44 pages • 1 hour read
T.R. Simon, Victoria BondZora and Me
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section discusses anti-Black racism in the Jim Crow South, including lynching and racist slurs.
Two weeks before they start the 4th grade, Carrie and her best friend, Zora, witness an alligator attack a man named Sonny. Sonny finds the biggest alligator he can, a beast named Ghost, and calls a number of men to watch him wrestle it. Carrie and Zora watch as Ghost mauls Sonny. Three men rescue him, but his arm is mangled, and he dies later that night. Ghost disappears without a trace, despite efforts to find and kill him.
Zora’s father, Mr. Hurston, decides along with the town marshal, Joe Clarke, that it is not proper to talk about the incident in front of women and children. Carrie grapples with the knowledge that her mother has given up hope that her father, who has been gone for months, is ever coming home. When school starts, the other children pester Carrie and Zora for accounts of Sonny’s death.
Chapter 2 Summary
At school, girls tease Zora and accuse her of lying when she tells a story. Zora insists that she is not lying, she really did see a man turn “into a half gator” (8). She was at a swimming hole called the Blue Sink one night when she heard a strange sound. She then saw Mr. Pendir, a solitary carpenter, with the snout of an alligator. Mr. Pendir is a mysterious man; people tell stories about how no alligator can kill him, as he once escaped being attacked by three alligators. Upon seeing Mr. Pendir’s alligator head, Zora ran home in fear.
The other children do not believe Zora’s story, but they still listen to it for all of recess. Carrie is troubled by Zora’s story. She loves swimming at the Blue Sink and does not want the presence of a monster to prevent her from going back. She decides that she does not really believe Zora’s story either; the allure of swimming in the Blue Sink on a hot day is too good to give up.
Chapter 3 Summary
Carrie is headed to the Blue Sink. She is determined, despite Zora’s story, to cool off after a hot day. Zora tags along, reasoning that Mr. Pendir probably does not show his gator head during the day.
At the swimming hole, the girls run into Old Lady Bronson, who is fishing on a ledge by the water’s edge. Old Lady Bronson grumpily tells them to leave her in peace. Zora tells Old Lady Bronson to be careful, in case Mr. Pendir turns into an alligator and eats her. Old Lady Bronson is convinced that Zora is not a liar, she is just “crazy as a hoot owl” (14). Carrie and Zora are somewhat afraid of Old Lady Bronson, who has a reputation for casting spells and being bad-tempered. They leave, deciding there are better things to do than swim and risk “Mr. Pendir’s gator head and Old Lady Bronson’s juju” (16).
Chapter 4 Summary
Carrie and Zora meet up with Teddy, a boy their age, who tells them he has a secret. He leads them to a fallen tree trunk where a razorback pig is nursing her babies. Carrie and Zora are delighted to see them. Teddy is the son of farmers and has a way with animals. He is always rescuing sick or injured animals and burying the ones that do not survive. He has a collection of animal bones, skulls, and shells.
When they leave the pig and her babies, Teddy tells Carrie and Zora that he has to keep them a secret because his father and brothers would want to kill them if they found out about them. Teddy’s father believes that razorback pigs are pests; they destroy farmland and are not good to eat. Teddy does not think that this merits killing them. Carrie and Zora promise to keep Teddy’s secret. Zora challenges them all to a race to the Loving Pine.
Chapter 5 Summary
The Loving Pine is a pine tree that Zora particularly likes. She believes that it can “give and get love” (23) even though it cannot talk. The tree has feelings, and the children must always be kind to it. Teddy wins the race to the Loving Pine, but there is already someone else there. A young man sits at the base of the tree, singing and playing his guitar. He reminds Carrie of her father in appearance and voice. Zora is very excited to meet a stranger and introduces herself and her friends. The man’s name is Ivory. He sometimes works collecting turpentine and has traveled as far as New York City. Zora is delighted and begs for stories about New York. Ivory tells her that she should go there herself one day. He sings a song about “looking and finding folks” (27). He believes that everyone is looking for someone, but some people do not want to be found.
Carrie is struck by this and thinks about her father, Avery, who sometimes travels to turpentine camps to find work. Six months ago, he traveled to Orlando to work in a factory for a few weeks. He never came home. Avery’s cousin went to look for him but never found anyone at the factory who had even heard of him. Carrie’s mother is devastated, and Carrie believes that she has given up hope of her husband coming home.
Carrie asks Ivory if he knows a man named Avery Brown, but he does not. Ivory gets up to leave, mentioning that he might go swimming in the Blue Sink later. Zora warns him to be careful of alligators. Ivory jokes that he has outlived “creatures much more dangerous than gators” (29).
