Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Editor’s Note

  Foreword by Tayari Jones

  Introduction by Genevieve West

  John Redding Goes to Sea

  The Conversion of Sam

  A Bit of Our Harlem

  Drenched in Light

  Spunk

  Magnolia Flower

  Black Death

  The Bone of Contention

  Muttsy

  Sweat

  Under the Bridge

  ’Possum or Pig?

  The Eatonville Anthology

  Book of Harlem

  The Book of Harlem

  The Back Room

  Monkey Junk

  The Country in the Woman

  The Gilded Six-Bits

  She Rock

  The Fire and the Cloud

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Credits

  About the Author

  Also by Zora Neale Hurston

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Editor’s Note

  This volume constitutes an entirely new edition of Hurston’s short fiction. Each story here has been transcribed anew using, whenever possible, the first documented publication of the story as the copy text. When a first publication was not available, typescripts served as the foundation. I respectfully corrected errors that likely occurred during the typesetting process, such as missing end punctuation, missing opening or closing quotation marks, obvious spelling errors, and idiosyncratic capitalization. Hurston’s punctuation—particularly her use of commas, dashes and commas together, and punctuation of contractions and dialogue—evolved considerably over the course of the Harlem Renaissance. Consequently, rather than impose a single standard on the volume, I have looked to the stories themselves for guidance. Each story has been treated as a discrete text with its own conventions. For instance, when ain’t appears five times in a story with the apostrophe and once without it, I have replaced the missing apostrophe in that story only. In later stories, readers will then see words spelled and punctuated differently in the various stories as Hurston’s distinctive voice matured. I have preserved her punctuation and spelling to ensure fidelity to her vision at the time the story first appeared.

  * * *

  Concerning the discovery of the stories, in 2005 I documented four that were found in the Pittsburgh Courier in Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture. I uncovered them in the landmark microfiche collection Black Literature 1827–1940 as I searched for reviews of Hurston’s books. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Black Literature 1827–1940 collects the poetry, fiction, and reviews that appeared in 110 significant—but rare—black magazines and newspapers from the period. Although the work of developing the microfiche collection began in the early 1980s, the Hurston stories contained therein waited—undocumented—until 2005.

  In 2010, Glenda S. Carpio and Werner Sollors working collaboratively also chanced upon the Pittsburgh Courier stories while perusing microfilm of the newspaper. Through their efforts, the Courier stories became front-page news in the Chronicle Review.1 A short time later, Carpio and Sollors gathered all five of the Courier stories as the centerpiece of a special issue of an academic journal, Amerikastudien / American Studies.

  Foreword

  Love Letter and Testimony

  Zora Neale Hurston is in that rare category of writer who reached the type of notoriety that gives her one-name status. This isn’t terribly uncommon—think Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. However, there are precious few whose one name is their first name, and fewer still who are easily known by their given names and/or their family names. I can think of only three—Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and the great Zora Neale Hurston, who predated them both.

  Whenever I think of Zora, by this single name, I have the urge to go wild with punctuation: Zora!!! Part of this is motivated by the audacity of the name itself. There is something brazen about the letter Z, bringing up the rear of the alphabet with three bold slashes. And this is compounded by the fact that the name is perfectly suited to the woman herself. Who hasn’t admired the images of her that we see on postcards in bookshops? The most memorable are the portraits taken by Carl Van Vechten in which Zora poses with her felt hat tilted to shade one eye, or she wears a coat that frames her face with a dramatic fur collar. These are black-and-white photos, but my favorite features her against a red background in which she sports a beaded cap that matches her cream-colored dress. Her lips are curved into something between a smirk and a smile, like she knows something that we don’t.

  Have you ever noticed that Zora Neale Hurston is seldom photographed looking squarely at the camera? I can never decide whether she is being coy, deliberately cultivating the mystery of her persona. Maybe she spares us the intensity of her straightforward gaze because one should never look directly into the sun. Regardless of her motivation, the images we have are captivating and enchanting. She may not meet our eyes, but she leaves us unable to turn away all these years later.

  The page of her insightful prose is where Hurston chooses to reveal herself. Gone are the dramatic hats and headdresses, the sidelong glances, and the rouged lips. The stories in this fine collection are the tales of country folks—farmers, factory workers. And through their lives we experience the full range of human emotion. Hurston’s sense of humor is legendary. I dare you to read this book in public without releasing at least one leg-slapping guffaw. Although people often suggest that black folks “laugh to keep from crying,” these characters show that some laughter is simply the reward for a joke well told. But even the folks who sit on the porch telling lies and playing the dozens still get the blues. After all, they are parents, lovers, children, spouses, and friends; with these connections come vulnerability and even grief. Hurston illuminates the breadth, depth, diameter, and circumference of the lives of those she knows and loves best.

