Advertisement

Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories a rich look at black lives

Written almost a century ago, the stories in ‘Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick’ are funny, magical and moving by turns.
 
In 1935, Zora Neale Hurston visited Eatonville, where she grew up. The Florida town is the setting of some of the stories in "Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick."
In 1935, Zora Neale Hurston visited Eatonville, where she grew up. The Florida town is the setting of some of the stories in "Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick." [ Library of Congress ]
Published Feb. 20, 2020

Zora Neale Hurston has earned such an indelible place as a novelist that we sometimes forget that she was educated as an anthropologist. In a new collection of her short stories, the fiction writer and the social scientist complement each other.

Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick gathers 21 stories, published between 1921 and 1934 and presented in the order in which they first appeared in print, mostly in magazines and newspapers.

Some are touching, some are dark, many are full of rollicking humor. Together, they give readers a window into Hurston’s development as a writer — her best-known work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, would be published in 1937 — and into how her education shaped her fiction.

Hurston earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1928 from Barnard College (she was its only black student at the time) and went on to graduate studies in that discipline at Columbia University under the great Franz Boas. Sometimes called the father of American anthropology, Boas is known for his emphasis on cultural relativism — the idea that there are no superior or inferior cultures, but that all have their own value and interest. (For insight into Boas, Hurston and several other of his most notable students, look for Charles King’s excellent group biography Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, published in 2019.)

Zora Neale Hurston [ Courtesy of N.Y. Nathiri ]

Hurston did extensive fieldwork under Boas’ direction, collecting folklore in the American South and the Caribbean, and some of that material — and her anthropologist’s eye — shapes these stories.

She grew up in Eatonville, north of Orlando, one of the first self-governing all-black municipalities in the United States. Her father served as its mayor when she was a youngster and was also a preacher. She had absorbed folktales and other storytelling as a child, but as an adult she saw them with a distance both artistic and scientific.

By the time she was writing these short stories, Hurston was living in Harlem in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic movement in the 1920s that produced a host of talented African-American writers, musicians, visual artists and scholars. Although she is considered one of the movement’s major figures, Hurston sometimes ran against its currents, especially its emphasis on the “New Negro,” which presented artistic high achievers as an ideal. Hurston was such an achiever herself, but she preferred to write about the everyday lives of people of color. In the stories in this book, her characters are sawmill workers and gamblers, washerwomen and mischievous little girls who wish they were princesses.

Planning your weekend?

Subscribe to our free Top 5 things to do newsletter

We’ll deliver ideas every Thursday for going out, staying home or spending time outdoors.

You’re all signed up!

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

Explore all your options

The book’s introduction, by editor Genevieve West, notes that Hurston explained its title phrase, “hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick,” in several ways, including “making a way out of no way” — a nod to her fondness for subversion. One of her subversions of norms for fiction a century ago is her almost complete focus on black characters. White people are all but absent in this world, and when they do show up momentarily, they’re generally clueless. Hurston subverts white attitudes toward black people by simply ignoring them.

Whether the stories are set in Eatonville or Harlem, in most of them Hurston writes her characters’ dialogue in phonetically spelled dialect, like one character’s comment on another’s fierce wife: “I’m glad to hear dat 'cause there ain’t no more like her nowheres. Naw sir! Folks like her comes one at a time — like lawyer going to Heaven.”

To contemporary readers, that dialogue might seem stereotypical or even offensive, but Hurston, in anthropologist mode, wanted to capture the flavor of language. (Her insistence on vernacular dialogue was one reason that Barracoon, her biography of an elderly, formerly enslaved man, was turned down by publishers and didn’t see print until 2018, 87 years after she wrote it.)

In the foreword to Hitting a Straight Lick, Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage, writes, “Hurston captured the language of her community phonetically, so that none of the music and magic would be lost in the alchemy from breath to ink.”

In the dialogue and everyplace else, there is plenty of music and magic in these stories. Even the earliest one, John Redding Goes to Sea, shows Hurston’s assurance in the sad, eerie tale of a young man who wants to travel the world beyond his Florida home.

Drenched in Light is the story of a young girl named Isis who also dreams of escape on the “white shell road” in front of her home. Much of the story is a funny account of her mischief, like trying to shave her sleeping grandmother’s chin whiskers, but it takes a chilling turn at the end.

Hurston writes often about marriage. Sometimes the stories are grisly, like Spunk, about a woman who’s widowed twice in short order, and Sweat, in which an ill-treated woman whose husband tries to run her out of her own house gets ironic revenge. Magnolia Flower is a spooky fable with a sweet ending. Under the Bridge is a heartbreaker about an older man, his young wife and his beloved only son. They all grow to love one another, and it’s not a good thing.

Other marriage stories are hilarious, like The Country in the Woman. It’s one of several in which Hurston traces the Great Migration, in this case with a couple from Eatonville who move to Harlem. Mitchell Potts is in his element in the city, where he finds plenty of women to chase, but his formidable wife, Caroline, hasn’t changed much. Back in Florida, she was famous for her interventions in her husband’s affairs. In one case, she accosted one of his “side gals” outside church, knocked her down and removed the fancy underwear Mitchell had bought her. Then Caroline “had seen fit to have her pony make the homeward trip with its hindquarters thrust into Delphine’s ravished clothes.” Harlem does not cramp Caroline’s style.

The funniest stories in the book are four written in mock-biblical style, Book of Harlem, The Book of Harlem, Monkey Junk and She Rock. The first three are tales of young men who come to Harlem from the country, and the last is a retelling of the Caroline epic. Hurston is brilliant at playing scriptural style against vernacular, as in this passage from Book of Harlem:

13. But his father strove with him and said, “Why dost thou crave Babylon when Gussie Smith, the daughter of our neighbor, will make thee a good wife? Tarry now and take her to wife, for verily she is a mighty biscuit cooker before the Lord.”

14. Then snorted Mandolin with scorn and said, “What care I for biscuit-cookers when there be Shebas of high voltage on every street in Harlem? For verily man liveth not on bread alone, but by every drop of banana oil that drippeth from the tongue of the lovely.”

Hurston goes beyond fable and comedy in one touching marriage story, The Gilded Six-Bits, about a happy young couple torn apart by betrayal. It’s one of the later stories, and its character development is more realistic than comic — no ponies in bloomers here — as Joe and Missie May find their long, hard way to forgiveness and candy kisses.

Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick

By Zora Neale Hurston

Amistad, 252 pages, $25.99