Zora and Me

Content Warning: This section discusses anti-Black racism, including lynching, in the Jim Crow South, as well as racist slurs. 

Carrie Brown is the narrator and protagonist of Zora and Me. She is completely fictional, unlike Zora, and she is a vehicle through which young readers can be introduced to Zora Neale Hurston (See: Background).

Carrie is not as confident and self-assured as Zora; she is much more like a typical 10-year-old than her best friend. She grapples with grief after her father’s disappearance and likely death. She is not able to spend much time with her mother because she works so much, which leaves her isolated. Carrie loves her mother, but she actually spends more time with Zora’s family than her own. Her personal development involves the theme of The Coming-of-Age Experience. She is unable to fully understand the events taking place around her and relies on The Power of Storytelling to contextualize and explain Ivory’s death. She needs to use magic and myth to understand death, murder, racism, and social isolation.

By the end of the book, Carrie has progressed on her journey and is able to better understand the world. She understands why Zora made “a story out of events that were too huge and too frightening for [her] to hold” (103), and she accepts that a human killed Ivory.