Growing up in 1903 Eatonville, Fla., is idyllic for 12-year-old Zora Neale Hurston and her friend Carrie Brown. Since Eatonville was incorporated as America's first "all-colored" town a few years before they were born, the girls have never known a different life. But their peace is abruptly shattered on the night their friend Mr. Polk, the "town mute," is mysteriously attacked. Suddenly, Eatonville's history begins catching up with its present.
Zora and Me: The Cursed Ground is told in two alternating voices: Carrie's 1903 viewpoint and that of Lucia, a young girl in 1855 who is taken from the Caribbean to Florida, where she is forced into slavery. The two narratives gradually come together, culminating in an explosive scene that exposes Carrie and Zora to the ugliness of slavery's recent history and the racism that still exists all around them. The narrator, adult Carrie, remembers that moment and how they awaited a lynch mob coming to take land from a black landowner: "This was the moment when our color became our curse."
This stunning sequel to Zora and Me is a fictionalized mystery based on Zora Neale Hurston's childhood and includes a biography of Hurston as well as a timeline of her life. T.R. Simon's writing does elegant justice to the grownup Hurston's genius as a writer as well as to the character she apparently was as a child. Readers should be profoundly moved by Carrie and Zora's coming-of-age revelations: "No matter how long I lived," Carrie says, "the hate white folks could have toward us would never make sense to me." And, as the "town conjure woman" says, "Slavery is over, but tonight you saw how it still haunts us." --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor