Outstanding novelist, skilled folklorist, journalist, and critic, Zora Hurston was for thirty years the most prolific black woman writer in America.1
—Mary Helen Washington
For Zora Neale Hurston the Harlem Renaissance began in 1921, when she published her first short story, and it ended in 1937 with the publication of her masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. In the period between, she wrote twenty-one stories, all of which appear here together in a single volume for the first time. Included in Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick are several “lost” Harlem Renaissance tales, eight of which challenge readers to rethink their assumptions about Hurston’s literary interests. An author long associated with the rural, with Eatonville, Florida, she wrote eight stories about northern cities and the Great Migration. She also wrote about Harlem’s middle class. Thus, this new Harlem Renaissance volume provides a much-needed correction to Hurston’s legacy and better reflects the true breadth of her subject matter.
Presented in the order of their composition, the stories collected here allow readers to track the evolution and maturation of Hurston’s skills and interests as a fiction writer, from what her biographer Robert Hemenway describes as her “apprentice” work to her mature, masterful critiques of the politics of race, class, and gender—what we today call the politics of identity.2 Hurston typically submerged her explorations of such serious topics within plots revolving around romantic relationships between men and women. Literary critics Claudia Tate and Susan Meisenhelder adopted Hurston’s own phrase, “hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick,” to describe the ways in which she subversively critiques the politics of race and gender, and, I add, the politics of class as well. Zora herself described what it means to “hit a straight lick with a crooked stick” in slightly different ways. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), she uses the phrase to describe her hometown because “[i]t is a by-product of something else.” In the essay “High John de Conquer,” she describes it as “making a way out of no-way” or “[w]inning the jack pot with no other stake but a laugh.”3 Hurston’s “making a way” to express herself in a racist and masculine publishing industry required subversive strategies for exploring topics, critiquing behaviors and norms, and expressing perspectives that editors and readers might have rather avoided. Across the body of her Harlem Renaissance fiction, again and again Hurston “hit[s] a straight lick with a crooked stick” to address the politics of identity.
Eight of the nine recovered stories that appear here are set in urban environments that reflect the tumult of the Great Migration. More than two million African Americans left the largely rural South between 1910 and 1940 for the industrialized cities of the North.4 On their journeys to build new lives, migrants faced collective and individual challenges in urban communities as they encountered new expectations for dress, deportment, speech, education, religious practice, and entertainment. So profound were the changes wrought by the Great Migration that it spawned an entire body of what scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin describes as migration narratives—songs, stories, novels, and paintings—that depict the upheaval of migration, the resulting loss of community, confrontations with the new environment, attempts to reestablish community, and even reverse migration, which some undertook when the North failed to fulfill its promise of a better life.5
Until the recovery of Hurston’s lost stories, it had appeared as though she had opted to limit her treatment of the Great Migration to a single story, “Muttsy,” and to the subtle references that appear elsewhere in her fiction, such as in her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934). Cultural and literary critic Hazel V. Carby had even gone so far as to suggest that Hurston “attempt[ed] to stabilize and displace the social contradictions and disruption of her contemporary moment” by focusing on “a utopian reconstruction of a historical moment of her childhood” in Eatonville.6 Today—with the recovery of these urban stories—we know that Carby was mistaken. She simply did not have access to Hurston’s entire corpus. When Hurston explores urban settings and characters, the Great Migration may be central to the plot, or it might loom in the background. Both strategies, however, expand her treatments of the politics of gender, class, and race to include another layer of complexity produced by regional differences. Migrants were forced to reconcile conflicting norms on matters both secular and sacred—many of which intersected with gender-based norms related to race and class. The choices Hurston’s characters face, mundane and momentous alike, illustrate the tumult of the times. Hurston’s short stories rarely fail to engage identity politics, and in this way her urban tales are no different from her better-known Eatonville stories and her novels. At the same time, the urban settings do change the nature of the politics her characters must negotiate.
