Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick

Hurston wrote her first four extant stories during this period. By the fall of 1924 her work had been accepted in one of the period’s leading magazines, Opportunity. It was her breakthrough. “Drenched in Light” would become her first major publication. The success encouraged her to consider writing as a career. Unable to raise the funds to finish her degree at Howard, Zora packed her bags and migrated to New York, the center of American publishing. She tells us in her autobiography that she arrived in Harlem with only $1.50 in her pocket. Short of funds but full of dreams, she carried “a small suitcase of … short stories and plays.”13

The connections that Hurston established through Opportunity proved essential once she arrived in New York. The monthly magazine of the National Urban League served as a major publication venue for New Negro writers. Charles S. Johnson, a young sociologist who acted as the magazine’s editor, fostered Zora’s career by publishing three of her early stories. The magazine also sponsored a series of literary contests and award dinners in the 1920s to help introduce emerging writers to judges and editors who could open doors to periodical and book publications. At the May 1925 Opportunity awards, where the fledgling writer won four prizes for her short stories and plays, she wisely made the most of her meetings with the (white) writers Fannie Hurst and Annie Nathan Meyer.14 Their assistance allowed her to return to college in the fall. Hurst offered the recent transplant a secretarial position while Meyer facilitated admission to Barnard College, then the women’s division of Columbia University, where she matriculated that fall and from which she would graduate in 1928. A 1925 letter from Hurston to Meyer reflects the goals the young writer had set for herself: “My typewriter is clicking away till all hours of the night. I am striving desperately for a toe-hold on the world.”15 Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick demonstrates just how successful she was in attaining her goal.

Zora’s short fiction opened doors that allowed her to network with the period’s most powerful figures and would help her find a publisher for her books in the 1930s. It was her 1933 short story “The Gilded Six-Bits,” included here, that attracted the J. B. Lippincott Company to Hurston and led to her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, published in 1934. Four other books followed with Lippincott. In her lifetime only her last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), would be published by another. Without Zora’s early success as a Harlem Renaissance writer of short fiction, it seems unlikely that her beloved novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) would ever have found an audience.

THE POLITICS OF ART IN THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

When Hurston arrived in New York, the Harlem Renaissance was in full bloom, but the debates about black art were thorny. At the heart of the matter was the battle over images of African Americans. Alain Locke, in his landmark 1925 essay “The New Negro,” describes the race as a butterfly undergoing the transformative process of emerging from “a chrysalis.” But who was the “New Negro”—or the “old Negro,” for that matter?16 How was he or she to be depicted? It was hardly a theoretical question. The New Negro movement advocated for art as a means of changing American culture and challenging its racism. To advance the cause of racial equality, writers and other artists battled racist stereotypes of African Americans that had existed since the transatlantic slave trade. Dehumanizing images of Africans had helped make the institution of slavery possible. Those same stereotypes had been deployed in the years following Reconstruction to repress African Americans’ political and economic progress. Many of them manifested on the stage and in popular culture through the minstrel tradition. The New Negro movement in the 1920s sought to correct those images and to celebrate “authentic” black culture.17 One strategy for advancing the race was to establish that there were class differences within the group—that there were educated, refined, intelligent, and properly chaste middle-class black people.18 Consequently, depictions of middle-class characters were a popular means of challenging stereotypes. Hurston, however, allied herself with the younger writers who were willing to challenge the establishment, including Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Rudolph Fisher, to explore the lives of the common people. She introduced folk characters who speak in their own voices and typically fail to conform to middle-class New Negro standards.

Perhaps inspired by James Weldon Johnson’s 1922 call for African American writers to do “something” for black dialect like John Millington Synge “did for the Irish,” Hurston and some of the other, typically younger, writers of the period challenged long-held assumptions about art, language, and politics.19 Her decision to write in idiom—often described as dialect—was a risky enterprise in the 1920s, particularly when that writing was funny. The history of minstrelsy meant that dialect and idiomatic expression, particularly when coupled with humor, evoked the very stereotypes New Negroes hoped to vanquish. Zora’s essays make it clear that she understood the inter- and intraracial politics of her artistic choices, but she persisted in her efforts to break the chains of the past.

