Zeely

by Virginia Hamilton

  “ ‘Zeely Tayber,’ she said, ‘I see you!’ And I remember, I began to cry.

  “ ‘Zeely Tayber,’ she said again. She raised her cane right at me, and she was coming toward me. I could see her bow moving in the air. Suddenly, she had me by the arms. She was cackling again—I thought she would never stop.

  “At last, she spoke,” Zeely said. “ ‘Zeely Tayber,’ she said, ‘you have made a poor soul happy. You are the night and I have caught you!’ ”

  “Oh!” said Geeder. “What a thing to happen!”

  “Yes,” said Zeely.

  “What did you do?” asked Geeder.

  “Do?” Zeely said. “I did nothing. Soon, the woman let me loose and went on her way, laughing and singing to herself. I was stunned by what she had said to me and I stood there in the darkness for many minutes. All at once in my mind everything was as clear as day. I liked the dark. I walked and swam in the dark and because of that, I was the night!

  “Finally,” Zeely said, “I told my mother about what had happened. My mother said that I simply had not known darkness well enough to tell the difference between a stone and a turtle and a vine and a snake. She said the snake and turtle had been there all the time. She said that since the woman was not quite right in her head, she had decided that I was the night because my skin was so dark.”

  “Did you believe what your mother said?” asked Geeder.

  “I came to believe it,” Zeely said. “I believe it now. But I was sorry my mother had said what she did. It meant I was only myself, that I was Zeely and no more.”

  Geeder sighed and looked down at her hands. “Things . . . are what they are, I guess,” she said, quietly.

  “Yes,” said Zeely. “No pretty robe was able to make me more than what I was and no little woman could make me the night.”

  “But you are different,” Geeder said. “You are the most different person I’ve ever talked to.”

  “Am I?” Zeely said, her voice kind. “And you want to be different, too?”

  Geeder was suddenly shy. She took hold of her beads and ran her fingers quickly over them. “I’d like to be just like you, I guess, Miss Zeely,” she said.

  Zeely smiled. “To be so tall that wherever you went, people stared and questioned? You’d like to be able to call a hog to you and have it follow you as though it were a puppy?” She laughed. The sound of it was harsh. “Hogs see me as just another animal—did you know that? Their scent is my scent, that is all there is to it. As for being so tall, I would like once in a while not to have people notice me or wonder about my height. No,” Zeely added, “I don’t think you’d enjoy being like me or being different the way I am.”

  “I guess not, then,” Geeder said. “I mean, I don’t know.” She stopped in confusion. She would never have imagined that Zeely didn’t like being tall. “I want to be . . . to be . . .” She paused.

  “Whoever it is you are when you’re not being Geeder,” Zeely said, finishing for her. “The person you are when you’re not making up stories. Not Geeder and not even me, but yourself—is that what you want, Elizabeth?” Zeely looked deeply at Geeder, as if the image of her were fading away. “I stopped making up tales a long time ago,” she said, “and now I am myself.”

  Geeder was so startled she could not say anything. And the way Zeely called her Elizabeth, just as though they were the same age, caused a pleasant, quiet feeling to grow within her. What she had promised herself at the beginning of the summer crossed Geeder’s mind. I won’t be silly. I won’t play silly games with silly girls.

  But I was silly, she thought. I made up myself as Geeder and I made up Zeely to be a queen.

  She let go of her bright necklaces and smoothed her hands over her hair.

  “Myself . . .” she whispered. “Yes, I guess so.”

  Zeely Tayber ruffled the creases from her long robe and then stood up to leave. She was tall and beautiful there, before Geeder. Her expression was soft.

  “I want to thank you, Geeder,” she said, “for helping me with the sow last Saturday. I don’t know how much you know about hogs, but they are miserable creatures. My father is tired of them and so am I. I take care of them as much as I can, to see they are treated well. It is hard work and I don’t have much time for friends.”

  She touched Geeder lightly on the hair. Her long fingers fluttered there a moment, as lithe as the wings of a butterfly, before they were gone. Zeely knew before Geeder did that Geeder was close to tears.

