Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

by Zora Neale Hurston

  Hurston’s recovered story “Under the Bridge” (1926) was first printed in The X-Ray: The Official Organ of the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority along with a play and an essay by Hurston. She joined the sorority while still a student at Howard University, but her writing was published in the X-Ray after she moved to New York. Wyatt Houston Day, a collector of African American sorority and fraternity memorabilia, bought several items at auction, and among his purchases he uncovered the story, which he reprinted in American Visions in 1997.31

  “Under the Bridge,” the story of a May–December love triangle, follows Luke, a widower, who marries Vangie, a woman less than half his age.32 As fate would have it, Luke has a handsome son the same age as his new wife. While it takes little to imagine the painful outcome, there is nothing tawdry in the tale. Rather, the two young people grow closer emotionally. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts it, “The air is thick with temptation in this story, but it is also thick with the young people’s love of the old man.”33 Luke feels his age in a growing sense of competition with his beloved son. In an effort to keep his wife, the husband and father resorts to “a hand” from the local conjure man. Hurston’s decision to introduce conjure plays a crucial role in the plot, but it also has class implications. Middle-class black readers who saw such practices as ignorant or backward often wanted to distance the race from practices that had so often been yoked to stereotypes. It was a part of African American life in the South that they wanted to leave behind. The story has elicited speculation that it, like much of Hurston’s fiction, may be autobiographical. If it were, an early marriage to a much older man might account for the lost decade of Hurston’s life—those years between school and the Gilbert and Sullivan troupe—that biographers have been unable to reconstruct.34

  Hurston’s exploration of manhood also introduces extreme behaviors that demonstrate what I call tyrannical masculinity.35 “Magnolia Flower” and “Sweat” both explore violent tyrants who seek to control the women in their lives. The first introduces colorism or shadeism, while the latter raises questions about the responsibilities of men in the community to deal with abusive husbands. “Magnolia Flower” (1926) opens in the years following emancipation. Bentley’s daughter, Magnolia Flower, falls in love with a light-complected African American teacher. Rather than see his daughter marry a man who reminds him of his white oppressors, the father vows to hang the lover. To punish most cruelly, Bentley vows to make the lover watch Magnolia Flower marry one of his lackeys before the hanging. Bentley emerges as a tyrant who exploits, abuses, and exercises complete control of his family and neighbors. In this way and in others, “Magnolia Flower” anticipates themes that would reach their fullest representation twelve years later in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Bentley’s character prefigures the better-developed one of Joe Starks, Janie’s second husband, in the novel. Although Joe Starks is not a would-be murderer, both men build big houses, control the men around them, and verbally and physically abuse their wives. Joe Clarke, a similar figure, also dominates Eatonville in Hurston’s 1925 story “The Bone of Contention,” in which readers witness Joe’s power to banish others from the town he founded.

  In “Sweat” (1926), Sykes has been cheating on and beating Delia for fifteen years. Despite his abuse, Delia has built a home for them washing the clothes of white families in a neighboring town. The men on the store porch know that Sykes has subjected Delia to “brutal beating[s].” In fact, they agree that Sykes has beaten Delia “’nough tuh kill three women.” At the same time, the larger community becomes a target for criticism when the men continue to turn a blind eye to the violence. They discuss whipping and killing Sykes, but “the heat . . . melt[s] their civic virtue.” They opt to cut a watermelon rather than address his abuse. Hurston raises a number of unanswered questions. If Sykes has beaten Delia too much, as the men suggest, readers are left to wonder, How much violence toward a wife is acceptable? At what point should other men in the community intervene in domestic violence? If they do so, what form should that intervention take? If the men in the community fail to intervene, have they failed to act as “men”?

  As Hurston was exploring masculinity in her fiction, she also began to develop the female characters for which she has become so well known. Although “Drenched in Light” (1924), her third published story, often prompts discussions of race, the author also explores constructions of gender. Isis, the story’s eleven-year-old heroine, strains against and even flouts the gender norms her grandmother would impose on her. Perched on the fence post, Isis loves to watch the parade of people and cars on the shell road outside her home. Doing so, however, puts her at odds with traditional femininity, which would describe such behavior as unladylike. The child also likes to whistle, slouch in her chair, and sit with her knees apart, which her grandmother describes as “settin’ brazen.”36 Isis clearly does not care and would much rather be on horseback herding cattle and cracking the whip (a masculine, phallic symbol) than washing dishes for her family, a chore that falls to her as the only female child. Hurston cleverly turns this traditional construction of ladylike womanhood on the grandmother when Isis and her brother try to shave the woman’s chin whiskers as she snores loudly through her afternoon nap. While Hurston doesn’t tackle constructions of femininity directly, she reveals a girl resisting traditional gender roles and the grandmother’s hypocrisy in imposing them.

  “The Back Room” (1927) is one of the four stories I discovered in the Pittsburgh Courier, a weekly black newspaper.37 It is unique among Hurston’s fiction, as it focuses on an educated and evidently prosperous migrant. It is Hurston’s only work of fiction to plumb New Negro life in the Harlem Renaissance. The thirty-eight-year-old Lilya Barkman is living, in the words of Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors, the “upper-crust party life” of Harlem’s elite. She is approaching the age of forty but has by choice remained unmarried. She has remained “on the battlefield” and “had her fun” in the belief that marriage “ages a woman so—worrying with a house and husband at the same time.” Lilya’s home includes a large portrait of her painted years earlier, when her beauty and her marriage prospects were at their peak. Unwittingly, she has constructed herself as an object of the male gaze, both in art and in life, but in order to land on her feet at the end of the story, she must reclaim her agency.

  The narrative names Porter David as the artist who created the painting that captures Lilya at her best. His name, as Carpio and Sollors astutely point out, evokes the painter James A. Porter, a 1927 Howard graduate.38 While Carpio and Sollors suggest “the world in a jug” reference in the story constitutes an “uncanny anticipation” of Porter’s award-winning painting Woman Holding a Jug, it seems more likely that both Hurston and Porter allude to the blues song “Down Hearted Blues,” which made Bessie Smith famous in 1923.39 Like so many blues songs, this one chronicles a broken relationship. Smith, however, puts her own stamp on the song by reorganizing the lyrics to emphasize the blues singer’s resilience. Although Smith’s man has left her, she still believes that she has “got the world in a jug—the stopper’s in my hand.”40 In Hurston’s story, the line “the world in a jug” appears in the opening paragraphs, foreshadowing the ending, in which the male characters leave Lilya behind.

  “Monkey Junk” (1927), another recovered story, also evokes an element of Harlem life that is unlike anything else in Hurston’s work. Although funny, it is perhaps the author’s most cynical look at relationships between men and women. The narrative juxtaposes the high and low in mock biblical chapters, much like “Book of Harlem” and “The Book of Harlem.” “[M]ixed up proverbial wisdoms” like “He that laughest last is worth two in the bush,” Carpio and Sollors note, provide much of the humor.41 Beneath this humor, however, Hurston takes her “crooked stick” to both genders. The plot unfolds as an unnamed man journeys out of the South to Harlem. He believes he “knoweth all about women,” and by story’s end that overconfidence has cost him dearly. He is trapped by a woman infatuated with his checkbook
. As a consequence of underestimating the power of feminine wiles and overestimating his own skills, the exploited and outmatched husband finds himself responsible for a hefty alimony payment. It is easy to laugh as the unnamed woman takes advantage of his arrogance. At the same time, however, Hurston also interrogates the way the woman exercises her agency. In divorce court the judge and jury view her as a woman in need of rescue when nothing could be further from the truth. As readers watch the woman lie and manipulate, her performance becomes central. Admittedly, as Carpio and Sollors point out, she is hardly a feminist role model. And yet, she uses what she has—her appearance—to achieve her ends in a patriarchal culture. Through the introduction of the woman’s lawyer, Hurston “hit[s] a straight lick.” He is the only man who sees through the woman’s performance. Through his character, Hurston cautions readers to avoid being like the “doty juryman” and instead to see beneath the surface of gendered performances.

  “The Country in the Woman” and “She Rock” also explore the impact migration has on identity and marriage, as well as the tensions between rural and urban life. The plot of both stories revolves around Caroline, a married woman who uses her ax to end the affairs of her philandering husband. This pattern appears four times across the body of Hurston’s work. Rural versions of the tales set in Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, Florida, appear in “The Eatonville Anthology” (collected here) and in her autobiography. In “The Country in the Woman” and in “She Rock,” Hurston relocates the plot to Harlem to critique urban constructions of female identity.

  “The Country in the Woman” (1927) focuses narrowly on Caroline and her wayward husband in Harlem. In exchanges between Caroline and her husband, Mitchell, readers see Caroline perform for her audiences. The story opens on a Harlem street as Caroline confronts Mitchell and his “side gal.” Rural African American vernacular permeates Caroline’s speech, as she threatens the other woman: “I’ll kick her clothes up round her neck like a horse collar. She’ll think lightnin’ struck her all right, now.” A “dark brown lump of country contrariness,” this wife has publicly and humorously vanquished previous rivals when the couple lived in the South, but Mitchell mistakenly believes that in urban Harlem he can carry on an affair without her knowledge. Mitchell has adopted “Seventh Avenue corners and a man about town air” and a new, store-bought wardrobe. Caroline, however, continues to sleep in “yellow homespun.” Because homespun cloth and the clothing it became were made in the home, that nightgown symbolizes the independence necessary for the survival of rural women like Caroline. Her idioms and her “‘way-down-in-Dixie’ look” also foreshadow the rural weapon Caroline will use to end Mitchell’s liaison. Readers laugh at the humorous conflict between husband and wife and between rural and urban norms as Caroline emerges the victor by rejecting conventional, urban, middle-class norms of femininity.42

