Zora Neale Hurston’s Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick Reviewed by Jennifer Taylor-Skinner
Zora Neale Hurston’s short story collection, “Hitting a Straight Lick With a Crooked Stick,” reads as a reflection of Hurston’s own journey from her small-town upbringing in Eatonville, Florida, to her evolution as a central literary figure during the Harlem Renaissance. Author of the acclaimed novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston’s posthumously published collection of stories, introduces us to a cast of characters all seeking a similar evolution, as they wade through the complexities and pains of race and class, often chasing upward mobility, while dreaming of, and plotting better lives.
The Harlem Renaissance was considered the cultural and expressive arm of the New Negro Movement, a movement during the 1920s which aimed to counter widespread negative, and often dehumanizing portrayals of Black Americans. The Movement was conceived by American writer and philosopher Alain Locke, who was referred to as the father of the Harlem Renaissance, who also served as mentor to many of the acclaimed writers during this period, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.
In keeping with the goals of The New Negro Movement, and in an effort to challenge negative stereotypes of Black Americans, the literary and artistic output from this period often depicted educated, middle-class Black people. Hurston, on the other hand, chose to challenge the literary establishment by elevating the experiences and culture of common Black Americans, an artistic choice made by many of the younger writers during this time, including Langston Hughes, and Rudolph Fisher. Hurston utilized a heavy southern dialect for many of her characters. This broken dialect is not used in dialog for white characters, nor is it used for educated Black characters, further demonstrating Hurston’s knack for creating a complex cast, showcasing the lives and struggles of everyday people.
Each story within this collection builds with a subtle tension as characters grasp at tenuous opportunities to escape the limitations of their small town lives, often through connections or proximity to white people, or to other Black people who occupy higher stations than their own. Women also hold a central role as pivotal characters, often wielding the power to either advance or prohibit the successful transition to a better life.
Matty Redding illustrates this power in the opening story “John Redding Goes to Sea,” where her ten-year-old son, John Redding, longs to explore the world beyond his riverside town in the Florida woods. Matty describes John’s longing as “queer,” as does the other “simple folk” in their small town. In fact, John’s penchant for daydreaming of a life beyond their village is so foreign compared to Matty’s own complacency, that she suggests he must have been influenced by a wandering “spell,” as she persistently discourages his wanderlust. As John grows into young man, his ambition for a more sophisticated, worldly life is symbolized by a notable evolution in his speech; as a boy, John speaks in the same broken vernacular as Matty Redding (which is coincidentally, the common dialect of Hurston’s own hometown of Eatonville, Florida). And as the story progresses, he begins to drop this grammatical affectation, a sign of that John is growing increasingly unmoored to village life, all while getting no closer to his dream of escaping. In the end, John must decide whether to concede to his mother’s pressure to stay in their small village, or follow his lifelong dream to explore the world.
In The Conversion of Sam, there are hints of colorism, as a light-skinned Stella becomes a vehicle for escape to a better life for Sam, who had previously lolled away his time drinking and gambling on the wrong side of town. Stella is introduced in the story as an “octoroon,” or someone who is one-eighth Black, continuing a common theme among characters in this collection, of equating upward mobility or escape, with whiteness. Stella becomes the driver for Sam’s conversion, as he takes on steady work, and moves into a more affluent neighborhood; Sam even undertakes a decidedly painful transformation to his appearance, and in a bid for her affection, allows Stella to comb his hair “so often that it was almost bereft of its ancestral kinks.”
In “Drenched in Light,” young Isis Watts temporarily escapes her grandmother’s frequent beatings by running off to a nearby carnival; once there, Isis draws a crowd by imitating the exotic moves of a Spanish dancer she’d once seen. Later, the child attempted to prolong her unplanned escape from her grandmother’s relentless scolding, by going to a nearby creek. There she is picked up by a white couple, who is charmed by the precocious young girl, and offer to drive her home. The couple then asks the grandmother’s permission to take Isis to their hotel, explaining that they found the child’s dance entertaining. The grandmother agrees, but we’re left to imagine whether Isis is returned home, as the woman declares while snuggling up to Isis as they drive away, “I want a little of her sunshine to soak into my soul.”