HURSTON “REALLY DID GET BORN”
Zora Neale Hurston claimed, at various times, to have been born in 1901, 1902, and 1903 in Eatonville, Florida, the first “incorporated” black town in the United States.7 It is probably more accurate to say that Eatonville was home, the place that not only inspired her but also shaped her identity. In addition, Zora was also a decade older than she publicly acknowledged, having been born (according to US Census records) in 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama.8 Her family relocated to Eatonville in 1894. When Zora’s mother died and her father remarried to a woman she despised, it initiated a period of wandering. Unable to finish high school because she needed to support herself, she worked in white homes as a maid, bounced among relatives and friends, and then took a position as a lady’s maid in a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe traveling the country. When the woman she worked for left the company to marry, Hurston settled in Baltimore, Maryland, where her sister Sarah was, to complete her education.9
State law in Maryland guaranteed a free high school education to anyone under the age of twenty. Hurston seized the opportunity that she had longed for and promptly took a decade off her life to begin passing as a teenager rather than the twenty-six-year-old woman she was. Thus Hurston began the masquerade of being born in 1901 rather than 1891. In 1917 Hurston enrolled at Morgan Academy, then the high school division of Morgan College, which we know today as Morgan State University. The following year, she moved to Washington, DC, with the hope of attending Howard University, which she would later call “the capstone of Negro education in the world.” Admitted first through the college preparatory program, Hurston spent close to four years at Howard, in and out of class as her finances and health allowed. There she discovered that she was not only “Howard material,” as a friend put it, but also Zeta Phi Beta material.10
When Hurston’s first story appeared in print in 1921 in the Howard University literary magazine, The Stylus, she was still a student trying to make rent and pay tuition by working as a manicurist. Fortunately for Hurston, the literary renaissance was already taking place in Washington, as well as in other cities around the country. A lifelong lover of books, the would-be writer found in the city a lively black literary community, focused on a group known as the Saturday Nighters. Elizabeth McHenry’s research has demonstrated that such groups “provid[ed] a network of support for African American intellectuals” and helped shape American literature and modern culture.11 Weekly gatherings of the Saturday Nighters—at which participants discussed books, plays, and poetry—often took place at the home of Georgia Douglas Johnson, who was already an established poet. For this group of writers, many of whom found the city’s racism and narrowness isolating, Johnson’s home proved “an assembly of likeable and civilized people.” One contemporary recalls that Hurston actually lived at Johnson’s home for a period.12 There, Zora, as an evening’s guest or in residence, would have encountered not only faculty members and mentors from Howard University, like Montgomery Gregory and Alain Locke, but also a range of other luminaries from the period, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, Marita Bonner, and Jessie Fauset, as well as native Washingtonian Jean Toomer, whose Cane (1923) instantly made him a literary celebrity. It was during these years that Hurston began publishing her fiction and her lesser-known poetry, suggesting that the lively discussions may have helped foster her desire to put pen to paper.
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.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.
Near the end of the period, Hurston published one of her finest stories, “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1933), which offers one of her most direct critiques of the politics of race. Her critique is embedded in an interesting reversal of other migration stories (in that one of the characters migrates south) and provides a subtle interrogation of masculinity. In its conclusion, however, Hurston turns the reader’s attention to the politics of race. When “The Gilded Six-Bits” appeared in Story magazine, it caught the attention of editors at J. B. Lippincott and ultimately led to the publication of Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Again, the complexities of marriage take center stage in a love triangle, but this time a northerner participates in reverse migration when he moves from Chicago to Eatonville to open an ice cream parlor. There he meets Joe and Missie May, a young married couple. Joe puts the urbanite on a pedestal, talking repeatedly about this urban interloper with “de finest clothes . . . ever seen on a colored man’s back” and a five-dollar gold coin for a lapel pin. Missie, on the other hand, seems decidedly unimpressed. Readers then are almost as shocked as Joe is to find Missie and the northerner in bed together. When Joe discovers the affair, he also finds that the gold pin he had admired is nothing more than a gilded coin. It and the urbanite are both fakes. Things are not always as they seem. In the final lines, Hurston turns this story about love and marriage to illuminate yet another way in which appearance and reality collide, this time in the politics of race. She confronts readers with racism in the one scene in which a white character appears. When Joe finally spends the northerner’s gilded coin in a local shop, the white store clerk articulates the stereotype he has imposed on Joe: “Wisht I could be like those darkies. Laughin’ all the time. Nothin’ worries ’em.” The ironic claim rings hollow for readers who know just how painful the acquisition of that gilded coin was for Joe. The clerk’s use of the term “darky” reveals that he sees Joe as a minstrel figure untroubled by the woes of the modern world. Through dramatic irony, Hurston points out that Joe’s life is far more complicated than the racist clerk can imagine. The line contrasts what readers, white and black, know about Joe’s life with what the clerk thinks he knows. In this way, Hurston undermines the stereotype, revealing its distortion of a man’s complex humanity.
