Zora and Me: The Summoner by Victoria Bond

Author:Victoria Bond [Bond, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780763695347
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2020-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

“Deep river,

My home is over Jordan.

Deep river,

I want to cross over into campground.

Oh, don’t you want to go

To the Gospel feast;

That Promised Land

Where all is peace?

Oh, deep river, Lord,

I want to cross over into campground.

Deep river, Lord,

Help John Hurston protect our home.”

The next morning, I found Zora sitting at the foot of the Loving Pine. The crate lid she used as a writing desk was in her lap, but she wasn’t writing.

“I don’t want to interrupt,” I said.

“Do I look like I’m doing anything besides waiting for you?” Zora stood and opened her arms. “Come over here.” We hugged, hard. I broke down sobbing on account of Teddy. “Carrie, Carrie, Carrie,” Zora said, with such tenderness and understanding that I felt my personhood to be real and alive again for the first time in days.

We released each other. All I could say was, “It was good to see you and your mother yesterday. I’ve missed you.”

“I doubt Mama will be able to get out of bed today.” Zora shook her head in helpless anger. “She shouldn’t have gone to the vigil, but she pretended to be able to do it for my father’s sake.” Her bitterness was palpable. “Pretending isn’t helping her get well. It’s not helping anyone, in fact, except my father and his bid for mayor. There’s going to be a meeting at the post office about the mayoral race. My father and Joe Clarke have agreed to it.”

I said, “You think your father will win, don’t you?”

“I do,” she answered, and the idea of her father’s triumph troubled her.

Those two words again. I do. The future happiness that I had cavalierly assumed was mine to share with Teddy, like so many things, might never come to pass. Over the past few days, Teddy had been too ill to receive visitors and, of all things, I regretted not being able to tell him about Mr. Cools’s trunk. But I could tell Zora what Teddy had said about Mr. Cools’s body.

“Right before Teddy fell sick, he told me something about Chester.”

“What did he tell you?”

“When he helped Doc Brazzle prepare Chester for burial, he saw that Chester’s body was riddled with wounds and scars. He said there was an old bullet still in him and that there were burn marks on his throat. It looked like . . .”

“Yes?” Zora egged me on.

“It looked like people had tried to kill Mr. Cools a long time ago, even that, by rights, he should have died years earlier.”

A flame of recognition blazed in Zora’s eyes. “My God, Carrie!” she blurted out. “My God!” The thing that surprised me most was that I had already thought, before her, the very thing she was thinking. Only, unlike Zora, I didn’t actually believe it.

Zora pieced the incredible details of the strange life and death of Chester Cools together. “I think the man that got lynched in that picture was Chester Cools. That would explain the burn scars on his neck. That was the first time he died.

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