  Like Faulkner, Hurston’s muse is her hometown, the landscape and culture that formed her. But while Faulkner sets his work in a fictional place, Yoknapatawpha County, Hurston calls Eatonville by its true name, giving credit where it is due. (She represents for Eatonville harder than Biggie did for Brooklyn and Tupac for LA.) Hurston’s writing is both love letter and testimony. For too many years, the American South has been evoked as a shorthand for African American misery and oppression. When Nina Simone said, “Mississippi Goddam,” she covered the entire region. But Hurston loved the land that she called home. Eatonville boasted a black mayor, and although Hurston roasts him mercilessly in this book, as well as in Their Eyes Were Watching God, there is an empowerment that comes from black self-governance. Although racism and “white folks” present real challenges to the characters that people this collection, oppression is not the center of their lives. This is one of the many intricacies of the southern experience that is on full display in this excellent collection.

  Short stories offer us something that novels do not. With a novel, even a masterpiece like Their Eyes Were Watching God, our attention is aimed at one or two characters as we take a deep dive into their complicated psychology, actions, and circumstances. With each short story, we encounter the same degree of complexity, but the characters’ experiences are distilled into a few defining moments. To use a metaphor of which I hope Hurston would approve: A novel is like a whole watermelon, gorgeous striped rind, white pith, red flesh, and shiny black seeds. It is delicious; it is a work of God’s majesty. The short story is more like the watermelon heart. In the country, men stand by the side of the road and throw the watermelon down on the pavement, ju
st so. Upon impact, the melon will break in such a way that the juicy center is separated from the rest. This is the best part of the fruit—ripe, firm, seedless, and sweet. If a man offers a woman the heart of the watermelon, well, things are serious.

  Similarly, these stories get right to the heart of the matter.

  Hurston, trickster that she is, has chosen comeuppance as her literary specialty. Hers is a world populated by people who are more powerful than they seem. A jilted husband, so timid that he can only gulp when his wife’s lover passes by. However, through his own death, he takes the Romeo to his grave. (The wife, on the other hand, lives her best life—free of them both.) The Baptists and the Methodists square off for an epic clash and nobody quite wins, but laughs abound. But in the realm of payback, there is more than fun and games. In tales that feel as ancient as “The Monkey’s Paw,” characters learn to be careful what they wish for. The delight of this collection is the way the stories feel rooted in a reality that is nearly a century old, yet still manage to achieve timelessness.

  On Hurston’s tombstone are engraved the words “A Genius of the South.” The memorial stone was commissioned by a young Alice Walker who was so moved by Their Eyes Were Watching God that she took a pilgrimage to Florida to find out what became of Hurston and to pay her respects. Many people know this part of the story. Hurston died penniless and in obscurity. Walker searched an unkempt cemetery, battling mosquitos and sticker briars until she found the sunken, unmarked grave. At the time, this was a deterrent example and rallying call, admonishing us to take better care of our cultural workers as they age. Hurston became symbolic of the many black women writers who fell into obscurity due to the twin burdens of racism and sexism. Virginia Woolf mused about Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, but Walker championed Zora Neale Huston, an actual person.

  I wonder what Hurston would make of this. I do not doubt for a moment that she would have enjoyed the attention. She was the life of the party, after all. Thanks to the advocacy of Walker and other writers and scholars, Their Eyes Were Watching God is now regarded as an American classic and has been translated into dozens of languages. Zora Neale Hurston is perhaps the best known of all the Harlem Renaissance writers, surpassing even Langston Hughes. However, I think she would be dismayed at becoming a cautionary tale. In her famous essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she declared, “I am not tragically colored.”

  In that spirit, I offer a different interpretation of these same events. We can all agree that the end of Hurston’s life was difficult. We can all agree that she deserved her laurels while she still walked among us. Yet Zora, being Zora, did not let mere death end her life. Alice Walker found Hurston’s grave, but Hurston’s work found Alice Walker.

  Some readers may not understand the title Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick. I will explicate it the best I can. Like Hurston, I understand that sometimes the most vibrant language doesn’t translate well into the more formal tone of well-meaning documents like this foreword. The expression, one I know from my own southern childhood, means to achieve a goal that seems to be in contradiction to the means by which it was accomplished. (It’s amazing, isn’t it, how the act of translation boils the life out of the phrase, leaving it as limp as overcooked vegetables? This is why 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.)

  I would not do justice to this latest addition to Hurston’s oeuvre if I didn’t praise the splendor of its language. No writer before, or since, has regarded the language of the African American South with such affection and seriousness. Unfettered by respectability politics, Hurston lets the people speak for themselves. And speak, they do.

  I recommend reading this work aloud, enjoying the feel of the words in your mouth, and the sound of English tightened and strummed like the strings of a banjo. Lose yourself in these stories. Laugh when it’s funny. Wipe your eyes when the spirit moves you. Remember Hurston in this way—complicated and brilliant. These pages, like their author, contain multitudes.

  Tayari Jones

  August 19, 2019

  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 his
torical 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