Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance by Zora Neale Hurston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars From Florida to Harlem, Varieties of Love and Hate Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick (2020) is a collection of twenty-one Zora Neale Hurston short stories, several of them published here for the first time, ranging in setting from Eatonville, Florida to Harlem, NY, mostly depicting different kinds of love (romantic, abusive, transformative, destructive, etc.) and using savory demotic black English for characters’ speech and vivid mainstream English for the narration. Whether the situations and speeches of the characters are tragic or comical, they are always fitting. The Forward (“Love Letter and Testimony”) by Tayari Jones gives a concise overview of the stories, highlighting their common theme of “comeuppance” and the meaning of the title of the collection (“to achieve a goal that seems to be in contradiction to the means by which it was accomplished”). The twenty-eight-page Introduction by Genevieve West covers topics Hurston's childhood, the politics of art in the Harlem Renaissance, and Hurston’s explorations of gender, race, and class. Here is a list of the stories: 1. John Redding Goes to Sea: An imaginative boy longs to travel and to see the sea, but although his father is sympathetic, his clinging mother uses all sorts of emotional blackmail to keep him with her, “home-tied.” 2. The Conversion of Sam: What happens when a beautiful, innocent, octoroon girl from the country comes to the city and attracts the attention of shiftless Sam Simpson, who quits drinking and gambling and gets a job so he can pay court to her? 3. A Bit of Our Harlem: A vignette showing the fellowship between a young lady of some education and a poor 16-year-old hunchback from 53rd St selling candy. 4. Drenched in Light: Isis Watts, an imaginative 11-year-old girl interested in passersby and life, sorely tries her strict grandmother, who doesn’t want the “hellion” to whistle or talk to boys or leave home. 5. Spunk: An infamous brave man fears not the dangerous saw in the mill where he works—until he openly snatches the wife of a cowardly guy and kills him in self-defense. 6. Magnolia Flower: An old river tells a young brook the story of a dominating father who hates white people and sure doesn’t want his daughter to marry a light-skinned young teacher. 7. Black Death: Even though white folks laugh about it, the Eatonville locals know that voodoo can kill, the proof being this story, in which the mother of a seduced and abandoned girl pays a visit to the local hoodoo man. 8. The Bone of Contention: An amusing Eatonville courtroom drama featuring a mule bone assault, a turkey theft, and rival Methodists and Baptists. 9. Muttsy: The same story as The Conversion of Sam but set in Harlem, with an innocent girl from the south showing up in NYC, where a slick gambler falls in love with her. 10. Sweat: A neglected, hardworking, prematurely-aged wife of fifteen years has been earning money by washing white folks’ clothes, when her abusive, philandering, no good husband gets a pet rattlesnake. 11. Under the Bridge: A powerful story about a 58-year-old man, his young wife, and his big son. All three love each other, but after passing under a bridge on a fishing trip, they emerge from the darkness altered, about to be carried somewhere by destiny. 12. ‘Possum or Pig? A vignette in which a favored slave is caught cooking a purloined pig. 13. The Eatonville Anthology: Fourteen spicy character sketches of women, men, and a die-hard thieving dog. Some signs of Their Eyes Were Watching God. 14. Book of Harlem: An amusing tale told in Biblical mode about a young country man gone to Babylon (NY) where, after initial hiccups, he becomes “Panic” of Harlem, where there are “Shebas on every street,” and “the men gnasheth their bridgework at the sight of him.” 15. The Book of Harlem: Not so funny as the previous one, because it’s the same thing done a second time but with less compelling detail. 16. The Backroom: What happens when an aging beauty’s former rejected suitor (now a widowed doctor) comes to town, bringing his young niece with him? Convincing characters and an ironic outcome for the cocky, vulnerable protagonist. 17. Monkey Junk: Another Biblical Harlem story, this time featuring a woman marrying a man for his “shekels and his checkbook,” the man thinking, “Verily, I am a wise guy. I knoweth all about women,” and their divorce case ending as you might expect. 18. The Country in the Woman: A married couple come from the country to Harlem (Babylon), and the wife doesn’t take the husband's infidelity without an axe in her hands. 19. The Gilded Six-Bits: A happily married couple enjoying affectionate playfighting in their clean house come to grief after a slick man from Chicago with a gold coin on his watch chain comes to town. 20. She Rock: ANOTHER biblical Harlem story (“Oscar goeth hot cha cha”) has a couple moving from Florida to Harlem, the husband flaunting his adultery, and the wife deciding that people chop wood in the city, too. 21. The Fire and the Cloud: A nice story about Moses in the desert talking with a lizard about life, God, the Israelites, the promised land, and patience. I liked the stories, and I'm glad to have listened to this audiobook collection, but I could have listened to a more selected collection that left out some of the element-repeating stories featuring people moving to Harlem from the south. Furthermore, although I got a kick out of the biblical narration for mundane situations in several Harlem stories, it started wearing a little thin after the second one. There are many memorable lines, like “A woman robbed of her love is more terrible than an army with banners,” “I'm gonna make me a graveyard of my own,” and “I hate ya to the same degree that I used to love ya. I hate ya like a suck egg dog.” There are many vivid descriptions, like “The sun had burned July to August. The heat streamed down like a million hot arrows, smiting all things living upon the earth. Grass withered, leaves browned, snakes went blind and shedding, and men and dogs went mad.” Aunjanue Ellis gives an excellent reading of the audiobook, and I bet it’s easier to listen to things like, “Ah doan want Jawn tuh git dat foolishness in him” or “Case you allus tries tuh know mo’ than me, but Ah aint so ign’rant” than to read them. If you liked Their Eyes Were Watching God, you’d find a lot of nourishment here, though that novel is on a higher level of experience and art. View all my reviews
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
May 2024
Jefferson's books
by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
|
My Fukuoka University