Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

by Zora Neale Hurston

  “I am alone, O lizard, because I am alone.”

  The lizard felt that Moses’ answer lacked reason and he would have taught him how to make answer as do the great ones in the council of lizards, but when he lifted his head to speak, he beheld the head of Moses enveloped in a dense white cloud. “The gods have borne away the head of the rock-lifter,” he thought aloud, and scurried to his hole in quivering awe. He slept and memory fled away. So soon he emerged and looked into the benign eyes of the nation-maker from the same bush.

  “The lizard says that the present hour is much hotter than the tender ones of morning,” he began abruptly.

  “The lizard is wise,” Moses answered casually.

  “The words of lizards are full of truth,” the reptile went on cunningly. “But even so, O friend-who-digs-his-hole-above-ground, the greatest among us has no rod that can summon fly-swarms at will.” The lizard said this and looked at Moses under-eyed.

  “That is true,” Moses agreed with his thoughts at a distance.

  “All your works accumulate praise. Twenty and nine days you have been with me upon this mountain, and each day you have called forth a swarm of flies at the hour when I am most hungry.”

  “Pardon me, friend,” Moses said humbly. “The thirtieth day shall be as the twenty-nine.” He lifted his rod ever so slightly and flies swarmed over the bush upon which the lizard rested. “Sup.”

  The lizard ate. The last fly of the swarm was just enough. Every day it had been so. He looked at Moses in admiration.

  “Whence do you come, O Master?”

  Moses pointed to the plain of Moab where the tents of Israel crowded the horizon.

  “How do you say that you are alone if of your kind such hosts of multitudes be at hand?”

  “I am that I am and so I am alone. I am Moses, The-drawn-out. It is given me to call God by his power-compelling names. I bear his rod. The blind and the mute have companionship, but I am a leader.”

  “I see that your leadership has galled your shoulders. Why then did you go before?”

  “I went because I was sent. In my agony I cried into nothingness and enquired ‘Why am I called?’ There was no answer. Only the voice that again said ‘Go!’”

  “How long, O mighty Moses, have you led?”

  “Forty years and more. From the mountain of God I returned to Egypt, and with my stretched-out arm I confounded the Pharaoh, and led my people forth with a mighty hand. From the Nile, where we were bondsmen, to beyond the Jordan, where they shall rule.”

  “Ah Moses, because you have so exalted your kind and kindred, their love for you must exceed this great mountain in thickness and the height would not be less.”

  “Lizard, love is not created by service to mankind. But if the good be deemed sufficiently great, man sometimes erects little mountains of stone to the doer called monuments. They do this so that in the enjoyment of this benefit they forget not the benefactor. The heart of man is an ever empty abyss into which the whole world shall fall and be swallowed up.”

  “Do none of the hosts love their deliverer?”

  “Who shall know? However, Joshua is strong in soul and body. He shall follow me. He gives thought to me. If I do not return to my tent before another day begins, he will ascend this mountain in search of me.”

  “Your labors have brought little joy.”

  “Lizard, forty years ago I led a horde of slaves out of Egyptian bondage and held them in the wilderness until I grew men. Look now upon the plain of Moab. A great people! They shall rule over nations and dwell in cities they have not builded. Yet they have rebelled against me ever. A stiff-necked race of people. They murmur against me anew because I have held them before the Jordan for forty days. Their taste would humble them before the armies of Canaan. They must wait yet another thirty days. I have not striven with God, with the wilderness, with rebellion and my own soul for forty years to bring them to a new bondage in the land beyond the Jordan. They shall wait for strength.”

  “How then, Moses, will you hold your horde of murmurers on the brink of the Jordan when their eyes already feast on the good land?”

  “If a leader dies in Israel, the hosts mourn thirty days.”

  Again the head of Moses disappeared in cloud and a sleep fell upon the lizard. But the cloud-splitting eye of Moses carried to the silver gilt hills of Canaan lying half in the late night, and half in shadows of the setting sun, and his soul wandered beyond the Jordan for the space of half an hour. When it returned to him upon Nebo he gazed down upon the tented nation beneath him, and the nation-maker sorrowing, wept over Israel. But Israel, unknowing, sang and danced, hammered its swords, milked its cows, got born and died.

  “Ah Moses,” the lizard observed on waking. “You shall yet rejoice. Soon your hosts will triumph beyond the Jordan, and you shall be called king of kings.”

  “I have already known the palaces of the Pharaohs, lizard, but I was not happy in the midst of them.”

  “You were an alien in the Egyptian palaces, but the mansions in Canaan shall be of your kindred.”

  “When the Israelites shall erect palaces, God shall raise up abundant palace-dwellers to fill them. I have taught them statutes and judgements fit for the guidance of kings and shepherds alike.”

  “But will they remember your laws?”

  “If I tarry within this that I have erected on Nebo, then shall they remember my laws in Canaan. People value monuments above men, and signs above works.”

  The lizard travelled around the tomb and studied its contours.

  “But Moses, your splendid new dwelling has no hole by which you may enter. A queer dwelling. A hole above ground—no entrance.”