In “The Country in the Woman,” women are again central figures in the transition to a better life. As a married couple, Mitchell and Caroline migrate from a Florida village to New York, where Mitchell frequently expresses dismay at his wife’s resistance to adapt to the big city. In their new town, Mitchell pursues infidelitous relationships with women who are depicted as more sophisticated than Caroline; he expresses feelings of being stifled by his marriage and cultural remnants of their former life, exclaiming that “the country had cramped his style…” and that his wife “couldn’t keep up with him” in Harlem. One trait Caroline carries with her to New York, is an unwillingness to tolerate Mitchell’s philandering, often publicly humiliating his mistresses. In the story’s climax, after Caroline discovers Mitchell has bought his latest mistress a fur coat, Caroline is spotted walking through the city with an axe casually slung over one shoulder in pursuit of the two. Minutes later, she returns “just as leisurely” with the axe still over her shoulder, her “wiry frame” draped in the fur coat.
These stories are personally resonant because I am a daughter of the South. Growing up in Memphis, TN, just miles from the Mississippi River, where just a few generations before my own upbringing, the Memphis riverbanks were lined with riverboats loaded with cotton; a city which was once labeled “Biggest Inland Cotton Market in the World,” and infamously where Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated, I longed to escape the oppression of living day-to-day alongside the vestiges of slavery, Jim Crow, and the old South. I saw aunts, uncles, and cousins move to places further north, often through marriage, the military, college, or job offers. And like the characters in Hurston’s stories, we all lived with the tension between wanting to leave these painful reminders behind, fear of the unknown, fear of possible disappointment, or fear of failure. And like John Redding, in the opening story, my own dreams to escape were often met with discouragement due to those same fears.
This is a necessary collection for followers of the Harlem Renaissance, and scholars of Hurston’s work, as these early stories illuminate Hurston’s evolution as a writer, an artistic maturation that mirrored the evolution of the movement itself. Restaged in small villages, rural Florida, and Harlem, Hurston’s rich and nuanced caste of characters are presented with uncharted challenges, thus leaving the reader with new ways to consider the race and class struggles of Black Americans during the Harlem Renaissance.
Jennifer Taylor-Skinner is the founder of Electorette Media, and creator and host of the popular political podcast, The Electorette. Prior to founding The Electorette, Jenn Taylor-Skinner worked in technology, leading projects at Microsoft including new feature releases for MSN.com, Hotmail and managing release operations for the Microsoft Revenue division. Following a career in technology Jenn Taylor-Skinner decided to leave the industry, citing the lack of diverse voices in the field, and embarked on a vision to create a space for women's voices to be heard -- unfettered, and without interruptions.
In 2017, Jenn created The Electorette, a political podcast featuring women activists, authors, scholars and leading voices on feminism, intersectionality and civil rights; and has featured interviews with Shannon Watts founder of Moms Demand Action, Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, author Carol Anderson, as well as many progressive activists, authors, and academics. The Electorette has been frequently listed as a top rated podcast in iTunes, featured in iTune's New & Noteworthy podcasts, was chosen as one of the podcasts for iTunes' Bold Women in Podcasting, as well as iTunes, Top 2018 Midterm Election Podcasts. The Electorette was also chosen as a top political podcast by Teen Vogue magazine and Marie Claire magazine.
Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance
by Zora Neale Hurston
Amistad Press,
Hardcover, 304 pages
January, 2020
$25.99
Jennifer Taylor-Skinner is the founder of Electorette Media, and creator and host of the popular political podcast, The Electorette. Prior to founding The Electorette, Jenn Taylor-Skinner worked in technology, leading projects at Microsoft including new feature releases for MSN.com, Hotmail and managing release operations for the Microsoft Revenue division. Following a career in technology Jenn Taylor-Skinner decided to leave the industry, citing the lack of diverse voices in the field, and embarked on a vision to create a space for women's voices to be heard -- unfettered, and without interruptions.
In 2017, Jenn created The Electorette, a political podcast featuring women activists, authors, scholars and leading voices on feminism, intersectionality and civil rights; and has featured interviews with Shannon Watts founder of Moms Demand Action, Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, author Carol Anderson, as well as many progressive activists, authors, and academics. The Electorette has been frequently listed as a top rated podcast in iTunes, featured in iTune's New & Noteworthy podcasts, was chosen as one of the podcasts for iTunes' Bold Women in Podcasting, as well as iTunes, Top 2018 Midterm Election Podcasts. The Electorette was also chosen as a top political podcast by Teen Vogue magazine and Marie Claire magazine.
Jenn Taylor-Skinner has continued in her activism to lift the voices of progressive women and activists with trainings for Netroots Nation, and through her popular talk, Black Women in Tech- Leaning In & Pushed Out for the ACT-W (Advancing the Careers of Technical Women) organization.