Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

by Zora Neale Hurston

  ———. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. Edited by Carla Kaplan. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

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  Johnson, Charles S. Ebony and Topaz: A Collectenea. 1927. Reprint, Freeport, NY: Black Heritage Library Collection, 1971.

  Johnson, James Weldon, ed. The Book of American Negro Poetry. 1922. Reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969.

  Johnson, Ronald M. “Those Who Stayed: Washington’s Black Writers in the 1920’s,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 50 (1980): 484–99.

  “Jordan, Lawrence Victor.” Who’s Who in Colored America 1938–1940. Brooklyn: T. Yenser, 1940: 306.

  Joseph, Philip. “The Verdict from the Porch: Zora Neale Hurston and Reparative Justice.” American Literature 74, no. 3 (2002): 455–83. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/1844.

  Krasner, David. “Dark Tower and the Saturday Nighters: Salons as Themes in African American Drama.” African American Studies 49, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 81–95.

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  “Myles Anderson Paige.” Who’s Who in Colored America 1941–44. Brooklyn: T. Yenser, n.d.: 392.

  Lawless, Elaine J. “What Zora Knew: A Crossroads, a Bargain with the Devil, and a Late Witness.” The Journal of American Folklore 126, no. 500: 152–73. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jamerfolk.126.500.0152.

  Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1994.

  Manigault-Bryant, James A., and Lerhonda S. Manigault-Bryant. “Conjuring Pasts and Ethnographic Presents in Zora Neale Hurston’s Modernity.” Journal of Africana Religions 4, no. 2 (2016): 225–35.

  Martin, Tony. African Fundamentalism: A Literary and Cultural Anthology of Garvey’s Harlem Renaissance. Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1983.

  ———. Literary Garveyism: Garvey, Black Arts, and the Harlem Renaissance. Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1983.

  Mathieu, Sarah-Jane (Saje). “The African American Great Migration Reconsidered.” OAH Magazine of History 23, no. 4 (October 2009): 19–23.

  McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2002.

  Meisenhelder, Susan Edwards. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick. Tuscaloosa, AL: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1999.

  Moylan, Virginia Lynn. Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade. Gainesville, FL: Univ. Press of Florida, 2011.

  Newson, Adele S. Zora Neale Hurston: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.

  Rosenberg, Rachel A. “Looking for Zora’s Mule Bone: The Battle for Artistic Authority in the Hurston-Hughes Collaboration.” Modernism/modernity 6, no. 2 (April 1999): 79–105. doi: 10.1353/mod.1999.0021.

  Ryan, Barbara. “In/visible Men: Hurston, ‘Sweat’ and Laundry Icons.” American Studies 51, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 69–88.

  Sherrard-Johnson, Cherene. Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2007.

  Spagnuolo, Daniel. “Paraphernalia of Conjure: Hurston and the Black Folk Preacher.” Unpublished paper, 2009.

  Tate, Claudia. “Hitting ‘A Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick’: Seraph on the Sewanee, Zora Neale Hurston’s Whiteface Novel.” In The Psychoanalysis of Race, edited by Christopher Lane, 380–94. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1998.

  Toomer, Jean. Cane. 1923. Reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

  Walker, Alice. “Looking for Zora.” In I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, edited by Alice Walker, 297–313. New York: Feminist Press, 1979.

  ———. “On Refusing to Be Humbled by Second Place in a Contest You Did Not Design: A Tradition by Now.” In I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, edited by Alice Walker, 1–4. New York: Feminist Press, 1979.

  Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington, IN: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1995.

  Weisenfeld, Judith. Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2007.

  West, M. Genevieve. “‘Youse in New Yawk’: The Gender Politics of Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Lost’ Caroline Stories.” African American Review 47, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 477–93.

  ———. Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture. Gainesville, FL: Univ. Press of Florida, 2005.

  Notes

  Editor’s Note

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

  Introduction

  1.Mary Helen Washington, “Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman Half in Shadow,” in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader, ed. Alice Walker (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1979).

  2.Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1977), 19.

  3.Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (1942; repr., New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 1; and “High John de Conquer,” in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), 923. Hurston also uses a variant of the phrase in a letter dated 8 September 1944 (see Zora Neale Hurston, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan [New York: Doubleday, 2001], 500). For other scholars’ use of the phrase, see Claudia Tate, “Hitting ‘A Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick’: Seraph on the Suwanee, Zora Neale Hurston’s Whiteface Novel,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 19, no. 2 (1997): 72–87; and Susan Meisenhelder, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1999), 1–13.

  4.Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu, “The African American Great Migration Reconsidered,” OAH Magazine of History 23, no. 4 (October 2009): 20.