Hurston’s earliest statement on aesthetics appears in the neglected essay “Race Cannot Become Great Until It Recognizes Its Talent.”20 There she compares African Americans to the English after William the Conqueror’s conquest in the year 1066. She credits Chaucer with recognizing the beauty of writing in English (rather than the French or Latin that had been used for centuries) and Shakespeare with incorporating folklore into his plays. Implicitly, we see Hurston following the lead of these canonical figures by devoting herself to writing about the beauty of the folk. She saw African Americans as “physically but not spiritually free, unable as yet to turn our eyes from the distorted looking glass that goes with the iron collar [of slavery].” Imitation of white traditions, she cautions, will do nothing to advance the race, as “pupils never stand on equal footing with the master.”21 In search of something original, she refused to shrink from aspects of black life such as folk traditions and patterns of speech that others found undesirable or shameful. Hurston was proud of the way she depicted the speech of her African American characters on the page. She described this as her use of “the idiom—not the dialect—of the Negro.” She wanted to capture the “poetical flow of language,” the “thinking in images and figures.” She says it provides “verisimilitude to the narrative by stewing the subject in its own juice.”22 Committed to representing those Langston Hughes called “the low-down folks,” Hurston resisted the pressure to conform and presented her characters in their full, complex, and contradictory humanity. In a 1938 essay written for the Florida Federal Writers project, the now-established novelist would describe this as her “objectivity.” Of course today we recognize that there was nothing neutral or apolitical in her passionate work in a violent Jim Crow culture to reclaim black folk speech and traditions and to establish the full humanity of its creators. She depicted the full range of the human experience in her characters, even when doing so did not suit a New Negro agenda.23

Hurston’s stories from the Harlem Renaissance typically revolve around courtship and marriage, a trope that scholar Ann duCille describes as “the coupling convention.” The convention allowed generations of black women writers a way to critique the inequities and injustices they saw.24 Zora deployed the convention regularly. Instead of critiquing directly, she used her “crooked stick” to work in subversive, often subtle, ways that challenge the status quo. Through her use of language, characters, and plots, she interrogates and disputes the very stereotypes New Negroes objected to and treats subjects that continue to trouble American culture today. One of the reasons that Their Eyes Were Watching God has a current popular readership is that the issues her characters wrestle with continue to be relevant more than eighty years after the book’s initial publication. Implicitly, the novel asks, What is the purpose and function of marriage? What does it mean to be a woman, particularly a married woman? How should a man behave? What are his responsibilities? How do couples navigate or share power? What is the community’s role in negotiating difficult or abusive relationships? These questions are all posed implicitly by Their Eyes Were Watching God, but Hurston was exploring such topics long before writing her masterpiece. Her Harlem Renaissance short fiction also reveals the intersections of race, class, and gender that scholars talk about as intersectionality.25 In short, the term means that we should not talk about one aspect of identity without talking about others. Hurston was not only a woman; she was a black woman from the rural South. This intersectionality makes it difficult—and shortsighted, if not foolish—to try to separate race, class, and gender in Hurston’s life and in her work. Rather, they intersect and intertwine to create complex subjectivities and systems of oppression. She worked within those systems and wrote about them.

Hurston’s earliest stories reveal that she was wrestling with the politics of identity from the very beginning of her career, regardless of whether she was focused on rural or urban communities. Her early narrative “A Bit of Our Harlem” implicitly asks what it is that connects people. This recovered story first republished by Tony Curtis appeared in the weekly newspaper Negro World in 1922 while Hurston was still pursuing her studies at Howard University. A publication of Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association, the paper boasted a weekly circulation of nearly 200,000 and would, undoubtedly, have introduced Hurston’s fiction to a large reading audience.26 Here, in her second published story, class divisions dissolve over the course of a conversation between the unnamed middle-class narrator, who is likely a stand-in for the author, and a child with a disability selling candy. Despite their many differences, the educated narrator finds in the boy “the world of sympathy, understanding, and fellowship” that “seldom had she found” in “her own class.” And although these two characters overcome their class differences, in the majority of Hurston’s stories class differences serve as a wedge that divides people.

INTERROGATING THE POLITICS OF GENDER AND CLASS

In some of Hurston’s earliest stories, she focuses on the ways in which class intersects with masculinity to determine just what it means to be “a man.” While Hurston has become known for her depictions of female characters, she began her career exploring masculine identities in both the North and the South.

“The Conversion of Sam” (ca. 1922), a recovered story, is one of Hurston’s earliest, written before her migration to Harlem. The original story exists only in typescript form at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Scrawled across the top margin in Hurston’s craggy handwriting are her name, the Washington, DC, address of the barber shop in which she worked as a manicurist, and the phrase “submitted at the usual rate.” The library has no record of the story’s provenance, so we can only speculate about its history. In the same collection at the Schomburg are letters Hurston wrote to Lawrence Jordan, a 1931 graduate of Columbia University who worked as an assistant to the curator of the Schomburg Collection from 1930 to 1932.27 Since Jordan clearly knew Hurston and they corresponded in the 1920s, perhaps he is responsible for the story finding its way to the collection. It appears that Adele S. Newson in Zora Neale Hurston: A Reference Guide was the first scholar to document the story’s existence, while John Lowe in Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy was the first scholar to comment on it.28 A published version has not been located, but the phrase “submitted at the usual rate” tantalizingly suggests it may have appeared in a newspaper or magazine. The stilted, nineteenth-century dialect suggests she wrote the story between 1921 and 1923—before her use of African American idiom and vernacular was fully developed.