  “You have a most fine way of dreaming,” Zeely said. “Hold on to that. But remember the turtle, remember the snake. I always have.”

  Geeder didn’t see Zeely leave the clearing. The colors of bush and tree swam in her eyes and Zeely melted away within them.

  16

  GEEDER SAT UNDER THE catalpa trees until the sky was streaked with light of the setting sun. She got up, chilled. Her legs felt cramped and there was a dull, uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach. When she came out of the forest onto the road, she found the tunnel the catalpa trees made dark as night.

  “I don’t mind the dark of it,” she whispered. “It’s being alone in it that’s the trouble.” She walked quickly through the tunnel, full of sadness.

  Toeboy waited for Geeder behind Uncle Ross’ hedge. He had waited all afternoon and was beginning to worry, when he heard Geeder on the road. He jumped up when she entered the yard.

  “I don’t want to talk right now,” Geeder said. She did not even glance at him. “I’m going up to rest awhile before dinner.”

  Toeboy was too surprised to say anything. He wanted to know right away what Zeely had said; yet, he was stopped by the new tone in Geeder’s voice. He needed no one to tell him that she was awfully upset about something. He went away quietly to tell Uncle Ross of her return.

  Uncle Ross and Toeboy were eating by the time Geeder came down to supper. If a stranger had seen her go up, he wouldn’t have believed she was the same girl who now came down.

  “Geeder!” Toeboy said, “Just look at you!”

  For the first time this summer, Geeder had come to dinner wearing a dress. It was a nice dress. Toeboy had to admit that. It was yellow with pretty white flowers. In her hair, Geeder wore a white ribbon. Toeboy couldn’t help laughing at the ribbon and Geeder grew angry. Still, she didn’t yell at him. In fact, she nodded politely and sat down next to him.

  “You look the way you do when we go to school,” Toeboy said to her. “You don’t look like Geeder at all.”

  “Well, Elizabeth,” Uncle Ross said, “you’ve been gone a good part of the day.”

  Toeboy stared at Uncle Ross. He had called Geeder Elizabeth. Toeboy felt like saying that there sat Geeder and not Elizabeth. But when he looked at Geeder, he couldn’t say a word. There was no doubt at all that right beside him was Elizabeth.

  “Uncle Ross, I didn’t mean to stay away so long,” Geeder said, “but Miss Zeely Tayber had so much to tell me . . .”

  “Geeder, was she mad?” Toeboy wanted to know.

  “No, she wasn’t mad,” Geeder said. “She wasn’t what I had expected at all.”

  “What had you expected?” Uncle Ross asked.

  “I wanted her to say right away that she was a queen,” Geeder said.

  “Didn’t she look like a queen up close?” Toeboy asked.

  “I’d better tell you,” Geeder said. She pushed her plate away. “If I don’t tell you as fast as I can, I won’t believe it ever happened.”

  Geeder told Toeboy and Uncle Ross just the way Zeely had been and she didn’t change anything at all. She told them about the robe Zeely had worn and every detail of their meeting. She described the clearing for Toeboy, saying how frightened she had been, seated so close to Zeely. At last she told them about Canada and about the little old woman. She told them the long story of the three couriers. When she had finished, Uncle Ross sighed and smiled.

  “When you stayed away so long,” Toeboy said, “I thought for sure you must have found out Zeely Ta
yber was a queen.” He leaned on his hand, staring thoughtfully into space.

  Geeder looked at Toeboy and then at Uncle Ross. She smoothed her hands over her dress and patted her dark curls.

  “It’s true,” she said, simply. “There’s not another thing in the world Zeely Tayber could be but a queen.”

  Both Toeboy and Uncle Ross were taken by surprise. Before either one could say anything, Geeder was talking.

  “Listen!” she said, almost whispering, so that Uncle Ross and Toeboy had to lean forward to hear. Her hands rose before her. She began to divide and shape the air, as though she were making images out of nothing.

