“The piano in Ma Turner’s back parlor stuttered and wailed.”
-Zora Neale Hurston
“Muttsy”
Zora Neale Hurston’s Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is brilliant American literature. Twenty-one Hurston stories written between 1921 and 1937 comprise Crooked Stick. Tayari Jones wrote in the Foreword: “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.” In 2005, eight previously lost Hurston stories were discovered and included in the January 2020 republication.
Born in 1891, Hurston died penniless in 1960. During her almost 70 years of life, she was a novelist, anthropologist, folklorist, filmmaker and ethnographer. Jones declared, “Zora Neale Hurston is perhaps the best known of all the Harlem Renaissance writers, even surpassing Langston Hughes.” Hurston’s other classics include Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse. In 1973, Alice Walker commissioned a headstone at Hurston’s neglected Fort Pierce, Florida, grave site with the epitaph: “Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South”.
The old phrase hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick means achieving a goal that seems to be in contradiction to the means by which it was accomplished. The expression encapsulates Hurston subversively critiquing the politics of race and gender with the goal of challenging the status quo.
Editor Genevieve West explained in the Introduction: “Hurston’s decision to write about black communities with white characters appearing only on the fringes–if at all–is a political choice, one that marginalizes whites and puts African Americans at the center and affirms that black folk are worthy of stories.”
Most of the stories transpire in Harlem and environs surrounding Eatonville, Florida. Her sharp humor is evident in “Drenched In Light” when young Isis and Joel attempt to shave Grandma’s chin-hair while she’s asleep. In “Sweat”, Delia Jones’ abusive husband terrorizes her with a rattlesnake, but she avoids a fatal bite. The foolish narrator in “Monkey Junk” issues a Shakespearian confession, “For verily her lips were worth it.”
In “Black Death”, the storyteller describes a Florida hoodoo man living near Lake Blue Sink: “There was a 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 fingernails with lizard’s feet and dried up her blood…”
Other personal favorites in this collection are: “John Redding Goes to Sea”, “The Gilded Six Bits”, “The Book of Harlem”, “The Eatonville Anthology” and “The Country in the Woman”, each a testament to Hurston’s enduring storytelling.
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick contains a potent dose of soul, grit and masterful vernacular. Essential reading.
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