Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

by Zora Neale Hurston

Genres: African American Women's Fiction; Cultural Heritage; Authors of color

Synopsis

From "one of the greatest writers of our time" (Toni Morrison)—the author of Barracoon and Their Eyes Were Watching God—a collection of remarkable stories, including eight "lost" Harlem Renaissance tales now available to a wide audience for the first time.

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In 1925, Barnard student Zora Neale Hurston—the sole black student at the college—was living in New York, "desperately striving for a toe-hold on the world." During this period, she began writing short works that captured the zeitgeist of African American life and transformed her into one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nearly a century later, this singular talent is recognized as one of the most influential and revered American artists of the modern period.

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is an outstanding collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, racism and sexism that proudly reflect African American folk culture. Brought together for the first time in one volume, they include eight of Hurston's "lost" Harlem stories, which were found in forgotten periodicals and archives. These stories challenge conceptions of Hurston as an author of rural fiction and include gems that flash with her biting, satiric humor, as well as more serious tales reflective of the cultural currents of Hurston's world. All are timeless classics that enrich our understanding and appreciation of this exceptional writer's voice and her contributions to America's literary traditions.

Release date: January 14, 2020

Publisher: Amistad

Print pages: 304

Sample

Introduction

Outstanding novelist, skilled folklorist, journalist, and critic, Zora Hurston was for thirty years the most prolific black woman writer in America.¹

—Mary Helen Washington

For Zora Neale Hurston the Harlem Renaissance began in 1921, when she published her first short story, and it ended in 1937 with the publication of her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. In the period between, she wrote twenty-one stories, all of which appear here together in a single volume for the first time. Included in Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick are several “lost” Harlem Renaissance tales, eight of which challenge readers to rethink their assumptions about Hurston’s literary interests. An author long associated with the rural, with Eatonville, Florida, she wrote eight stories about northern cities and the Great Migration. She also wrote about Harlem’s middle class. Thus, this new Harlem Renaissance volume provides a much-needed correction to Hurston’s legacy and better reflects the true breadth of her subject matter.

Presented in the order of their composition, the stories collected here allow readers to track the evolution and maturation of Hurston’s skills and interests as a fiction writer, from what her biographer Robert Hemenway describes as her “apprentice” work to her mature, masterful critiques of the politics of race, class, and gender—what we today call the politics of identity.² Hurston typically submerged her explorations of such serious topics within plots revolving around romantic relationships between men and women. Literary critics Claudia Tate and Susan Meisenhelder adopted Hurston’s own phrase, “hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick,” to describe the ways in which she subversively critiques the politics of race and gender, and, I add, the politics of class as well. Zora herself described what it means to “hit a straight lick with a crooked stick” in slightly different ways. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), she uses the phrase to describe her hometown because “[i]t is a by-product of something else.” In the essay “High John de Conquer,” she describes it as “making a way out of no-way” or “[w]inning the jack pot with no other stake but a laugh.”³ Hurston’s “making a way” to express herself in a racist and masculine publishing industry required subversive strategies for exploring topics, critiquing behaviors and norms, and expressing perspectives that editors and readers might have rather avoided. Across the body of her Harlem Renaissance fiction, again and again Hurston “hit[s] a straight lick with a crooked stick” to address the politics of identity.

Eight of the nine recovered stories that appear here are set in urban environments that reflect the tumult of the Great Migration. More than two million African Americans left the largely rural South between 1910 and 1940 for the industrialized cities of

the North.⁴ On their journeys to build new lives, migrants faced collective and individual challenges in urban communities as they encountered new expectations for dress, deportment, speech, education, religious practice, and entertainment. So profound were the changes wrought by the Great Migration that it spawned an entire body of what scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin describes as migration narratives—songs, stories, novels, and paintings—that depict the upheaval of migration, the resulting loss of community, confrontations with the new environment, attempts to reestablish community, and even reverse migration, which some undertook when the North failed to fulfill its promise of a better life.⁵

