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Following the dust tracks: Touring Florida through the eyes of Zora Neale Hurston
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He admitted he didn't quite know but pointed out something else. "This house is 112 years old," he said. "I talk to the previous medium who lived here sometimes." The way he spoke of her, even though she had died years ago, it was as if they shared the house, like roommates.
When I went to check out the next morning, I found Doreen Kelly, a psychic reader who also works the front desk and gift shop at the Lost in Time Cafe, examining drugstore enlargements of photographs with a gray-haired man wearing a Blizzard of Ozz tour T-shirt and store-bought cutoff jean shorts. "We used to have the front desk there in the lobby, rather than in the store. There was nothing on it but a vase," Kelly said, pointing at a picture of a slightly unfocused oblong, brightly haloed object. "And look at that! There are these orange swirls of light, like fireballs -- the kind that often flare around a reflective object."
"Oh, yeah, those are flames all right," the man agreed.
"But everyone focuses on the angel in the middle of the swirl," Kelly said. "I don't see it."
"No, that's not a face. That's smoke. But from where?" said the man, who later introduced himself as Robert Bolk. "It's energy. Definitely energy." He is director of operations of Team Phenomenon, a paranormal research organization that he said had recently undertaken an investigation of a seven-story, 600-foot ship in Tampa. Team Phenomenon returned to inspect Cassadaga on a somewhat frequent basis.
"We got a photo here once in this hotel of a boy sticking his head through a stained-glass window down the hall," Bolk said matter-of-factly. "Sometimes you don't see those things till you get home, you know. We were investigating a room on the first floor last night. We didn't get much, but when we listen to the audio and video, it might be a different story. Sometimes things emerge later that you didn't see at the time."
American Beach
Hurston didn't just wait for things to emerge, she actively sought them out, leaving behind the "hard road" and heading into unlikelier territories to gather stories. "The best source is where there are the least outside influences," she wrote in "Mules and Men," "and these people, being usually under-privileged, are the shyest. They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by."
Tour 2's dry cataloging of orphanages, irrigation systems and canning factories is frequently broken by passages that bear the stamp of Hurston's voice, explaining, for example how the "Florida land tortoise" came to be known as a "gopher": "The Devil, realizing he couldn't out-argue God, said: 'Well, if it ain't no turtle it'll go fer one sure enough and folks'll eat him for a turtle.'"
Nearing Jacksonville, Highway 17 becomes a commerce of fabulously named and shaped establishments accompanied by outsized signage: a grinning gold tooth advertising a store called Jewels N Thangs, the OK Beauty Supply, an abandoned strip mall anchored by the House of Jesus Love Center. I followed the guide's directions from downtown in a rainstorm (surely Hurston had a folk tale to explain the magnificent deluges I seemed to encounter on a daily basis), via Heckscher Drive, curving past the Jacksonville Zoo (whose animals, 70 years ago, included "'Snookums,' a lethargic sloth; ill-tempered wildcats; a honey bear").
My last stop would deviate from Tour 2. Like Eatonville and Cassadaga, American Beach is tiny, spanning just 120 acres, and the town -- with wood-frame homes and vast dunes -- looks mostly untouched by development and is hidden from a main road dominated by luxury resorts. Like Eatonville, it is one of the oldest African American communities of its kind; it was established in 1935 by A.L. Lewis, Florida's first black millionaire, in response to the virtual lack of beach access for African Americans back then. And the town has its own Zora Neale Hurston connection. In 1939, during her WPA years, Hurston was briefly married to a fellow relief worker, the much younger Albert W. Price III; the two rumoredly honeymooned on American Beach. But a year later, Hurston filed for divorce.
I went to visit Marsha Dean Phelts, author of two books about the area: a history, "An American Beach for African Americans"; and "The American Beach Cookbook," a collection of recipes, photographs and stories connected to the town. Phelts grew up coming to American Beach every summer with her family and, eventually, decided to move there. Sitting in her yard, we could see the past life of American Beach all around us. "That was Evans' Rendezvous," she said, pointing to a crumbling shorefront club and pavilion that occupied a city block and, in previous decades, provided most of the dining and entertainment on American Beach.
"And over there is Price Street, named after Zora's husband's family. Now, A.W. Price, people talk about how good-looking he was, how he could sing and play the piano. ... When they married, she was probably 48, and he was 23. You know, Zora was always 'being younger' than what she was. They say she was a very striking person; she had a lot of flamboyance about her."
I noticed then another landmark, just left of Phelts's house, where the yard ended and the dunes began again. I'd seen bottle trees growing up; they are everywhere in the South -- actual leafless trees or tree-like structures on which empty bottles are hung like coats. But I'd never thought about the origins of the bottle tree; I had always assumed they were just another Southern way of storing things, like hubcap collections and fleets of old cars rusting in front yards. The one Phelts had rigged neighbored a palmetto tree, but she'd hooked so many clear, green and blue bottles on its pegged branches that its glass plumage upstaged the real fronds. "Bottle trees go all the way back to Africa and Egypt," Phelts said. "The story is that evil spirits, you know, come around at night, and they get attracted to the bottles and jump inside them. Then, when morning comes and the sun is up, they're trapped, and they stay inside, so they can't bother the world of the living."
As I bid Phelts goodbye, I could see the cobalt and jade glass flash in the noon sun. In Cassadaga, these might be construed as orbs. Here, as everywhere I'd been, the past life of these towns persisted into the present. Reluctantly I pointed my very un-Hurston-like rental back toward a coastal highway lined with piercing green golf courses, upscale shops, luxury condominiums and all that beckons people to Florida now. I paused at a stoplight, readying myself for the hard road ahead.
Rebecca Bengal last wrote for the Magazine about the Maryland Renaissance Festival. She can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.