  “This is no dwelling, lizard. It is a place of burial.”

  “I am no longer young, Moses, perhaps, I nodded. What buried yon there?”

  “No, you did not witness it, but here is interred the voice of Sinai, the stretched-out arm of Moses, the law-giver, the nation-maker.”

  “Those are your words, but I behold you sitting as you sat at sunrise.”

  “Those are your thoughts, but you see the old man of the wilderness sitting upon the tomb of Moses.”

  Whereupon Moses arose and took one long look at the tented nation in the valley, and his face shone as it had done at Sinai when even Aaron had feared to look upon it. He took one dragging look beyond the Jordan, then wrapped his mantle closely about him.

  “Sun is set,” he said in low rumbles. “I depart.”

  He laid his rod upon the new-made tomb, set his face sternly towards the wilderness and walked away, leaning lightly on a new-cut staff.

  “But wait, O Moses!” the lizard squeaked after him. “You have left your rod behind.”

  “Oh, Joshua will pick it up,” he called back and strode on.

  Acknowledgments

  The seeds of this project were planted nearly a decade ago. So while it may seem pro forma to say that this project is deeply indebted to the kindness and generosity of many people, it is, nevertheless, quite true. My debts, professional and personal, are numerous, and I apologize in advance for any omissions.

  I am indebted to Tracy Sherrod, my editor at Amistad Press, for her thoughtful feedback on drafts as I navigated the needs of the diverse readers we hope will find this volume. Nate Muscato and David Kuhn at Aevitas Creative have shared their wisdom and insights through a tangled process. Joy Harris and her team at the Joy Harris Literary Agency have been a pleasure to work with. I also wish to thank the Zora Neale Hurston Trust for entrusting me with a project that I dreamed of as a graduate student. I am grateful for the opportunity. It has been a labor of love.

  My friend and mentor Henry Louis Gates Jr. laid the foundation for this volume in two distinctive ways. He was the first to collect Hurston’s stories for contemporary readers. In addition, his pioneering efforts to make important black periodicals accessible to scholars in the Black Literature Index brought together six of the undocumented stories that appear here, as well as num
erous other recovered texts that continue to help scholars document and study African American literary history. Always ready to share his insights, his wise counsel has made this collection better. Likewise, the important work of Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors helped Hurston’s uncollected Pittsburgh Courier stories find a new audience. Their beautifully edited issue of Amerikastudien / American Studies made five of Hurston’s “lost” stories available to academics around the world and drew much-needed attention to a body of work that had been overlooked. To Paul Lucas at Janklow & Nesbit Associates I am indebted for his commitment to seeing these stories collected.

  One of my ambitions for this project was to return to the first printings of Hurston’s stories for fresh transcriptions. Most of the stories here do not exist in typescript and none in Hurston’s hand. My efforts to look anew at Hurston’s stories in their original contexts would not have been possible without the assistance of librarians and archivists around the nation. For their support and encouragement, I am indebted to JoEllen ElBashir, curator at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University; Delisa Minor Harris, Special Collections librarian at the John Hope and Aurelia E. Franklin Library at Fisk University; June Can and Adrienne Leigh Sharp, in access services for the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; and Florence M. Turcotte, literary manuscripts archivist, and Steven Hersh, public and support services assistant, at the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida. In addition, Abby Wolf, executive director; Kevin M. Burke, director of research; and Rob W. Heinrich, non-resident fellow, at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, led by Professor Gates, generously helped me obtain copies of rare publications not available to me elsewhere.

  In every way imaginable, Texas Woman’s University, my academic home, has offered its support as I have balanced the demands of teaching and administrative work with the need to complete this project. Abigail Tilton, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; my generous departmental colleagues; and my graduate students have been unwavering in their support for my endeavors. Susan Whitmer, Amanda Zerangue, and Julie Reed Sullivan, three of our gracious and talented librarians at Blagg-Huey Library, along with Erik Martin, systems engineer, offered spectacular technological support as I experimented with using OCR software to create initial transcriptions of stories.

  In its infancy, and again as it took its current form, this project benefited from the contributions of three graduate research assistants at Texas Woman’s University. Aaron Cassidy and Allyson Hibdon both helped me transcribe and collate for accuracy all of the stories included here. Allyson, who worked intensively on the project, contributed broadly to the volume and to my good humor on long days of collation work. Allyson’s role in the project was facilitated by a 2018 Creative Arts and Humanities research grant from Texas Woman’s University, which proved invaluable. Daniel Stefanelli, funded by a 2019 Creative Arts and Humanities grant, served as a sharp-eyed proofreader. I am grateful for the support. The new transcriptions presented here would not have been possible without it.