Until the recovery of Hurston’s lost stories, it had appeared as though she had opted to limit her treatment of the Great Migration to a single story, “Muttsy,” and to the subtle references that appear elsewhere in her fiction, such as in her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934). Cultural and literary critic Hazel V. Carby had even gone so far as to suggest that Hurston “attempt[ed] to stabilize and displace the social contradictions and disruption of her contemporary moment” by focusing on “a utopian reconstruction of a historical moment of her childhood” in Eatonville.⁶ Today—with the recovery of these urban stories—we know that Carby was mistaken. She simply did not have access to Hurston’s entire corpus. When Hurston explores urban settings and characters, the Great Migration may be central to the plot, or it might loom in the background. Both strategies, however, expand her treatments of the politics of gender, class, and race to include another layer of complexity produced by regional differences. Migrants were forced to reconcile conflicting norms on matters both secular and sacred—many of which intersected with gender-based norms related to race and class. The choices Hurston’s characters face, mundane and momentous alike, illustrate the tumult of the times. Hurston’s short stories rarely fail to engage identity politics, and in this way her urban tales are no different from her better-known Eatonville stories and her novels. At the same time, the urban settings do change the nature of the politics her characters must negotiate.

HURSTON “REALLY DID GET BORN”

Zora Neale Hurston claimed, at various times, to have been born in 1901, 1902, and 1903 in Eatonville, Florida, the first “incorporated” black town in the United States.⁷ It is probably more accurate to say that Eatonville was home, the place that not only inspired her but also shaped her identity. In addition, Zora was also a decade older than she publicly acknowledged, having been born (according to US Census records) in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama.⁸ Her family relocated to Eatonville in 1894. When Zora’s mother died and her father remarried to a woman she despised, it initiated a period of wandering. Unable to finish high school because she needed to support herself, she worked in white homes as a maid, bounced among relatives and friends, and then took a position as a lady’s maid in a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe traveling the country. When the woman she worked for left the company to marry, Hurston settled in Baltimore, Maryland, where her sister Sarah was, to complete her education.⁹

State law in Maryland guaranteed a free high school education to anyone under the age of twenty. Hurston seized the opportunity that she had longed for and promptly took a decade off her life to begin passing as a teenager rather than the twenty-six-year-old woman she was. Thus Hurston began the masquerade of being born in 1901 rather than 1891. In 1917 Hurston enrolled at Morgan Academy, then the high school division of Morgan College, which we know today as Morgan State University. The following year, she moved to Washington, DC, with

the hope of attending Howard University, which she would later call “the capstone of Negro education in the world.” Admitted first through the college preparatory program, Hurston spent close to four years at Howard, in and out of class as her finances and health allowed. There she discovered that she was not only “Howard material,” as a friend put it, but also Zeta Phi Beta material.¹⁰

When Hurston’s first story appeared in print in 1921 in the Howard University literary magazine, The Stylus, she was still a student trying to make rent and pay tuition by working as a manicurist. Fortunately for Hurston, the literary renaissance was already taking place in Washington, as well as in other cities around the country. A lifelong lover of books, the would-be writer found in the city a lively black literary community, focused on a group known as the Saturday Nighters. Elizabeth McHenry’s research has demonstrated that such groups “provid[ed] a network of support for African American intellectuals” and helped shape American literature and modern culture.¹¹ Weekly gatherings of the Saturday Nighters—at which participants discussed books, plays, and poetry—often took place at the home of Georgia Douglas Johnson, who was already an established poet. For this group of writers, many of whom found the city’s racism and narrowness isolating, Johnson’s home proved “an assembly of likeable and civilized people.” One contemporary recalls that Hurston actually lived at Johnson’s home for a period.¹² There, Zora, as an evening’s guest or in residence, would have encountered not only faculty members and mentors from Howard University, like Montgomery Gregory and Alain Locke, but also a range of other luminaries from the period, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, Marita Bonner, and Jessie Fauset, as well as native Washingtonian Jean Toomer, whose Cane (1923) instantly made him a literary celebrity. It was during these years that Hurston began publishing her fiction and her lesser-known poetry, suggesting that the lively discussions may have helped foster her desire to put pen to paper.

Hurston wrote her first four extant stories during this period. By the fall of 1924 her work had been accepted in one of the period’s leading magazines, Opportunity. It was her breakthrough. “Drenched in Light” would become her first major publication. The success encouraged her to consider writing as a career. Unable to raise the funds to finish her degree at Howard, Zora packed her bags and migrated to New York, the center of American publishing. She tells us in her autobiography that she arrived in Harlem with only $1. ...