Chapter 6 Summary
Carrie goes to Zora’s house for dinner, which she does three nights a week, so that her mother can work extra shifts in the evenings. Miss Billie, Old Lady Bronson’s granddaughter, is at the house. She tells Mrs. Hurston that her grandmother is missing. Zora and Carrie tell her that they saw Old Lady Bronson at the Blue Sink only a few hours ago. They go with Billie to the swimming hole. They find Old Lady Bronson sprawled below the ledge she was fishing at earlier. Carrie finds it hard to believe that she fell. Old Lady Bronson is bruised and faint, but alive.
Carrie and Zora see Mr. Pendir’s house in the distance. Mr. Pendir is outside, leaning against the door. His head is human, but Carrie is seized with fear and imagines it changing shape. Zora’s story suddenly does not feel so far-fetched. The girls run back to Zora’s house.
Chapter 7 Summary
Zora is vindicated that Carrie now believes her about Mr. Pendir. She thinks that it cannot be a coincidence that Old Lady Bronson, “a woman who’s never been sick a day in her life” (35), fainted and fell with him so close by.
After dinner, Zora raises her concerns with her mother. She asks if Ghost, the alligator, could have transformed into a man. Mrs. Hurston assures the girls that she has never seen an alligator turn into a man, or vice versa. Zora is not entirely convinced and makes her mother promise to never go to the Blue Sink by herself. Mrs. Hurston cannot swim, so she never goes to the Blue Sink anyway. She comforts Zora, and Carrie thinks about how much she wants to run home so her mother can comfort her, too.
Chapters 1-7 Analysis
Zora and Me explores The Coming-of-Age Experience, during which the characters develop new levels of maturity and understanding about the world around them. At the start of the story, Carrie and Zora are still very much children. They are in the 4th grade; later in the story, Carrie notes that she is 10 years old.
Since the main characters are children, they do not always have the tools to understand the full implications of their experiences. At the very start of the story, Carrie and Zora watch Sonny get mauled by an alligator and learn that he later died of his injuries. This is a profoundly traumatic event, and the fact that the adults around them are unwilling to talk to them about what they have seen means that Carrie and Zora have to find their own ways to process what has happened. They make assumptions about alligators and monsters because they do not have other tools with which to come to terms with watching Ghost attack Sonny.
Zora is particularly skilled at using The Power of Storytelling to understand her experiences. She tells the other children a story about Mr. Pendir with an alligator’s head that she insists is true. At this point in the novel, the veracity of Zora’s story remains a matter of debate. Regardless of whether it is true, it sparks the other children’s imaginations. As the violence in the town escalates with Old Lady Bronson’s injury, her story starts to sound more plausible to Carrie. Zora’s storytelling ability foreshadows her future success as a writer. She does not only use stories to make sense of traumatic events, she also uses them to help other people see the world in the same magical way that she does. For Zora, the whole world is alive with wonder. Her stories about the Loving Pine’s ability to give and receive love help Carrie and Teddy catch brief glimpses of her world. Carrie greatly admires Zora and finds her perceptive understanding of the world particularly compelling.
Carrie and Zora have a unique perspective on The Complications of Race and Belonging because they live in Eatonville. Eatonville is a real town in Florida. It was first incorporated in 1887 as one of the first all-Black towns in the United States. During the Jim Crow era, Black people who lived in Eatonville could build a life relatively free from the everyday racist oppression that they would have experienced in towns with a more diverse population. That is not to say that people in Eatonville did not experience racism, but it does mean that young children like Carrie and Zora were able to live comparatively insulated lives. Some people have described Zora Neale Hurston’s childhood in Eatonville as “idyllic,” and it was a location that she portrayed favorably in several of her stories.
Eatonville is idyllic for Carrie and Zora, but it is a town built on a traumatic past. It was established not long after the abolition of enslavement, and many of the people who lived there were formerly enslaved or were the children and grandchildren of enslaved people. At the turn of the 20th century, the people of Eatonville were still reckoning with the profound impacts of racism and enslavement in a part of the country that was still actively hostile to Black people. Although Eatonville provides Carrie and Zora with a sense of belonging, not everyone who lives there has the same experience. Some people are still on the outside of things, like Mr. Pendir. Nobody knows much about him, and he keeps to himself. His reasons for doing so are described in more detail later in the story.
When Zora meets Ivory, he suggests that she might one day visit New York. Indeed, Hurston did spend time in New York City. She was one of the most influential writers in the Harlem Renaissance. There are several details in the story that reflect real details from Zora Neale Hurston’s life. Joe Clarke, a character in this novel, was a real man who also appears in some of Hurston’s writings. Clarke (or Clark, per some sources) was a formerly enslaved man who ran the town’s general store and also worked as the town marshal.