  Finally, I want to thank my family and friends, some of whom have patiently listened to me talk about Zora for more than two decades now. To my parents, Carole and Lee Fager, I owe my first archival research trip. While still a graduate student, my love of archival work and Hurston merged at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University on a trip financed by them. My brother, Evan Fager, and my nephews, Lee and Seth, sacrificed our time together so that I could focus on this project. For laughter, generosity of spirit, and encouragement I have always been able to depend on my chosen family and Texas support system: Lou Thompson, Jennifer Phillips-Denny, Lisa Grimaldo, Claire Sahlin, Amanda Oswalt, and Rhonda Redfearn. My husband, Rex West, has always supported my pursuit of professional goals, encouraged me to persist when I thought I could not, and served as my ballast and anchor in seas so rough that I thought they might sink me. Without these people, the volume you hold in your hands would likely not exist.

  Saying thank you is hardly enough. There are no words.

  Bibliography

  Bonner, Marita. “The Whipping.” In Frye Street and Environs, edited by Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin, 185–94. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.

  Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2003.

  Cameron, Christopher. “Zora Neale Hurston, Freethought, and African American Religion.” Journal of Africana Religions 4, no. 2 (2016): 236–44. muse.jhu.edu/article/621873.

  Carby, Hazel V. “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston.” In New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” edited by Michael Awkward, 71–93. Cambridge: Univ. of Cambridge Press, 1990.

  Carpio, Glenda R., and Werner Sollors, eds. African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges. Special issue of Amerikastudien / American Studies 55, no. 4 (2010): 551–780.

  Carpio and Sollors. “The Newly Complicated Zora Neale Hurston.” The Chronicle Review (January 7, 2011): B6–10.

  Chapman, Erin D. Prove It on Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012.

  Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” In Feminism and Politics, edited by Anne Phillips, 314–43. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998.

  Davis, Donald F. “James Porter of Howard: Artist, Writer.” The Journal of Negro History 70, no. 3–4: 89–91.

  Davis, Hugh. “‘She Rock’: A ‘New’ Story by Zora Neale Hurston.” Zora Neale Hurston Forum 18 (2004): 14–20.

  duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993.

  Evans, Curtis J. The Burden of Black Religion. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008.

  Fisher, Rudolph. “The City of Refuge.” In The City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher. Edited by John McCluskey. Columbia, MO: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2008.

  Gates, Henry Louis Jr., ed. Black Literature, 1827–1940. Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, 1987–1996.

  Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996.

  Harold, Claudrena N. “Marcus Garvey.” In Harlem Speaks: A Living History of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Cary D. Wintz, 389–410. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2007.

  Harriss, M. Cooper. “Preacherly Texts: Zora Neale Hurston and the Homiletics of Literature.” Journal of Africana Religions 4, no. 2 (2016): 278–90.

  Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1977.

  Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In Within the Circle, edited by Angelyn Mitchell, 55–59. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1994.

  Hughes, Langston, and Zora Neale Hurston. Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life. Edited by George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

  Hurston, Zora Neale. “Art and Such.” In Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. Edited by Cheryl A. Wall, 905–11. New York: Library of America, 1995.

  ———. “The Back Room.” Pittsburgh Courier, February 19, 1927, sec. 2, p. 1. Black Literature 1827–1940 (1987–1996): fiche 1627.05.

  ———. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” Edited by Deborah Plant. New York: Amistad, 2018.

  ———. “A Bit of Our Harlem.” Negro World, April 8, 1922, 6. Black Literature 1827–1940 (1987–1996): fiche 1217.10.

  ———. “Book of Harlem.” Typescript, Zora Neale Hurston Collection. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

  ———. “The Book of Harlem.” Pittsburgh Courier, February 12, 1927, sec. 2, p. 1. Black Literature 1827–1940 (1987–1996):
fiche 1626.11.

  ———. Color Struck. 1926. In Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays. Edited by Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell, 33–50. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2008.

  ———. The Complete Stories of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

  ———. “The Conversion of Sam” [listed as “Conversion of Man”]. Typescript. Zora Neale Hurston Collection, 1919–1945. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

  ———. “The Country in the Woman.” Pittsburgh Courier, March 26, 1927, sec. 2, p. 1. Black Literature 1827–1940 (1987–1996): fiche 1628.05.

  ———. Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography. 1942. Reprint, New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

  ———. “The Emperor Effaces Himself.” In Call and Response: Key Debates in African American Studies, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Jennifer Burton, 267–71. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

  ———. Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

  ———. “High John de Conquer.” In Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings. Edited by Cheryl A. Wall, 922–31. New York: Library of America, 1995.

  ———. “Monkey Junk.” Pittsburgh Courier, March 5, 1927, sec. 2, p. 1. Black Literature 1827–1940 (1987–1996): fiche 1627.09.

  ———. “Race Cannot Become Great Until It Recognizes Its Talent.” Washington Tribune, December 29, 1934. n.p.

  ———. “She Rock.” Pittsburgh Courier, August 5, 1933, sec. 2, p. 3. Black Literature 1827–1940 (1987–1996): fiche 1740.10.

  ———. Spears (1926). In Zora Neale Hurston: Collected Plays. Edited by Jean Lee Cole and Charles Mitchell, 51–62. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2008.

  ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Reprint, New York: Harper Perennial, 2013.

  ———. “Under the Bridge.” X-Ray 1, no. 3 (1925): 9–12. Reprinted in American Visions (December/January 1997), edited by Wyatt Houston Day: 14–19.