Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

by Zora Neale Hurston

  “Black men came and went now as they pleased and the father had many to serve him, for now he had built a house such as white men owned when he was in bondage.

  “His heart, of the ex-slave Bentley, was iron to all but Magnolia Flower. Swift Deer was no longer swift. Too many kicks and blows, too many grim chokings had slowed her feet and heart.

  “He had done violence to workmen. There was little law in this jungle, and that was his,—‘Do as I bid you or suffer my punishment.’

  “He was hated, but feared more.

  “He hated anything that bore the slightest resemblance to his former oppressors. His servants must be black, very black or Cherokee.

  “The flower was seventeen and beautiful. Bentley thought often of a mate for her now, but one that would not offend him either in spirit or flesh. He must be full of humility, and black.

  “One day, as the sun gave me a good-night kiss and the stars began their revels, I bore a young Negro yet not a Negro, for his skin was the color of freshly barked cypress, golden with the curly black hair of the white man.

  “There were many Negroes in Bentley’s Village and he wished to build a school that would teach them useful things.

  “Bentley hated him at once; but ordered a school-house to be built, for he wished Magnolia to read and write.

  “But before two weeks had passed, the teacher had taught the Flower to read strange marvels with her dark eyes, and she had taught the teacher to sing with his eyes, his hands, his whole body in her presence or whenever he thought of her,—not in her father’s house, but beneath that clump of palms, those three that bathe their toes eternally and talk.

  “They busied themselves with dreams of creation, while Bentley swore the foundation of the school-room into place.

  “‘Nothing remains for me to do, now that I have your consent, but to ask your father for your sweet self. I know I am poor, but I have a great Vision, a high purpose, and he shall not be ashamed of me!’

  “She clung fearfully to him.

  “‘No, don’t, John, don’t. He’ll say “Naw!” and cuss. He—he don’t like you at all. Youse too white.’

  “‘I’ll get him out of that, just trust me, precious. Then I can just own you—just let me talk to him!’

  “She wept and pleaded with him—told him of Bentley’s terrible anger and violence, begged him to take her away and send her father word; but he refused to hear her, and walked up to her house and seated himself upon the broad verandah to wait for the father of Magnolia Flower.

  “She flew to Swift Deer and begged her to persuade her lover not to brave Bentley’s anger. The older woman crept out and tearfully implored him to go. He stayed.

  “At dusk Bentley came swearing in. It had been a hot day; the men had cut several poor pieces of timber and seemed all bent on driving him to the crazy-house, he complained.

  “Swift Deer slunk into the house at his approach, dragging her daughter after her.

  “What followed was too violent for words to tell,—strength against strength, steel against steel. Threats bellowed from Bentley’s bull throat seemed no more than little puffs of air to the lover. Of course, he would leave Bentley’s house; but he would stay in the vicinity until he was told to leave by the Flower,—his Flower of sweetness and purity—and he would marry her unless hell froze over.

  “‘Better eat up dem words an’ git out whilst ah letcher,’ the old man growled.

  “Bentley drew up his lips in a great roll glare.

  “‘No!’ John shouted, giving him glare for his rage boiling and tumbling out from behind these ramparts, as it were. His eye reddened, a vessel in the center of his forehead stood out, gorged with blood, and his great hands twitched. For good or evil, Bentley was a strong man, mind and body.

  “Swift Deer could no longer restrain her daughter. Magnolia Flower burst triumphantly upon the verandah.

  “‘Well, papa, you don’t say that I haven’t picked a man. No one else in forty miles round would stand up to you like John!’

  “‘Ham! Jim! Israel!’ Bentley howled, on the verge of apoplexy. The men appeared. ‘Take dis here yaller skunk an’ lock him in dat back-room. I’m a gonna hang ’im high as Hamon come sun up, law uh no law.’

  “A short struggle, and John was tied hand and foot.

  “‘Stop!’ cried Magnolia Flower, fighting, clawing, biting, kicking like a brown fiend for her lover. One brawny worker held her until John was helplessly bound.

  “But when she looked at all three of the men with her eye of fire, they shook in superstitious fear.

