but she did little work as a contract screenwriter and felt isolated on the
West Coast. So as before, time and again, Zora fled to Florida, and wher-
ever she could, she gardened, out of sheer joy as well as necessity.
In May , back in Eatonville, she effused to her New York benefactor,
‘‘I am happy here, happier than I have been for years. The air is sweet, yes
literally sweet. Summer is in full swing. The days are hot but the nights are
cool. The mocking birds sing off and on all night long and the honey suckle
and magnolia are in bloom.’’ She had put in a garden, too, beside the house
she rented. By late July she wrote again, announcing that a ‘‘hot dry spell
has killed my garden.’’ But just two weeks earlier she had bragged that her
pea crop was overwhelming. She had picked all she could possibly use and
had thought of getting ‘‘somebody to take them to town and sell them for
me,’’ except, she wrote, she would love to mail a good batch to the Upper
East Side, with directions for the benefactor’s cook.^25
Nineteen years later, Zora, now sixty (although she never admitted it),
settled in a one-room cinderblock house with huge, albeit messy and tan-
gled grounds, in a tiny town called Eau Gallie, Florida, two blocks from the
Indian River, close to the Atlantic. She was ‘‘the happiest I have been in the
last ten years,’’ she wrote to a friend. ‘‘I am up every morning at five oclock
chopping down weeds and planting flowers and things.’’ Finding an arte-
sian spring in the yard, she made an ornamental garden around it, plant-
ing butterfly ginger. Elsewhere she put in pink verbena. Zora also painted
the house. She enjoyed feeding more and more birds and defending them
from cats. And she petted her two dogs, Spot and Spot’s daughter, Shag. She
hired a man to grub out cane so she could plant papaya. Investing all of
in ‘‘knee high’’ papayas, she hoped to sell them in what promised to be a
good market.^26 All this on rented property, property poor Zora hoped des-
perately to buy, where she already felt so wonderfully ‘‘at home.’’ Sad to say,
despite all her labors on a white man’s house and fields, she lost it. Coastal
property values, almost forever burgeoning, blasted off, as it were, during
the s. Eau Gallie was too close (for Zora’s benefit) to Cocoa Beach and
military installations, and she could never earn or save at a rate even slightly
exceeding inflation.
Ironically, the only home she ever owned was a houseboat moored on
the Indian River. It was thirty-eight feet long, tight but comfortable, and its
engine was overhauled. There was no dirt for gardening on a boat, however.
Zora never enjoyed the financial security of marriage to a wealthy man, as
did Bernice Kelly. Zora was married three times (that we know of ), but never
for long, and although her first husband became a well-established physi-