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.
Chapter 20-Epilogue Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 20 Summary
After Teddy leaves, Zora arrives at Carrie’s house and tells her that she overheard a conversation between Joe Clarke and Gold at the Loving Pine. She learned that Gold is actually Ivory’s sister. Carrie is shocked to hear this; she and Zora both thought that Gold was white. It is obvious that other white people also assume Gold is one of them. Zora recounts the rest of the conversation.
Joe Clarke told Gold that Ivory is dead. Gold was devastated and said that she had to take Ivory home. Mr. Clarke told her that she could not take Ivory anywhere because everyone thinks she is white. Gold begged to stay in Eatonville, but Mr. Clarke refused. He thought her presence would upset the peace. Gold tried to believe that Ivory might not be dead. She wanted to stay in Eatonville so that he could find her. Mr. Clarke left, and Gold stayed at the Loving Pine, crying.
Carrie feels unsettled now that all of Zora’s theories and stories are falling apart. She knows that Zora told the stories to make sense of frightening events, but now she is angry with Zora for making them up. In hindsight, Carrie realizes that she was so upset by Ivory’s death because it made her realize that her father was gone for good. The day Ivory died was the day she started mourning her father. Zora takes Carrie’s hand and tells her that they should go talk to Gold.
Chapter 21 Summary
Carrie and Zora arrive at the Loving Pine, where they find Gold. She is disheveled and crying. Now that Carrie looks more closely, she can tell that Gold is not white. Zora tells Gold that she and Carrie knew Ivory. She also confesses to hearing Gold’s conversation with Mr. Clarke earlier.
Gold tells Zora and Carrie that she has known Mr. Clarke since childhood, as his parents owned the boarding house that Gold and her family lived in. She was much fairer than her mother; her mother would pretend to be her nanny and take her into white-only stores. She used to love being able to unlock a world for her mother, but Ivory did not like it. Carrie cannot imagine pretending not to be her mother’s daughter.
When they grew older, Gold started hanging around white children. One day, some of Gold’s friends saw her talking to Ivory and beat him badly, not realizing that he was her brother. Gold kept pretending to be white because she was tired of not being able to have all that the world has to offer. With her fiancé, Will, she feels like “nothing is off-limits” (109). Carrie challenges Gold on this, wondering if Ivory was nothing to her. Gold worries that Will might have seen her talking to Ivory and thought that she was having an affair with him. Will is rageful and jealous; Gold wonders if he killed Ivory. She tells the girls to go home and heads toward Lake Maitland.
Chapter 22 Summary
Carrie and Zora are stunned after hearing Gold’s story. Carrie believes that Gold is as dangerous as Will: By letting white people believe a lie about her, she put her brother in grave danger. The girls are overwhelmed by the weight of their secret and realize that what they face is more dangerous than a magical gator king. They reflect on the power of skin color to dictate who has worth and who should die.
Chapter 23 Summary
The next day, Miss Billie goes to check on Mr. Pendir and finds him dead in his bed. He is wearing “a green and sparkling gold wooden gator-snout mask” (114), and the walls of his bedroom are decorated with other animal masks that he made. Carrie is overwhelmed by the news of Mr. Pendir’s death. Zora is relieved that people now know that she was not lying about seeing Mr. Pendir with an alligator’s head. Carrie assures Zora that she and Teddy always believed her.
Chapter 24 Summary
Carrie and Zora walk to a nearby lagoon where they meet Mr. Ambrose. Zora thanks him for the book. Mr. Ambrose recognizes that both girls are upset and asks what is wrong. Zora is not sure she can trust Mr. Ambrose, but he assures her that “When you help bring a person into this world…you have a bond” (117). Zora tells him everything Gold said at the Loving Pine. She cries as she finishes her story.
Mr. Ambrose praises Zora’s intelligence and the depth of her feelings. He tells Zora and Carrie that they should talk to Mr. Clarke and tell him everything, but they should tell no one else. He knows that Mr. Clarke will ensure that justice is done in Eatonville; Mr. Ambrose will make sure that justice is done in Lake Maitland.
Chapter 25 Summary
Zora and Carrie find Mr. Clarke at his store and tell him everything. They have not told anyone else besides Mr. Ambrose that they think that Will killed Ivory. Zora asks Mr. Clarke about Mr. Pendir’s alligator mask. Mr. Clarke explains that Mr. Pendir was a sad, lonely man whose parents died when he was young. He went to work for white people, in conditions little better than enslavement. When he came to Eatonville, he had lost his ability to trust other people and kept to himself. He was a skilled woodworker and carved masks that helped him face his fears. Carrie reflects that both Mr. Pendir and Gold retreated into masks rather than connecting with the people around them.
Mr. Clarke assures the girls that they did the right thing telling him and Mr. Ambrose what they learned. He will see that justice is done in Eatonville. He tells them not to tell anyone else what they know. Zora and Carrie leave, laden down again with licorice sticks.