  5.For a discussion of the religious disputes between migrants and longtime residents, see Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), chapters 4–6. Judith Weisenfeld’s Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2007) provides an excellent discussion of the tensions between the sacred and secular. Erin Chapman’s Prove It on Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012) offers an insightful examination of gender roles and sexuality in the period. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson’s Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2007) offers an excellent examination of the middle-class norms female migrants encountered. For Farah Jasmine Griffin’s treatment of migration narratives, see “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995).

  6.Hazel V. Carby, “The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston,” in New Essays on “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” ed. Michael Awkward (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 76–77.

  7.Hurston, Dust Tracks, 19 and 1.

  8.Cheryl A. Wall was the first to document Hurston’s birth date through US Census records. See her Women of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1995), 143.

  9.Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2003), 72.
/>   10.For Hurston’s description of Howard, see her Dust Tracks, 113. Valerie Boyd documents this period of Zora’s life in Wrapped in Rainbows, 75–81. Hurston supported herself by working as a manicurist at George Robinson’s 1410 G Street shop, a “whites only” barbershop frequented by Washington’s powerful and elite. Robinson, himself an African American with six shops in the city, served only a white clientele in this shop, and Hurston found working there educational, as she enjoyed interacting with reporters and staffers from the Hill. The whites-only policy in the shop also forced her to wrestle with the moral and financial realities of Jim Crow practices. While she opposed Jim Crow, she also understood that serving blacks in the shop posed a serious threat to her livelihood and that of everyone else who worked in the shop. It was a complex, deeply personal reality she acknowledges in Dust Tracks without offering a solution or a judgment on the matter. See her recollections in Dust Tracks, 115–20.

  11.Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2002), 297.

  12.Ronald M. Johnson, “Those Who Stayed: Washington Black Writers of the 1920’s,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 50 (1980): 494. Owen Dodson explains that the salon hostess “took in stray people, artists who were out of money like Zora Neale Hurston for long periods.” For this quote and a larger discussion of the group see David Krasner, “Dark Tower and the Saturday Nighters: Salons as Themes in African American Drama,” American Studies 49, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2008): 81–95.

  13.Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 93.

  14.In the fiction category, Hurston’s “Spunk” won second place, while “Black Death” won honorable mention. Her play Color Struck won second place, while Spears won honorable mention in the category for drama. See Boyd’s discussion of the award dinner, in Wrapped in Rainbows, 97. Hemenway provides a more substantive discussion in Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, 20–21.

  15.Hurston, Dust Tracks, 121–22; Hurston, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, 55; Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 101.

  16.Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925; repr., New York: Atheneum, 1992), 1–16.

  17.While we often think of authenticity as a good or desirable quality, the term can also be used to limit what counts as valuable, meaningful, or “real.” In book reviews of Hurston’s work, white reviewers often describe her work as “authentic,” but those same reviewers also often reveal (inadvertently, of course) their racist conceptions of what constitutes authentic depictions of black life. Put another way, if Hurston’s folk characters are authentic, then what does that mean for the characters of her fellow writers Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, who wrote about middle-class characters? Or for Hurston’s own Lilya Barkman? Are those middle-class characters inauthentic because they are not folk characters?

  18.Locke called this the process of “class differentiation.” See his essay “The New Negro,” 6.

  19.James Weldon Johnson, ed., The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922; repr., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 41.

  20.Zora Neale Hurston, “Race Cannot Become Great Until It Recognizes Its Talent,” Washington Tribune, December 29, 1934.

  21.Hurston, “Race Cannot Become Great.”

  22.Zora Neale Hurston, “Art and Such,” in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New York: Library of America, 1995), 910.

  23.Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926), in Within the Circle, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1994), 56; Hurston, “Art and Such,” 910.

  24.Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 3–4.

  25.See Kimberle Crenshaw’s foundational essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, no. 1 (1989): 139–67.

  26.Zora Neale Hurston, “A Bit of Our Harlem,” Negro World, April 8, 1922, 6. The story was first reprinted in African Fundamentalism: A Literary and Cultural Anthology of Garvey’s Harlem Renaissance, ed. Tony Martin (Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1991), 287–89. It also appears in Black Literature 1827–1940, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1987–1996): Fiche1217.10.

  27.“Jordan, Lawrence Victor,” Who’s Who in Colored America 1938–1940 (Brooklyn: T. Yenser, 1940), 306.

  28.Adele S. Newson, ed., Zora Neale Hurston: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987); John Lowe, Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy (Champaign, IL: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1994), 20.