  “‘Oh, Mah Gawd!’ breathed Ham, terrified. ‘She’s cussing us, she’s cussing us all wid her eyes. Sump’m sho gwine happen.’

  “Her eye was indeed something to affright the timid and even give the strong heart pause. A woman robbed of her love is more terrible than an army with banners.

  “‘Oh, I wish I could!’ she uttered in a voice flat with intensity. ‘You’d all drop dead on the spot.’

  “Swift Deer had crept out and stood beside the child. She screamed and clasped her hands over her daughter’s lips.

  “‘Say not such words, Magnolia,’ she pleaded. ‘Take them back into your bosom unsaid.’

  “‘Leave her be,’ Bentley laughed acidly. ‘Ah got a dose uh mah medicine ready for her too. Befo’ ah hangs dis yaller pole-cat ahm gwinter marry her to Crazy Joe, an’ John kin look on; den ah’ll hang him, and she kin look on. Magnolia and Joe oughter have fine black chillen. Ha! Ha!’

  “The girl never uttered a sound. She smiled with her lips but her eyes burned every bit of courage to cinders in those who saw her.

  “John was locked in the stout back-room. The windows were guarded and Ham sat with a loaded gun at the door.

  “Magnolia was locked in the parlor where she ran up and down, tearing her heavy black hair. She beat helplessly upon the doors, she hammered the windows, making little mewing noises in her throat like a cat deprived of her litter.

  “The house grew grimly still. Bentley had forced his wife to accompany him to their bedroom. She lay fearfully awake but he slept peacefully, if noisily.

  “‘Magnolia Flower!’ Ham called softly as he turned the key stealthily in the lock of her prison. ‘Come on out. Ah caint stan’ dis here weekedness uh yo pappy!’

  “‘No thank you, Ham. I’ll stay right here and make him kill me long with John, if you don’t let him out too.’

  “‘Lawd a mussy knows ah wisht ah could, but de ole man’s got de key in his britches.’

  “‘I’m going and get it, Ham,’ she announced as she stepped over the threshold to freedom.

  “‘Lawd! He’ll kill me sho’s you born.’

  “Her feet were already on the stairs.

  “‘I’ll have that key or die. Ham, you put some victuals in that rowboat.’

  “Half for love, half for fear, Ham obeyed.

  “No one but Magnolia Flower would have entered Bentley’s bed-room as she did under the circumstances but to her the circumstances were her reasons for going. The big horse pistol under his pillow, the rack of guns in the hall, and her father’s giant hands—none of these stopped her. She knew three lives,—her own, her lover’s, and Ham’s—hung on her success; but she went and returned with that key.

  “One minute more and they flew down the path to the three leaning palms into the boat away northward.

  “The morning came. Bentley ate hugely. The new rope hung ominously from the arm of the giant oak in the yard. Preacher Ike had eaten his breakfast with Bentley and the idiot, Crazy Joe, had forced himself into a pair of clean hickory pants.

  “Bentley turned the key and flung open the door, stood still a minute in a grey rage and stalked to the back-room door, feeling for the key meanwhile.

  “When he had fully convinced himself that the key was gone, he did not bother to open the door.

  “‘Ham, it ’pears dat Magnolia an’ dat yaller dog aint heah dis mawnin’, so you an’ Swift Deer will hafta do,
being ez y’all let ’em git away.’ He said this calmly and stalked toward the gun rack; but his anger was too large to be contained in one human heart. His arteries corded his face, his eyes popped, and he fell senseless as he stretched his hand for the gun. Rage had burst his heart at being outwitted by a girl.

  “This all happened more than forty years ago, as men reckon time. Soon Swift Deer died, and the house built by strong Bentley fell to decay. White men came and built a town and Magnolia Flower and her eyes passed from the hearts of people who had known her.”

  * * *

  THE BROOK HAD LISTENED, tensely thrilled to its very bottom at times. The river flowed calmly on, shimmering under the moon as it moved ceaselessly to the sea.

  An old couple picked their way down to the water’s edge. He had once been tall—he still bore himself well. The little old woman clung lovingly to his arm.

