Zora N. Hurston: Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance

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HITTING A STRAIGHT LICK WITH A CROOKED STICK
Stories From the Harlem Renaissance
By Zora Neale Hurston

Early in Reginald Hudlin’s 2017 biopic about Thurgood Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston makes a memorable cameo appearance. The soon-to-be legendary attorney and his wife are sharing a booth at a nightclub with Langston Hughes and a friend when Hurston saunters in. Portrayed by the R&B star Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas, she looks as if she’s stepped out of a Carl Van Vechten portrait, oozing confidence and sly intelligence. The brief scene in “Marshall,” with its cutting repartee, suggests what Hurston admirers have long known: She would have been some kind of star even if she’d never parked her genius in front of a typewriter. But how fortunate we are that she did. Today she is revered as a peerless raconteur, intrepid investigator of culture and ritual, and author of a great American novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

“Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick,” edited and with an introduction by Genevieve West, with a foreword by Tayari Jones, helps illuminate Hurston’s path to iconic status. Its 21 stories are presented in the order in which she composed them. As a result, readers can note the progression from earnest “apprentice” works and experiments with form to the polished brilliance of her best-known stories. The latter include “The Gilded Six-Bits,” with its plot turning on heartbreak and betrayal; “Spunk,” a spooky adultery fable drenched in swagger; and “Sweat,” a nail-biting tale of domestic terror.

an excerpt from “Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick.” ]

Explaining the meaning of Hurston’s homespun title, West cites Hurston’s various definitions of the expression. Of those, my favorite is “making a way out of no-way.” Equally a part of Northern, Midwestern and Southern African-American culture, the saying recognizes our ancestors’ ability to survive and thrive in the most challenging circumstances. In many of the stories in this collection, Hurston’s men and women confront those challenges while also trying and failing at love, then trying again.

Hurston is equally insistent on displaying the bruised, bloody underside of romantic misadventure. “Everybody in the country cut the fool over husbands and wives — violence was the rule,” she writes in “The Country in the Woman.” Men aren’t the only ones who provoke mayhem, but they flaunt their willingness to live by their fists. And meat-axes. And pistols. (West calls this behavior “tyrannical masculinity”; she does not exaggerate.) Hurston’s willingness to show warts and wounds ran counter to black bourgeois sensitivities about revealing dirty laundry in public. Against the backdrop of Harlem Renaissance bigwigs calling for positive depictions of high-achieving Negroes, Hurston unpacked the lives of everyday black people doing everyday things.

Add her matchless powers of observation, exemplary fidelity to idiomatic speech and irresistible engagement with folklore, and the outcome is a collection of value to more than Hurston completists. Any addition to her awe-inspiring oeuvre should be met with open arms.


The Harlem Renaissance Through Zora Neale Hurston’s Eyes

 

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I just finished listening to the Audible version -- and as one of the biggest Queen Zora Neale Hurston stans I have to say the stories were great -- but some were extremely sad to me. I guess cause they were so realistic and Ms. Hurston was straight shooting on how things really were for many of our families in the system of White Supremacy.

Here's a snippet of the review from Seattle Times: Zora Neale Hurston’s new collection highlights her unapologetic celebration of Black culture

Hurston insisted on letting the characters in her story tell their stories in their own voices.

As a trained anthropologist, Hurston traveled down the East Coast and sat on stoops and corners, the storytelling stages and communal gathering spaces of Black communities, where, with academic rigor and a loving gaze, she listened, studied and collected the stories Black folk tell.

“John Redding Goes to Sea,” the beautiful first tragedy in this collection, gets at the heart of Hurston’s own pursuit as a writer and anthropologist — to open the world up a little more and show humanity in all its hues.

“If it’s travellin’, ‘twont be for long. He’ll come back tuh us bettah than when he went off. Anyhow he’ll learn dat folks is human all ovah de world. Dats worth a lot to know, an’ it’s worth going a long way tuh fin’ out.”

Hurston’s work defied academic, social and literary convention that deemed Black culture “primitive” or lesser (though some criticized her as perpetuating these stereotypes) and elevated Black stories into their own canon.

Reading Hurston’s writings that captured the culture, folklore and mythologies of Black folk, I saw Blackness without the admonishing white gaze and understood for the first time that I had a culture, not just behaviors and “bad English” that needed to be corrected.​

In these stories, you might struggle to find a blatantly evil or villainous, racist white man. Rather, you will find something much closer to reality, as her stories reflect the more insidious ways white supremacy and misogyny infiltrate the everyday lives and minds of Black folk.

In “The Conversion of Sam,” a well-meaning white man offers the title character a home and all of his old furniture to help him settle down. But when Sam disappoints, the man declares “I treated you white, but you didn’t appreciate it.”

Hurston captures how white supremacy could appeal even to good-natured or “well-meaning” white people. The existence of demeaned and subservient Black people makes their charity and goodwill feel even greater, further aggrandizing their sense of self-worth, of moral superiority. This is not the white supremacy of hooded racists. This is the more insidious liberal white supremacy that one may uncomfortably recognize in action today.

In “Drenched in Light,” Hurston achieves an opus’s worth of discomfort in just a few sentences when she describes the almost carnivorous hunger a white character has for interactions with Blackness.

After paying a young, rambunctious Black girl’s grandmother to let the girl come with her and entertain her, the white character “looked hungrily ahead of her and spoke into space rather than to anyone in the car. ‘I want a little of her sunshine to soak into my soul. I need it.’”

Yet even when Hurston invokes the presence of the white gaze, her stories are not told with the white gaze in mind. This may be part of the reason some criticized her for her portrayals of Black people. But Hurston rejects the misinterpretations that come with that gaze.

“The villagers knew,” she writes in the story “Black Death,” about how white people at the time would dismiss Black people’s stories about Hoodoo (Voodoo) conjuration and West African-based spiritual traditions. “White folks are very stupid about some things. They can think mightily, but cannot feel.”​