Chapter 26 Summary
Back at Zora’s house, the girls savor their candy. Mrs. Hurston sits with them on the porch. Zora and Carrie decide that even though they promised not to tell anyone else about Ivory, Gold, and Will, they have to tell Mrs. Hurston. Mrs. Hurston hugs the girls. She is deeply moved by their story. Carrie feels a sense of belonging in Mrs. Huston’s embrace. She has always thought of herself as fundamentally alone. Now, she realizes that she has many loved ones and a community. She feels that her heart does not belong to herself alone, but to the whole of Eatonville. She thinks that she will marry Teddy when she is older.
Epilogue Summary
The justice that Mr. Clarke and Mr. Ambrose promised comes swiftly. Mrs. Jefferson spreads rumors that Gold is passing as white. Mr. Clarke takes a trip to Orlando that coincides with Gold disappearing from town. Will’s business dries up, and he leaves Lake Maitland in ruin. Carrie and Zora are delighted that Mr. Clarke and Mr. Ambrose were able to do what they had tried to do with their stories about the gator king: They “rooted out evil and laid crooked tracks straight” (129).
Carrie feels that her life is different now. Though she knows that Zora loves Eatonville as much as she does, she also knows that one day Zora will leave their hometown while Carrie will not. She thinks about all the people who have never been to Eatonville, or even Florida, who will have a piece of Eatonville inside them because they met Zora on her travels.
Chapter 20-Epilogue Analysis
Carrie comes to fully recognize The Power of Storytelling just as Zora’s stories all fall apart. Zora’s stories and ideas about a gator king gave Carrie a sense of meaning and clarity, helping her process the violence happening in her hometown. The stories also made it easier not to mourn her father, because she did not have to confront the reality that her father was probably murdered just like Ivory was.
Even though Zora’s stories turned out not to reflect reality, they still had value for Carrie. She recognizes that Zora’s later literary career will have the same kind of value, allowing people from far and wide to connect with Eatonville and understand important truths through the lens of fiction. Zora and Me mixes its metaphors a little with regard to this theme. The children learn that Mr. Pendir carved animal masks to help him face his fears. This is its own kind of storytelling, but it is framed very differently from Zora’s stories. Even though Zora was not right about the gator king, her stories allowed her and her young friends to contextualize violence and come to terms with it gradually. Mr. Pendir’s masks helped him feel stronger and more comfortable in a world that had hurt him, but Joe Clarke (and, by extension, Carrie) consider Mr. Pendir’s storytelling to be a harmful mask that prevented him from connecting with the real world.
At the end of the story, The Coming-of-Age Experience is complete for Carrie. For her, coming of age means seeing the truth beyond Zora’s stories and reckoning with the harsh realities of the world. It also means coming to terms with and grieving her father’s death. Carrie, at the age of 10, has to accept that her father is gone forever and that he was most likely violently murdered because he was Black. Although these realizations are painful, Carrie is able to handle them because she understands that she is not alone. She has a community around her in Eatonville that will always be able to support her. Unlike Zora, who is going to travel widely and have a successful literary career, Carrie’s character growth stops at this point. She will never leave Eatonville. One of the challenges of writing about an author like Zora Neale Hurston, but not making her the story’s protagonist, is that the other characters in the story live very ordinary lives and have much less room for personal growth in the story by comparison.
The final chapters of the story explain Gold’s relationship to The Complications of Race and Belonging. She is a Black woman passing as white, and because of that decision, she has lost her ability to belong in a community like Eatonville. While she can access many spaces and resources that would otherwise be unavailable to her, it is at the cost of her identity and family. Carrie is particularly disturbed by her stories of pretending not to be related to her mother. Joe Clarke will not allow Gold to move to Eatonville, though his reasons for excluding her are somewhat oblique. He says, “We Eatonville folks ain’t got the fear of whites in us, and I won’t allow anyone to bring that fear here” (102). He insists that she return to Lake Maitland even though she believes that her fiancé may have murdered her brother.
The resolution of Gold’s storyline raises some difficult questions. Mr. Clarke and Mr. Ambrose choose to resolve the issue extrajudicially, which means that they do not contact any authorities to tell them that they think Will murdered Ivory. Given the racist norms and legal codes of the time, it is unlikely that a white man would have been convicted of murdering a Black man, even if he were guilty. Nevertheless, the story’s characters decide that Will is the one who killed Ivory based on nothing more than Gold’s suspicions. It is certainly possible that Will could have killed Ivory, but it is unlikely that he was the only racist white man in Lake Maitland willing or able to commit murder. By placing the blame on Will without due process or even firm evidence, Mr. Ambrose and Mr. Clarke run the risk of having ruined the life of an innocent man while the guilty party is still at large.
Similarly, it is implied that Mr. Clarke either helped or forced Gold to relocate to Orlando. Her opinion on the matter is never discussed, so it is unclear whether she consented to the move, or whether Mr. Clarke took it upon himself to completely restructure Gold’s life in the wake of her brother’s death. The book ends without examining any of these questions in detail, leaving some of the complications of race and belonging unresolved.
