records show. She was a year older than Lucy. Census takers called her Emeline; Zora called her Aunt Dinky.
“Aunt Dinky had lasted on for two months after Mama got there,” Zora remembered, “and so Mama had stayed on till the last.”
Losing her sister took its toll on Lucy, but other matters seemed to trouble her as well. During her trip to Alabama, Lucy apparently had become depressed about the mysterious murder, years earlier, of her nephew Jimmie. From Hurston’s account, it’s not clear whether Jimmie was Aunt Dinky’s son or the son of one of Lucy’s brothers. What is clear, though, is that Jimmie had met a violent death under circumstances that may have had racial undertones.
“He went to a party and started home,” Hurston would later recollect. “The next morning his headless body was found beside the railroad track. There was no blood, so the train couldn’t have killed him. This had happened before I was born. … He was my mother’s favorite nephew and she took it hard. She had probably numbed over her misery, but going back there seemed to freshen up her grief.”
Some Negroes in Alabama whispered that Jimmie had been shot by a white man accidentally, and then beheaded to hide the wound. Rumor had it that the shooter had been waiting to ambush his enemy—another white man he expected to pass by. It was dark, and the attacker shot at the first footsteps he heard. When he discovered he’d killed Jimmie instead of his intended victim, Hurston explained, the white man “forced a certain Negro to help him move the body to the railroad track without the head, so that it would look as if he had been run over by the train. Anyway, that is what the Negro wrote back after he had moved to Texas years later.”
Aware of the racism in Alabama at the time, Hurston concluded: “There was never any move to prove the charge, for obvious reasons. Mama took the whole thing very hard.”
Other worries gnawed at Lucy, too. Though she and her mother had long been on speaking terms again, just below the surface, it seemed that Sarah Potts had never quite forgiven Lucy for marrying John more than twenty years before.
This lingering resentment became evident after Aunt Dinky’s death, when Lucy suggested that the Potts farm in Notasulga be sold and the profits divided among the remaining family members. Although Sarah Potts no longer lived on the old place, she refused to sell it. She was not going to let Lucy take any money from the Pottses’ Alabama acres back to John Hurston in Florida. “Mama could just go on back to that yaller rascal she had married like she came,” Zora understood her grandmother to say.
Meanwhile, Lucy’s “yaller rascal” of a husband persisted in his extramarital affairs, apparently with no less relish and with no more remorse. John’s ongoing infidelity must have weighed heavily on Lucy’s heart, and on her health.
Then, too, Lucy had undergone the physical demands of birthing nine children, another factor that likely contributed to her declining health. She also had shouldered the primary responsibility of raising the eight surviving children, who, in September 1904, ranged from twenty-one-year-old Bob to five-year-old Everett.
Though Lucy was a relatively young woman—just a few months shy of her thirty-ninth birthday—she had begun to speak of death often. Still, Zora would recall, “I could not conceive of Mama actually dying.” So on that Sunday, September 18, when Lucy called Zora to her bedside to give her certain instructions, Zora indulged her mother, agreeing without question to everything she asked of her.
In the South of Zora’s youth, several superstitions about death held sway. It was customary, for example, to remove the pillow from beneath a dying person’s head to ensure an easier demise. Folk wisdom demanded that mourners cover the face of a clock in the death room because it would never run again if the dying person glanced at it. The looking glass was also to be covered, folks said, because if the dying person looked into it, the mirror would never cast any more reflections. And if anyone else saw his reflection in the mirror at the moment of death, he would be death’s next victim. Church members were turned to die with their feet facing east—they also were buried that way—so that they would arise in the afterlife with their faces to the rising sun.
Lucy did not want these superstitions to have any say in her final moments. So she asked her baby girl to see to it that these death rites were not performed. “I was not to let them take the pillow from under her head until she was dead. The clock was not to be covered, nor the looking-glass,” Zora Hurston would recall. “She trusted me to see to it that these things were not done.”
Zora promised—never questioning why Lucy wanted to defy her community’s accepted ceremonies for greeting death; never imagining that she would have to fight her father and much of Eatonville to try to keep her vow to her mother; never fathoming that death would come so soon.
But on that same day, near sundown, Zora joined the procession of women entering, and not exiting, Lucy’s room. “Papa was standing at the foot of the bed looking down on my mother, who was breathing hard,” Hurston would remember. “As I crowded in, they lifted up the bed and turned it around so that Mama’s eyes would face the east. I thought that she looked to me as the head of the bed was reversed. Her mouth was slightly open, but her breathing took up so much of her strength that she could not talk. But she looked at me, or so I felt, to speak for her. She depended on me for a voice.”
Hurston recounted what happened next in crushing detail:
Somebody reached for the clock, while Mrs. Mattie Clarke put her hand to the pillow to take it away.
“Don’t!” I cried out. “Don’t take the pillow from under Mama’s head! She said she didn’t want it moved!”