  “I don’t mean queen like you read in books or hear on the radio, with kingdoms and servants and diamonds and gold! I mean queen when you think how Miss Zeely is. Listen! All these hogs going down the road and into town, smelling up the town and squealing. Nat Tayber all covered with mud, just cruel and mean, worse than any animal—I don’t care if he is Zeely’s father. But did anyone ever think of Miss Zeely as smelling like those hogs or being anything other than kind? And listen! All those animals being dirty—no, filthy! Covered with flies and hog wallow, with a stench you couldn’t get rid of in a hundred years. But would you think Miss Zeely was anything but a lady? I mean, working with hogs, having to feed them and walk through them and handle the babies! And having to stay close to old Nat all the time because he is her father and because he gets mean with the hogs sometimes. She doesn’t even know that folks talk about her behind her back. She wouldn’t ever think folks could be as silly as to think she had bewitched those animals. She does her work and I bet she does it better than anybody could.

  “Because,” Geeder said, and then she paused a moment, “it’s not what a person stoops to do—oh, no, it’s not! It’s what’s inside you when you dare swim in a dark lake with nobody to help if something should happen. Or, when you walk down a dark road way late at night, night after night.

  “Oh, she’s a queen,” Geeder said, “Miss Zeely is the best kind you’d ever want to see!”

  There was a silence at the table. They could hear the sound of crickets through the window screen. Uncle Ross looked out the window, surprised to find that night had fallen. He picked up his knife and fork. He had placed them beside his plate when Geeder had first begun to talk about Zeely Tayber.

  They finished eating. There was not much talking. After supper, Toeboy and Uncle Ross went into the living room. Geeder went up to her own room. There, she pulled one of the cherry-wood chairs up close to the window. She sat down, gazing out into the night and the west field and stars beyond.

  “So much to see here,” she whispered. “Just a few days and nights left before we go back home. Where’s the summer melted to? I don’t recall it going.

  “That’s because of Miss Zeely,” she said. “She was the days and nights put together.”

  Geeder stared at the stars. They resemble people, she thought. Some stars were no more than bright arcs in the sky as they burned out. But other stars lived on and on. There was a blue star in the sky south of Hesperus, the evening star. She thought of naming it Miss Zeely Tayber. There it would be in Uncle Ross’ sky forever.

  “Will I come here again?” she whispered. “Will I come back to see her? No. What’s to see? If I do come again, it’ll be to remember the nights at the same time I’m living them. If she’s here, I will see her. But it will be all right if she’s gone off to some other place. There will be that star.”

  Geeder was an hour or more at the window before at last she moved away. She turned on the light and placed the chair where it belonged. She walked around the room collecting all her necklaces from the backs of the two chairs, from the bedposts and from the dresser-drawer knobs. When she had them all, she placed them in the box at the bottom of her suitcase. There they shone in bright flashes.

  She looked up, startled. Her hands were still in the suitcase touching the bright necklaces as she looked slowly around the room.

  “Did I take it back?” she said. “Where’s the flashlight?” Her hands jerked away from the necklaces. “The night traveller!” she whispered. “But no,” she said, “it was Miss Zeely all the time.”

  Geeder found the flashlight behind the window curtains. She placed it on her bureau so she would remember to return it to Uncle Ross. Then, she sat down on the bed and picked up two of her glass-bead necklaces. She swung them before her, like pendulums.

  “Remember the turtle,” she murmured, “remember the snake.”

  She swung the beads back and forth until she grew dizzy from watching the changing light of them. She was hungry again, as she usually was soon after supper. Maybe Uncle Ross had saved her a sweet potato.

  “I only had one,” she said. “I was talking so much, I didn’t even taste it.”

  A Biography of Virginia Hamilton

  Virginia Hamilton (1934–2002) was the author of forty-one books for young readers and their older allies, including M.C. Higgins, the Great, which won the National Book Award, the Newbery Medal, and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, three of the most prestigious awards in youth literature. Hamilton’s many successful titles earned her numerous other awards, including the international Hans Christian Andersen Award, which honors authors who have made exceptional contributions to children’s literature, the Coretta Scott King Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship, or “Genius Award.”