  The final and latest of the recovered stories is “She Rock.” In 2004, Hugh Davis noted his discovery in The Zora Neale Hurston Forum.43 He serendipitously found it while browsing the Courier for the writings of another Harlem Renaissance scribe, George Schuyler.44 Written in 1933, “She Rock” explores the same central plot as “The Country in the Woman,” but in this version traditional narration gives way to the numbered mock biblical chapters and verses that Hurston had employed in “The Book of Harlem” and “Monkey Junk.” In “She Rock” Hurston allows readers to migrate with Caroline and her husband when Oscar’s brother recruits him to work for the “Kings and Princes in Great Babylon” to earn “many sheckels.” Once in the city, Oscar is advised to “shake that thing,” and he does, as Hurston riffs on the Ethel Waters hit by the same name: “Yea, shook the fat with the lean, the rich with the poor; the aged with the young, verily was there not a shaking like unto this before nor after it.” More explicitly than in “The Country in the Woman,” Hurston critiques the relationship between Oscar and his girlfriend. The portraits are funny but unflattering. He is arrogant, and she is a gold-digging manipulator. The result of Hurston’s revisions is a less playful tale, one more critical of New Negro gender constructions that would keep Caroline passively at home while her husband roams the streets with another woman.45

  EXPLORING THE POLITICS OF RACE AND CLASS

  Hurston’s fiction interrogating race receives less attention than it should, particularly given that her more direct treatments of race and power appear in stories in which she blends folklore and fiction. African American folklore, particularly in song and story, serves important functions within the black community. It also has a long history as a weapon in the fight against slavery and racism. While Zora’s treatment of race differs considerably from the angry, confrontational work of her contemporary Richard Wright, her fiction nevertheless explores what it means to be black in America. Her 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. As we have seen, using her “crooked stick” Hurston strikes at the intraracial politics of complexion, called colorism or shadeism, which exists in dialogue with whiteness and the belief that lighter is somehow better. Likewise, her fiction resists New Negro attempts to rehabilitate the image of blacks in the eyes of the whites by shunning folk culture as backward, ignorant, or undesirable. These are intentional treatments of race that Wright and his contemporaries overlooked.46 But Hurston also wrote stories that address race more directly. She turned to folklore to do so.

  The neglected story “Black Death” apparently never appeared in print in Hurston’s lifetime. She submitted it to the 1925 Opportunity literary contest, where it won honorable mention.47 All evidence suggests the story waited until the appearance of The Collected Stories (1995) to finally find an audience, perhaps because it explores conjure’s role in a southern black community. Like “Spunk,” the story illustrates the ways in which the weak take their vengeance on the strong. Fiction and folklore blend in “Black Death,” blurring the lines between genres. The frame for the plot of “Black Death” reads like an essay and emphasizes different ways of knowing, illustrating that blacks know and understand things about the world that whites do not. At the heart of the story is a lothario who comes to town, seduces a girl he works with, and abandons her when she becomes pregnant. The girl’s mother, distraught and helpless in this world, turns to Old Man Morgan, the local conjure man, for justice. Hemenway tells us that both the lothario’s name, Beau Diddely, and the plot itself are “traditional,” and they exist elsewhere in Hurston’s anthropological publications.48 Clearly, then, the story is not entirely fiction, but Hurston transforms the folktale, frames it, and, like Charles W. Chesnutt did before her in his conjure tales, reveals the ways in which power works—in the material world and beyond. While some middle-class readers might have been put off by or embarrassed by a conjure story, Hurston’s pride in her culture prevented any such discomfort for her. Further, the frame of the story suggests that whites are inferior because they live only in a material world and thus fail to understand the additional dimensions of the spirit world.

  In “’Possum or Pig” (1926), Hurston takes a similar approach by blending genres. Julius Lester, the African American storyteller, explains that folklore is like water in that as it passes from one pitcher to another “its essential properties are not harmed or changed . . . . A folktale assumes the shape of its teller.”49 Hurston’s oral performances at parties were legendary, and here she may well have transferred to paper part of her repertoire for the magazine Forum, where editors included commentary praising the value of African American folklore and supporting the New Negro movement. Set in the days before emancipation, the story features a plot that hinges on John, the classic African American trickster figure, who has stolen and butchered one of Master’s pigs. When Master comes to John’s cabin, the pig is steaming in a pot above the fire. Unable to deter Master from entering his humble cabin without enduring
a whipping, John claims to be cooking a “dirty lil’ possum”: “Ah put dis heah critter in heah a possum,—if it comes out a pig, ’tain’t mah fault.” The open-ended tale emphasizes John’s willingness to match wits with his master, and readers pull for the less powerful character. Lurking beneath the surface, however, are also the larger dynamics of American slavery. John steals pigs to feed himself because he is not provided enough to eat. His cabin is not his own. The man defined by law as his “owner” can do what he wills to John without fear of retribution. John must use his wits to survive. The seriousness of this history embedded within a funny, traditional tale reveals Hurston “hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick” to address the politics of race, which had evolved painfully little in the years between emancipation and the Harlem Renaissance, especially for those sharecropping in the South.