to tea at five o’clock the next afternoon, in the apartment atop the Castle
Warden Hotel that she shared with her husband. The hotel was an elegant,
five-story resort that stood on the present-day site of the Ripley’s Believe-It-
or-Not attraction, near downtown. Marjorie’s enthusiasm for Zora’s com-
pany was infectious, and Norton was eager to accommodate, yet a bit wor-
ried. The Castle Warden, like virtually all southern public accommodations
during the long age of Jim Crow, was segregated, and Zora was lushly brown
in color—‘‘café au lait,’’ Marjorie described her.
Norton’s characteristically discreet solution was to stand watch himself
at the front desk and to station at the hotel’s entrance a black bellhop who
would greet and escort Zora up to the fifth floor. Norton and the bellhop
waited, then grew apprehensive when Zora did not appear. At : Norton
phoned up to inform Marjorie she had been stood up, only to hear in his
receiver a joyous roar. On her own initiative Zora had entered in back, by
the kitchen, and walked up alone. She and Marjorie were already joking
and howling with laughter. Marjorie’s ‘‘teatime’’ was doubtlessly cocktail
time for her, too; she loved to drink, smoke cigarettes, and make risque
practical jokes. Sometimes she became a little rowdy. Zora, curiously, was
not a drinker—or so she claimed—but possessed such an exuberant spirit,
sober, as to fill rooms with laughter. She was, though, like Marjorie another
heavy cigarette smoker, a flamboyant dresser, and an extravagant racon-
teur. Both were writers, too, of course, who shared many other passions.
Either that evening at the Castle Warden or from later talk with Zora,
Marjorie came to understand that her newfound friend was displeased with
her publisher’s grossly intrusive deletions from her autobiography. J. B.
Lippincott, insisting that angry descriptions of Jim Crow were incompat-
ible with patriotism in wartime, had forced her to accept excisions from
Dust Trackswhile leaving in good-natured mockery of black folks. The trun-
cated book provoked leftist critics such as Richard Wright, who excori-
ated her seemingly accommodationist attitudes. Zora needed funds, too.
So Marjorie recommended her to Maxwell Perkins and her own publisher,
Charles Scribner. Ultimately Scribner issued Zora’s last book,Seraph on
the Suwanee, in . In the meantime Max Perkins’s account to Marjorie
of Zora’s first visit to his Manhattan office confirms—if confirmation be
needed at this late date—Zora’s legendary magnetism. Zora made ‘‘the im-
pression,’’ he wrote, ‘‘of somebody so full of life and emotion and intelli-
gence that whatever she did should be good. She roused up the whole office
by the vitality of her presence.’’^27
Months after their first meetings, meanwhile, Zora readCross Creek
avery
(avery)
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