  “It’s been forty-seven years, John,” she said sweetly, her voice full of fear. “Do you think we can find the place?”

  “Why yes, Magnolia, my Flower, unless they have cut down our trees; but if they are standing, we’ll know ’em—couldn’t help it.”

  “Yes, sweetheart, there they are. Hurry and let’s sit on the roots like we used to and trail our fingers in the water. Love is wonderful, isn’t it, dear?”

  They hugged the trunks of the three clustering palms lovingly; then hugged each other and sat down shyly upon the heaped up roots.

  “You never have regretted, Magnolia?”

  “Of course not! But John, listen, did you ever hear a river make such a sound? Why it seems almost as if it were talking—that murmuring noise, you know.”

  “Maybe, it’s welcoming us back. I always felt that it loved you and me, somehow.”

  Black Death

  We Negroes in Eatonville know a number of things that the hustling, bustling white man never dreams of. He is a materialist with little care for overtones.

  For instance, if a white person were halted on the streets of Orlando and told that Old Man Morgan, the excessively black Negro hoodoo man, can kill any person indicated and paid for, without ever leaving his house or even seeing his victim, he’d laugh in your face and walk away, wondering how long the Negro would wallow in ignorance and superstition. But no black person in a radius of twenty miles will smile, not much. They know.

  His achievements are far too numerous to mention singly. Besides many of his cures or “conjures” are kept secret. But everybody knows that he put the loveless curse on Della Lewis. She has been married seven times but none of her husbands have ever remained with her longer than twenty-eight days that Morgan had prescribed as the limit.

  Hiram Lester’s left track was brought to him with five dollars and when the new moon came again, Lester was stricken with paralysis while working in his orange grove.

  There was the bloody-flux that he put on Lucy Potte; he caused Emma Taylor’s teeth to drop out; he put the shed skin of a black snake in Horace Brown’s shoes and made him as the Wandering Jew; he put a sprig of Lena Merchant’s hair in a bottle, corked it and threw it into a running stream with the neck pointing upstream, and she went crazy; he buried Lillie Wilcox’s finger-nails with lizard’s feet and dried up her blood.

  All of these things and more can easily be proved by the testimony of the villagers. They ought to know.

  He lives alone in a two-room hut down by Lake Blue Sink, the bottomless. His eyes are reddish and the large gold hoop ear-rings jan[gl]ing on either side of his shrunken black face make the children shrink in terror whenever they meet him on the street or in the woods where he goes to dig roots for his medicines.

  But the doctor can not spend his time merely making folks ill. He has sold himself to the devil over the powerful black cat’s bone that alone will float upstream, and many do what he wills. Life and death are in his hands—he sometimes kills.

  He sent Old Lady Crooms to her death in the lake. She was a rival hoodoo doctor and laid claims to equal power. She came to her death one night. That very morning Morgan had told several that he was tired of her pretences—he would put an end to it and prove his powers.

  That very afternoon near sundown, she went down to the lake to fish, telling her daughter, however, that she did not wish to go, but something seemed to be forcing her. About dusk someone heard her scream and rushed to the lake. She had fallen in and drowned. The white coroner from Orlando said she met her death by falling into the water during an epileptic fit. But the villagers knew. White folks are very stupid about some things. They can think mightily but cannot feel.

  But the undoing of Beau Diddely is his masterpiece. He had come to Eatonville from up North somewhere. He was a waiter at the Park House Hotel over in Maitland where Docia Boger was a chamber-maid. She had a very pretty brown body and face, sang alto in the Methodist Choir and played the blues on her guitar. Soon Beau Diddely was with her every moment he could spare from his work. He was stuck on her all right, for a time.

  They would linger in the shrubbery about Park Lake or go for long walks in the woods on Sunday afternoon to pick violets. They are abundant in the Florida woods in winter.

  The Park House always closed in April and Beau was planning to go North with the white tourists. It was then Docia’s mother discovered that Beau should have married her daughter weeks before.

  “Mist’ Diddely,” said Mrs. Boger, “Ah’m a widder ’oman an’ Doshy’s all Ah got, an’ Ah know youse gointer do what you orter.” She hesitated a moment and studied his face. “’Thout no trouble. [Illegible] Ah doan wanta make no talk ’round town.”