  Virginia Esther Hamilton was born in 1934 outside the college town of Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was the youngest of five children born to Kenneth James and Etta Belle Perry Hamilton. Her grandfather on her mother’s side, a man named Levi Perry, had been brought to the area as an infant probably through the Underground Railroad shortly before the Civil War. Hamilton grew up amid a large extended family in picturesque farmlands and forests. She loved her home and would end up spending much of her adult life in the area.

  Hamilton excelled as a student and graduated at the top of her high school class, winning a full scholarship to Antioch College in Yellow Springs. Hamilton transferred to Ohio State University in nearby Columbus, Ohio, in order to study literature and creative writing. In 1958, she moved to New York City in hopes of publishing her fiction. During her early years in New York, she supported herself with jobs as an accountant, a museum receptionist, and even a nightclub singer. She took additional writing courses at the New School for Social Research and continued to meet other writers, including the poet Arnold Adoff, whom she married in 1960. The couple had two children, daughter Leigh in 1963 and son Jaime in 1967. In 1969, the family moved to Yellow Springs and built a new home on the old Perry-Hamilton farm. Here, Virginia and Arnold were ableto devote more time to writing books.

  Hamilton’s first published novel, Zeely, was published in 1967. Zeely was an instant success,winning a Nancy Bloch Award and earning recognition as an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book. After returning to Yellow Springs with her young family, Hamilton began to write and publish a book nearly every year. Though most of her writing targeted young adults or children, she experimented in a wide range of styles and genres. Her second book, The House of Dies Drear (1968), is a haunting mystery that won the Edgar Allan Poe Award. The Planet of Junior Brown (1971) and Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982) rely on elements of fantasy and science fiction. Many of her titles focus on the importance of family, including M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974) and Cousins (1990). Much of Hamilton’s work explores African American history, such as herfictionalized account Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave (1988).

  Hamilton passed away in 2002 after a long battle with breast cancer. She is survived by her husband Arnold Adoff and their two children.

  For further information, please visit Hamilton’s updated and comprehensive website: www.virginiahamilton.com

  A twelve-year-old Hamilton in 1948, when she was in the seventh grade.

  Hamilton at a New York City club while she was a student at Antioch College in the mid-1950s. She often performed
as a folk and jazz vocalist in clubs and larger venues.

  Hamilton with her brothers, Buster and Bill, and sisters, Barbara and Nina, around 1954.

  Hamilton’s head shots. The first was taken while she was a teenager in the early 1950s. The second was taken in her New York City apartment in the late 1960s, before she and Adoff built their house in Yellow Springs.

  Hamilton outside of her first New York City apartment, which she shared with Adoff, around 1960. The couplemoved to a below-street-level single room on Jane Street and, Adoff says, “thought we were such hot stuff, living in the Village and taking our places in that wonderful and long line of writers banging their heads against the wall…but in style.”

  Adoff and Hamilton in Gibraltar in 1960, after a hard day of shopping and climbing the rock seen in the photo. As Adoff recalls, “This was the first time I convinced Virginia to sell everything but the books and leave America forever. It was also our delayed honeymoon. We made our way from Bremen to Paris to Málaga to a residency in Torremolinos, Spain, where we worked on our manuscripts and took side trips. This was one of them.”

  Taken in 1965 in Argelès-plage, France, this photo shows the building where Hamilton and Adoff rented an apartment during what Adoff calls their “second time leaving America forever…”

  Hamilton, Jaime, and Leigh at a reception at the Yellow Springs Public Library in 1975 after she received the Newbery Medal.

  Hamilton at the publication party for Jaguarundi. She attended hundreds of conferences and book signings at schools and libraries around the country as each of her books was published.

  Hamilton, Adoff, Leigh, and Jaime at Leigh’s wedding in Berlin in 2001.