“The Conversion of Sam” appears in print for contemporary readers for the very first time in this collection. The narrative introduces readers to Sam, who falls for Stella, a recent urban migrant. He has a reputation as a gambler who refuses to work, but his desire to marry Stella prompts Sam to change his lifestyle and become “dickty,” or middle class. When a former gambling buddy realizes just how prosperous Sam has become, the man jealously works to undermine the couple’s happiness. Faced with different lifestyles, Sam must decide whether he will “be a sensible, steady man” by providing for his wife. This tension between the gambler and the middle-class employed worker is Hurston’s first examination of the ways class intersects with and complicates life in the black community. In the story, to be a “steady man” requires that Sam earn a steady living, provide a home for his wife, and “keep her clean,” likely meaning that she will not have to work outside the home. Implicitly, then, Stella is a domestic figure, a woman to be cared for and protected, but her character is secondary to Hurston’s focus on Sam’s journey into manhood.

Sam’s story has much in common with the previously anthologized “Muttsy.” In this urban migration tale, Hurston’s migrant is also a woman. Pinkie has journeyed to Harlem from Eatonville, Florida. Pinkie, like Hurston in 1925, wishes to continue her education and has “no home to which she could return.” In an unfamiliar city, Pinkie’s traditional middle-class notions of femininity and her beauty make her vulnerable to exploitation. Muttsy, a well-respected and successful gambler, pursues Pinkie and even takes “nice,” or respectable, work in order to make himself more attractive as a potential husband. In an ironic twist, however, the final lines of the story leave readers to wonder whether Pinkie will find her marriage to Muttsy the refuge from exploitation and the source of respectability she seeks.

Hurston wrote two additional stories that focus on male migrants, only one of which appeared in print in her lifetime. Despite the commonalities of these two recovered stories, “Book of Harlem” and “The Book of Harlem” are distinctly different, with different protagonists and different conclusions. Both, however, work against the grain of her contemporaries’ treatments of the Great Migration. While many other Harlem Renaissance stories of migrants end tragically, Zora finds humor in the experience.29 “The Book of Harlem” (1927) appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier, while “Book of Harlem” (ca. 1925) appeared posthumously in Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories (1995).30 Unlike the protagonists from other migration stories from the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston’s are not escaping lynching or seeking relief from the economic exploitation of sharecropping. Instead, her male protagonists are pleasure seekers. Loaded with their fathers’ “shekels,” the young men leave their rural towns for Harlem in pursuit of “Shebas of high voltage.” These details challenge the stereotypes of poor southerners and of the migrant escaping persecution. Hurston’s humorous versions of the greenhorn story employ mock biblical language to marry the high and the low, the sacred and the secular, with terrific results. The narratives allow readers to see the characters transform themselves from men in “mail-order britches” to Harlem sophisticates. In their southern clothing that marks them as outsiders, they are dismissed by urban women. The characters’ transformations require financial resources. Only after the migrants adopt urban clothing and straighten their hair will women interact with them. Here, even in funny stories, the author presents serious issues.

Hurston’s focus on masculinity also drives two of her early well-known Eatonville stories, “John Redding Goes to Sea” (1921) and “Spunk” (1925). “John Redding Goes to Sea” has long been accepted as Hurston’s first published short story. The “apprentice” effort follows the efforts of John to see the world, a desire his father attributes to his being a man. The women in John’s life, however, want him to stay home, leading to inevitable conflict. While these characters split along the lines of gender in their thinking about masculinity, “Spunk” presents conflicting views held by the men within the Eatonville community. In the first of Hurston’s stories to introduce the Eatonville store porch and the men who talk there, readers meet a cuckolded husband who has lost his wife to Spunk, the title character. When the wronged husband seeks revenge—despite being fearful and outmatched—he loses his life. From beyond the grave, however, the husband continues to seek vengeance. Submerged within this ghostly love triangle, almost out of view, lies Hurston’s exploration of masculinity. The men on the porch debate whether the betrayed husband is braver—that is, manlier—for having conquered his fears and attacking his rival. Or is Spunk manlier for “go[ing] after anything he want[s]”? Even within the same community and among men of the same class, there is no clear consensus. The story exposes conflicting constructions of masculinity within this community, but the narrator avoids drawing a conclusion to allow the reader to decide.

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. 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.37 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.