I made to stop Mrs. Mattie, but Papa pulled me away. Others were trying to silence me. I could see the huge drop of sweat collected in the hollow at Mama’s elbow and it hurt me so. They were covering the clock and the mirror.
“Don’t cover up that clock! Leave that looking-glass like it is! Lemme put Mama’s pillow back where it was!”
But Papa held me tight and the others frowned me down. Mama was still rasping out the last morsel of her life. I think she was trying to say something, and I think she was trying to speak to me. What was she trying to tell me? What wouldn’t I give to know! Perhaps she was telling me that it was better for the pillow to be moved so that she could die easy, as they said. Perhaps she was accusing me of weakness and failure in carrying out her last wish. I do not know. I shall never know.
Just then, Death finished his prowling through the house on his padded feet and entered the room. He bowed to Mama in his way, and she made her manners and left us to act out our ceremonies over unimportant things.
The moment of Lucy’s death would haunt Zora for decades to come. “In the midst of play, in wakeful moments after midnight, on the way home from parties, and even in the classroom during lectures. My thoughts would escape occasionally from their confines and stare me down,” she would write.
As an adult, Hurston certainly understood that the promise she’d made her mother was impossible to keep under the circumstances. John Hurston and most of Eatonville’s citizens comported themselves according to a common code of moral principles and folkways, which included certain rituals for the dying. The adults of Eatonville would not—could not—allow an adolescent to upset the community’s mores. Still, Zora was deeply scarred by this incident—particularly by her own voicelessness, her own powerlessness to honor her last vow to her beloved mother.
“That moment was the end of a phase in my life. I was old before my time with grief of loss, of failure, of remorse of failure,” Hurston would write. “No matter what the others did, my mother had put her trust in me. She had felt that I could and would carry out her wishes, and I had not. And then in that sunset time, I failed her. It seemed as she died that the sun went down on purpose to flee away from me.”
As the sun slipped below the horizon, the women of Eatonville washed Lucy’s body and dressed it for her funeral, which would take place the next day at Macedonia Baptist Church. The warm climate and the absence of embalming methods necessitated a swift burial. The women stretched Lucy’s body out on the smooth, wooden slab the family used as an ironing board. This night, it would serve as a cooling board, the place where the body—no longer home to a warm, living spirit—grew cold as it awaited burial. Lucy’s body, laid out in the parlor, was draped with a white sheet that rustled gently in the breeze from the open windows.
This is how her oldest son found her when he arrived home, too tardy to say good-bye. Bob was away at school in Jacksonville, 135 miles away, and he had been sent for when Lucy’s illness worsened. By the time he got home, though, his mama was already dead. “Bob’s grief was awful when he realized he was too late,” Zora recalled. “He could not conceive at first that nothing could be done to straighten things out.”
Lucy’s other children also did their weeping. As Zora put it, “We were all grubby bales of misery, huddled about lamps.”
John Hurston cried, too. Pacing through the house, “from the kitchen to the front porch and back again,” as Zora recalled, “he kept saying, ‘Poor thing! She suffered so much.’” For Zora, this was an odd statement to hear her father make. “I do not know what he meant by that. It could have been love and pity for her suffering ending at last,” Zora later wrote. Then, more cynically, she added: “It could have been remorse mixed with relief.”
Zora wanted to know exactly what her father was feeling. “I have often wished I had been old enough at the time to look into Papa’s heart that night,” she would write. “If I could know what that moment meant to him, I could have set my compass towards him and been sure.”
If there was ever a moment to rescue and recover the love lost between John Hurston and his younger girl, this was it. If John could have somehow let Zora know that his heart was as broken by Lucy’s death as hers was, he might have changed the course of his family’s history. But John failed to seize the moment, failed to embrace Zora, failed to express his emotions in a way that let her know, unequivocally, that he had loved Lucy and that he was sorry she was gone.
Grappling with his own grief, John no doubt did the best he could. But it wasn’t enough for Zora. In his failure to comfort her, and to express his own pain, John alienated his daughter even further.
Lucy Potts Hurston had been Zora’s anchor, her protector, her confidante. Lucy was the one who’d been guiding Zora through adolescence and preparing to usher her into adulthood. Lucy was the one who’d been teaching her all the things every colored girl ought to know, as the novelist Toni Morrison has put it, the one who had recited Zora’s growing-up litany: “Pull up your socks. … Your slip is showin. Your hem is out. Come back in here and iron that collar. Hush your mouth. Comb your head. Get up from there and make that bed. Put on the meat. Take out the trash. Vaseline get rid of that ash.”
Lucy died at precisely the time when Zora needed a mama to teach her how to be a woman. Losing Lucy this way hurtled Zora into an emotional autonomy that, though reluctant at first, helped to make her into the fiercely independent woman she was fast becoming.
Looking back, Zora Hurston would remember her mother’s death as the moment her own girlhood ended. “That hour began my wanderings,” she would write. “Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit.”