  29.For classic migration tales that end tragically, see Rudolph Fisher, “The City of Refuge,” in The City of Refuge: The Collected Stories of Rudolph Fisher, ed. John McCluskey (Columbia, MO: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2008), 35–47; and Marita Bonner, “The Whipping,” in Frye Street and Environs, ed. Joyce Flynn and Joyce Occomy Stricklin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 185–94.

  30.Cheryl Wall has dated “Book of Harlem” to approximately 1921, but it seems more likely that Hurston wrote it during the mid-1920s and that it is an earlier incarnation of the story the Courier published. The address on the typescript of “Book of Harlem” on deposit at Yale University indicates Hurston was already living in New York when she wrote it, and the typescript was part of Carl Van Vechten’s personal collection, which would also suggest that she wrote it after relocating to Harlem in 1925. Finally, the story mentions Van Vechten by name, just as the other stories Hurston published in 1927 mention famous personages, such as the singer and actress Ethel Waters and the attorney Myles Paige. It was her generation’s version of a cameo appearance. For Wall’s dating of the story, see her “Note on the Text,” in Hurston: Novels and Stories (New York: Library of America, 1995), 1034.

  31.See Wyatt Houston Day, ed., American Visions (December/January 1997): 14–19.

  32.The story first appeared in the December 1926 (vol. 1, no. 3) issue of The X-Ray, an “Official Organ of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority.”

  33.Unpublished essay; quoted by permission of the author.

  34.For a discussion of this gap in Hurston’s biography, see Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 68–69.

  35.The characters discussed here share similarities with “toxic masculinity,” but readers see so little of the characters’ emotional lives that I cannot apply the term here.

  36.Meisenhelder, Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, 5–7.

  37.In 2005 I documented “Monkey Junk,” “The Back Room,” “She Rock,” and “The Country in the Woman” in Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture. I uncovered them in Henry Louis Gates’s landmark microfiche collection Black Literature 1827–1940. Then in 2010, Glenda S. Carpio and Werner Sollors also chanced upon the stories while perusing microfilm of the newspaper. Through their efforts, the Courier stories became front-page news. 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.

  38.For further discussion of Porter’s art, see Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors, “Part One: ‘The Book of Harlem,’ ‘Monkey Junk,’ and ‘The Back Room,’” Amerikastudien / American Studies 55, no. 4 (2010): 564. It seems likely that Hurston and Porter crossed paths in the relatively small world of New Negro artists and the still smaller world of black artists in the nation’s capital. For a biography of Porter, see Donald F. Davis, “James Porter of Howard: Artist, Writer,” Journal of Negro History 70, no. 3–4 (Summer–Fall 1985): 89–91. After studying abroad, Porter returned to Howard as a faculty member and wrote what his biographer Donald F. Davis calls “the fundamental book for those who delve into black art history.” James A. Porter’s “Woman Holding a Jug” is reproduced in Amerikastudien / American Studies 55, no. 4 (2010): 576.

  39.Alona Sagee, “Bessie Smith: ‘Down Hearted Blues’ and ‘Gulf Coas
t Blues’ Revisited,” Popular Music 26, no. 1 (2006): 121. A reference to the song also appears in Rudolph Fisher’s “The City of Refuge,” 14.

  40.Sagee, “Bessie Smith,” 121.

  41.Carpio and Sollors, “Part One: ‘The Book of Harlem,’ ‘Monkey Junk,’ and ‘The Back Room,’” 563.

  42.For further discussion of gender in these stories, see my essay “‘Youse in New Yawk’: The Gender Politics of Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Lost’ Caroline Stories,” African American Review 47, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 477–93.

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

  44.Details about how Davis uncovered the story were provided in an email to the author.

  45.West, “‘Youse in New Yawk’: The Gender Politics of Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Lost’ Caroline Stories,” 489.

  46.For a discussion of Wright’s response to Hurston’s work see my Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2005), 109–26.

  47.Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 74.

  48.Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 77.

  49.Julius Lester, Black Folktales (New York: Grove Press, 1991), ix; Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 79.

  50.Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows, 218–35.

  51.Hurston, Dust Tracks, 188–89.

  52.For a discussion of the reception of Their Eyes Were Watching God, see my Zora Neale Hurston and American Literary Culture, 91–126. A discussion of Hurston’s recovery and canonization follows on pages 229–48.

  Credits

  “John Redding Goes to Sea” was originally published in Stylus, May 1921, and was reprinted in Opportunity, January 1926.

  “A Bit of Our Harlem” was originally published in Negro World, April 8, 1922.

  “Drenched in Light” was originally published in Opportunity, December 1924.

  “The Bone of Contention” was first published posthumously in Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, collected and edited by George Houston Bass and Henry Louis Gates Jr. by Harper Perennial, 1991.