  In a split second the vivacious, smiling Beau had vanished. A very hard vitriolic stranger occupied his chair.

  “Looka heah, Mis’ Boger. I’m a man that’s travelled a lot—been most everywhere. Don’t try to come that stuff over me—what I got to marry Docia for?”

  “’Cause—’cause”—the surprise of his answer threw the old woman into a panic. “Youse the cause of her condition, aintcher?”

  Docia, embarrassed, mortified, began to cry.

  “Oh, I see the little plot now!” He glanced maliciously toward the girl and back again to her mother. “But I’m none of your down-South-country-suckers. Go try that on some of these clod-hoppers. Don’t try to lie on me—I got money to fight.”

  “Beau,” Docia sobbed, “you ain’t callin’ me a liah, is you?” And in her misery she started toward the man who through four months’ constant association and assurance she had learned to love and trust.

  “Yes! You’re lying—you sneaking little—oh you’re not even good sawdust! Me marry you! Why I could pick up a better woman out of the gutter than you! I’m a married man anyway, so you might as well forget your little scheme!”

  Docia fell back stunned.

  “But, but Beau, you said you wasn’t,” Docia wailed.

  “Oh,” Beau replied with a gesture of dismissal of the whole affair. “What difference does it make? A man will say anything at times. There are certain kinds of women that men always lie to.”

  In her mind’s eye Docia saw things for the first time without her tinted glasses and real terror seized her. She fell upon her knees and clenched the nattily clad legs of her seducer.

  “Oh Beau,” she wept, struggling to hold him, as he, fearing for the creases in his trousers, struggled to free himself—“You said—you—you promised”— — —

  “Oh, well, you ought not to have believed me—you ought to have known I didn’t mean it. Anyway I’m not going to marry you, so what’re you going to do? Do whatever you feel big enough to try—my shoulders are broad.”

  He left the house hating the two women bitterly, as only we hate those we have injured.

  At the hotel, omitting mention of his shows of affection, his pleas, his solemn promises to Docia, he told the other waiters how that piece of the earth’s refuse had tried to inveigle, to force him into a marriage. He enlarged upon his theme and told them all, in strict confidence, how she had been pursui
ng him all winter; how she had waited in ambush time and again and dragged him down by the lake, and well, he was only human. It couldn’t have happened with the right kind of a girl, and he thought too much of himself to marry any other than the country’s best.

  So the next day Eatonville knew; and the scourge of tongues was added to Docia’s woes.

  Mrs. Boger and her daughter kept strictly indoors, suffering, weeping, growing bitter.

  “Mommer, if he jus’ hadn’t tried to make me out a bad girl, I could look over the rest in time, Mommer, but—but he tried to make out—ah— —”

  She broke down weeping again.

  Drip, drip, drip went her daughter’s tears on the old woman’s heart, each drop calcifying a little the fibers till at the end of four days the petrifying process was complete. Where once had been warm, pulsing flesh was now a cold heavy stone, that pulled down pressing out normal life and bowing the head of her. The woman died, and in that heavy cold stone a tiger, a female tiger—was born.

  She was ready to answer the questions Beau had flung so scornfully at her old head: “Well, what are you going to do?”

  Docia slept, huddled on the bed. A hot salt tear rose to Mrs. Boger’s eyes and rolled heavily down the quivering nose. Must Docia awake always to that awful desolation? Robbed of everything, even faith. She knew then that the world’s greatest crime is not murder—its most terrible punishment is meted to her of too much faith—too great a love.

  She turned down the light and stepped into the street.

  It was near midnight and the village slept. But she knew of one house where there would be a light; one pair of eyes still awake.

  As she approached Blue Sink she all but turned back. It was a dark night but the lake shimmered and glowed like phosphorous near the shore. It seemed that figures moved about on the quiet surface. She remembered that folks said Blue Sink, the bottomless, was Morgan’s graveyard and all Africa awoke in her blood.

  A cold prickly feeling stole over her and stood her hair on end. Her feet grew heavy and her tongue dry and stiff.