THE END OF THE ERA
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Hurston took a break from writing short fiction as she traveled the South collecting African American folklore. During this period she drafted the material that would eventually become three distinct books: Mules and Men (1935), Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States (2001), and Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (2018). She and Langston Hughes fell out over their failed collaboration on Mule Bone in 1929, which did not appear in print until 1991. And she worked to bring authentic folk performances to the stage to great critical acclaim but with little financial success.50 Zora’s fiction was changing, too. The last story from Hurston’s Harlem Renaissance years, “The Fire and the Cloud” (1934), marks a significant departure from her earlier stories in terms of themes, characters, and settings. There is no love triangle, no Eatonville or Harlem settings, no vernacular speech. Instead, “The Fire and the Cloud” focuses on the Old Testament figure of Moses. Hurston’s attention has shifted from identity politics to the complexities of leadership. “The Fire and the Cloud” appeared five years before her novel Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), in which she develops Moses as a magical figure—a masterful hoodoo practitioner, one not only dependent on God but powerful in his own right. Building on a long tradition of the Exodus story serving as an inspiration in African American culture, Hurston shifts the focus from the plight of the people being led out of bondage to the struggles of the leader. In the short story, readers see Hurston exploring for the first time the isolation and burdens of leadership. Set in the days after Moses has led the people to the Promised Land, the story opens on a mountain where the great liberator sits overlooking his people. Although seemingly without companionship, Moses strikes up a series of conversations with a lizard, in which he reveals he is alone after forty years of leadership. He is unconvinced that the people he served will remember or appreciate his sacrifices. After all, he points out, “The heart of man is an ever empty abyss into which the whole world shall fall and be swallowed up.” At the end of thirty days on the mountain, Moses symbolically inters his role as leader and walks away, leaving his powerful staff leaning on the pile of stone. He passes the role of leader to Joshua, who will find the staff and assume that Moses has passed away. The story’s conclusion literally and symbolically severs the role of leader from the human being who assumes the mantle, suggesting it is a performative role. While followers might naively put their leaders on a pedestal and idealize them, leaders take on the role their followers need them to assume, sometimes at great personal cost.
In the years between “The Fire and the Cloud” and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston traveled to Haiti and Jamaica on two prestigious Guggenheim fellowships. She wrote the novel on her first trip as she tried to “smother [her] feelings” after leaving her longtime love affair behind in the United States. “The plot was far from the circumstances, but I tried to embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him in ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God,’” she writes in her autobiography.51 While Hurston’s black contemporaries were critical of the book when it appeared because it did not explicitly confront class issues, it has been largely responsible for her ascending to the canons of American literature.52 When the author returned to the United States after her fellowships in 1938, she would focus on producing books and essays. The peak of her productivity as a short story writer was behind her.
Almost a century later, Hurston’s contributions to American literary culture continue to inform the ways we talk about the Harlem Renaissance, Modernism, women’s literature, folk literature and folklore, ethnography, migration fiction, and Southern literature. Her groundbreaking stories and bodacious personality have made her one of the most-storied and most-studied Harlem Renaissance writers. Hurston’s finest stories have made her a hypercanonical figure, a giant of the twentieth century, an icon. This collection of Hurston’s Harlem Renaissance short fiction, particularly the addition of once-lost stories to her canon, requires readers to rethink her legacy. In these recovered stories, we see her explore the urban experience and the educated New Negro, two elements of Harlem Renaissance culture that seemed to have been lacking in her oeuvre. We see her use her “crooked stick” to critique the politics of gender, class, and race. Situated within the better-known body of Hurston’s work, as they are in this volume, these recovered stories reveal the broader scope of her writings, both in terms of theme and form. Hurston’s keen ear for vernacular speech, her devotion to depicting proudly and completely the folk she knew, and her persistent attention to the intersections of race, class, and gender have left us a beautiful, complicated, and unsurpassed legacy of Harlem Renaissance short stories.
Genevieve West
October 22, 2019